Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Open House or Parent Nights Coming Up?



Open House and Parent Nights can be scary, overwhelming, or boring, depending on how your school does it. In all these situations, I have used a variety of tactics to advocate for the library, share our resources, and meet the parents!


At one school, Open House was also book fair time, which meant it was overwhelming AND scary as I was meeting parents for the first time, AND was trying to sell books! For this situation, I smiled A LOT, helped parents and students choose books and pay as quickly as possible. Really, it was just a blur!


At one school, at Open House, one grade did a scavenger hunt, and had to get signatures from myself and the library aide, this was ideal to share information with parents as they were coming anyways! For this situation, I handed out cyber safety booklets in English and Spanish and freebie erasers that a random company sent us. Unfortunately, the Cyber Safety booklets were from a government organization, who does not give them out any more! I do post Brainpop and NetSmartz links on my website for parents.


At one school, one year we had a new technology teacher, and it was only my second year, so I made a PPT (run on a loop) of each of us, plus the aide, our roles, what the students will learn in library and technology (with pictures of students) and some stats about the library (how many books are checked out each year, etc). Please take a look at: Open House PPT. Want to change it to work for your situation?? Buy it on TPT!


At one school, Open House was a short presentation by the administration, and then the parents when to their child's classroom and had a long presentation about the expectations of the teacher and our program! This was boring, as I usually got very few parents! Surprisingly, in this situation, I made bookmarks with the library website as a QR code, with info about what students will learn, and handed them out as the parents left (this was by far one of the most popular things I have done...all of my bookmarks were gone!). Please see an example at: QR Code Bookmark PDF or Download it at: QR Code Bookmark Publisher File to Edit (this is a publisher file, so if you do not have Publisher, it will not open). Also, I used: http://www.unitaglive.com/qrcode to make the QR code (Free! Let's you change colors! Yay! =)

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