Sharing with parents

I have to say, communicating with parents through Studywiz is great. There are so many tools to do so, it’s knowing which ones will work best for your school that’s the tricky part! This post shows the current way we are trying to share with parent, I hope it’s of use!

Each of our year groups has 2 featured folders. The ‘Themes’ folder is shared between pupils and staff in that year group, the ‘Central’ folder is shared between pupils, parents and staff.

In each year group’s ‘Central’ folder there is an ‘eBulletins’ folder which is used to keep all the eBulletins sent to parents in that year group together. These include homework information, general updates and recently in my year group, we have started sending a weekly update with objectives covered in the up coming week, this sometimes includes children’s work from the previous week. If this proves a successful way of supporting learning outside school, we will then roll it out across all year groups.

There is also a ‘Pupil Showcase’ folder which contains work that is shared with parents. These activities are usually Galleries as then the parents are able to comment and rate the children’s work, which they love seeing.

Finally, as an alternative way of sharing learning objectives and ‘connecting the big picture’, this term I have started using a mind map, which is added to whenever the children cover a new objective. This is embedded into the ‘Central’ folder in Studywiz so it is also available for parents to view. When we loaded it up on Monday, a couple of weeks into term, the general reaction of the children was ‘woooaaahhh’. They couldn’t believe how much they had learnt over just 2 weeks, and the natural connections of the mind map format really help the children understand how their learning is connected.

It would be great to read comments from other Studywiz schools about how they share with parents as we are only scratching the surface of possibilities.

Peter Richardson
Twitter: @primarypete_
Walton-le-Dale Primary School, Preston.