Ideas for sharing newsletters
It’s a fairly common problem, you print a copy of the classroom newsletter for each child and stick it in their mailbox, and then at the end of the year you clean out their mailboxes only to find all of those newsletters still in there. It’s no wonder the parents had no idea what was happening all year long! This frustrating problem is made even worse by knowing just how much time you spent writing each of those newsletters!
I’ve sen this scenario play out time and time again – in my own classroom, and with a number of teachers that I work with, so unfortunately you are not alone. On Tuesday I shared an amazing list of topics that you can include in your newsletters, so how can you guarantee that parents will actually read them?
My solution to this problem has two answers;
- Share your newsletter in every way that you possibly can
- Figure out which way of sharing it is most likely to actually get it in front of your parents’ faces.
- Hard copy – keep printing out that paper version, chances are someone is taking it home, reading it, and sticking it on the fridge just like you intended, and you don’t want to take that away if someone is actually using it that way.
- Post it in the classroom – do you have a family message center or a location in your classroom where parents tend to congregate during drop off and pick up? Put a copy of your newsletter their, it just might catch their eye and throughout the course of the month they might actually read the entire thing in small bits and pieces.
- Email it – save your finished newsletter as a PDF and send it as an email attachment. Many parents are just more likely to read something if it is always with them, on their phone. Maybe they catch up on their email while their child is at soccer practice, or in the doctor’s office waiting room (I know I do), if they have easy access to the newsletter, and they are bored enough, they just might read it.
- Share your newsletter on social media – Does your program have an active facebook group? Upload the newsletter as a photo and parents can read it that way. Do you use instagram? Take photos of the different sections of your newsletter and share them this way. Get creative and capture the parent’s attention where they’re already interacting with you
- Have a contest – Post a question about your newsletter each month, a question that families will only know the answer to if they read the newsletter. Have a box where they can put their answer and draw a winner at the end of the month.
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