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But what will I tell their parents?

August 7, 2015

If this is your first year jumping into TCI, you have a lot of things to figure out as you anticipate the first few weeks of school. One of these is certainly Open House: what on earth are you going to tell the parents of your students?? How do you explain to them that you do not have a textbook and will be teaching language to their students in a way that is almost certainly completely different than the way in which they were taught a language in school?

The first way that I broached the topic was with some good ol' syllabus homework. Click here to view my syllabus and click here to view the syllabus homework that I assigned after the first day of classes. In the one year that I used the syllabus homework (I've been home with my kids since then, otherwise I'd still be doing it), I was extremely pleased with the quality and quantity of the responses received from both parents and students. I curated their questions and developed this Syllabus Homework FAQ sheet (pictured below) that I sent home to answer the most recurring questions.

The next step was explaining everything to parents face-to-face at Open House. My plan was to do a mini-story/PQA session with parents at Open House, but the scheduling was always wonky and no one was in the room when they were supposed to be, so it ended up being a free for all that didn't make for good story asking. I finally made up this Spanish Class Information sheet for parents to just grab and go if they didn't want to hang around for the demo and in-person Q&A.

I know that many other teachers have shared their parent info sheets online, so please share the links to any such documents in the comments! As I find them, I'll be adding them to this Pinterest board (which already contains a link to an Embedded Reading of Krashen's theories...which is pure genius!).

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