Avoiding the Summer Slide: Relationships Edition!
Ahhhh, summer break! For many, this is already a reality and for others, your days in school are dwindling down. A definite goal of summer for me is to take life at a slower pace and rest, relax, recharge and reboot. I also spend a lot of time reflecting. What are things that went well? What are things I need to adjust? How can I bring more BAM and less blah to our next school year? A hot topic in education is the summer slide and academics. Something that has been on my mind a lot is the summer relationship slide. After reading Culturize, by Jimmy Casas, I knew that I wanted to implement more proactive approaches to building relationships before the students came to get their schedules. Our counselors, assistant principal and I sat down to brainstorm some of the best ways to do this at our school. We knew that the transition to middle school is tough for some students. We decided, as Jimmy shared in Culturize, to identify some that may need a little extra tlc and do extra relationship-building throughout the 6th grade year. The FMS Welcome Wagon was born. Working with our elementary colleagues, we identified students and created a swag bag full of gear from FMS as well as an activity pass for the district. We called each of these families and let them know we would be stopping by the house to drop these off, if that worked ok for them. We also had an invite to a special “Popsicles with Principals and Friends” event the following week. This event was hosted by the counselors, principals and our student ambassadors. The ambassadors would help our new 6th graders get their locker and give VIP tours throughout the school. We had an absolute blast making our home visits. It was so great to meet our families and start to build excitement for the year. We had so much fun, in fact, that our assistant principal and I decided to do home visits on ALL 180 of our new 6th graders and invite them in as well to get their lockers. We are down to just a final few visits but what an amazing experience. We added in Facebook Live to announce where we might be headed next and the community response was truly unbelievable. The family feedback about how this helped to ease the nerves of new middle schoolers (and new middle school parents) has been worth it for sure!
After we started our Welcome Wagon, I knew that I wanted to find out other ways that educators across the globe build relationships all year long. I decided to take this topic to the #tlap PLN to get their ideas…and WOW they delivered! BIG TIME! Below you will find an archive of the many strategies and suggestions that this amazing group of educators shared last Monday during the #tlap chat. I hope that you can find something that you might be interested in trying out! When you do, please share on the #leadlap and #tlap hashtag. Pictures and resources you create are always a welcome addition as well. We are definitely better together! Have a GREAT summer and Shelley and I can’t wait to see your ideas!
Resources:
- Supercharge Summer Staff Retreats
- Our #FMSTeach Personalized Summer PD Resources adapted from the amazing Becca Henig @BHenigSME (Check out her original here and be sure to follow her on Twitter!)
- Chat Archives from June 4th, 2018 #TLAP