Happy New Year friends! I hope you had a fabulous holiday break and a great start to your New Year. For those of you who are already back at school good luck! I am a week behind you on my year around schedule! Our students return the 11th. I blogged today over at my collaborative blog The Elementary Entourage! Be sure to head on over and follow our pages!
I am here to share with you a new procedure that I made for me as a Literacy Coach to build relationships, communication and to show some love! But, you can use this as a classroom teacher for your students.
I personally think it is very important in my position to have good relationships with the classroom teachers. This is for many reasons as I am sure you all already know.
Here are a few things I do, some better than others, to build positive relationships:
- Walk to each teacher’s classroom every day or every other day to say hello and see if they need anything.
- Include affirmation, encouragement, thankfulness and other positive words in emails.
- Take an interest in the teacher’s personal life, by getting to know them and relating to them.
- Be an advocate to the powers above for them.
- Take their ideas, suggestions and complaints to the leadership team for feedback.
- Try to provide them with any resources they ask for or at least seek out resources for them.
- Find answers to their questions if I can’t answer them myself.
I have a goal for 2016 to find a way that I can manage to tell teachers what awesome things they are doing. Some great suggestions from colleagues of mine are:
- Email one team a week and tell them something great you noticed.
- Email one teacher a week and tell them something great you noticed.
- Write a note or letter to one teacher a week and tell them something great you noticed.
I really liked these personal ideas and I knew I wanted to do something personal and by hand. I did not want to write an entire letter or spend $ on note cards.
So I went with personal quick notes on Post Its. Why? My thinking behind this is that I would rather purchase post it notes if needed but I can get them at school for free. Next as we all know, anything hand written feels more personal than an email. Also most adults seem to remember what your wrote to them by hand then by email. Some teachers may throw them out immediately and some may keep them for a little bit. Either way, their eyes will read something in my handwriting that is reminding them of the awesome things they do. That is something that will go further than maybe I can expect. You can click on any of the photos below or HERE to grab this FREEBIE!
Here’s how to set them up:
Print the master page from file on white card-stock and get some 3×3 Post It Notes.
Place the Post It notes in squares evenly with sticky back at the top.
You need to know your printer! Place in printer drawer, decide what template you want and print!
Write a personal quick note!
I hope you find this simple, easy and effective with showing your students or staff some LOVE!
You can click on any of the photos above or HERE to grab this FREEBIE!
