Week Three - Desktop Publishing

Since I have never had to make a newsletter or any other document that requires desktop publishing this was a first for me. I tried to think about something that I had seen from another teacher in my substitute career or something that my children's teachers had sent home. I remembered that last year my son's teacher sent home a weekly newsletter.

The newsletter was always organized the same each week which made it helpful to find certain information like homework assignments. The best thing about the newsletter is it was the only communication I had to really go through each week besides his behavior agenda. It had all the information I needed to know about the next week without having 5 papers to go through. The only downfall to the newsletter is that there was too much information. I thought about the newsletter and ways to make it better. Items covered on the newsletter included what they were learning each week in each subject, homework assignments and due dates, list of important dates and other information about events that were going on in the classroom. Sometimes the newsletters had too much information on them like detailed descriptions of activities for the each subject. I think the newsletter should have been a little more simple and left information open so that communicating with their children could be prompted. Instead of including a detailed description for each subject a title of each lesson could prompt parents to say “So Jane I see that you are working on Rounding numbers this week, how is that going?”. The homework assignment was always on the back of the page and I think that with reducing some of the information all of this could fit on the front. This way parents won’t miss any information if they don’t turn the page over. Also the newsletter was in really small print (all of it). I think by reducing the information there will be more room to make for a bigger font. The bigger font makes important information easy to read.

So after thinking about what I wanted to improve I created my own newsletter. I chose a template that was offered in Microsoft Publisher and went from there. I put the date in bold and listed information for the main subjects. I made sure to include what are working on or a the title of the assignment. I didn’t share any other information. I believe that this could prompt parents to wonder what “Who has made the world better” about. This will engage the parents and students to communicate about things that are going on in the classroom. I listed homework assignments at the bottom in bold and also listed due dates. This way all academic information is in large fonts and can easily be seen. The other information I added were important dates and special notes. I left the newsletter with this information and didn’t include a lot of pictures. I think it is simple and a clear informative document.