Open House Success Tips
Aa back to school season comes upon us, one of the first “stressful” events that I have to wrap my head around is Open House!
At my school, we have a Back to School night where students and parents simply meet the teacher. It’s truly just a brief moment of giving handshakes/hugs/high fives, taking a brief picture, and waving goodbye. It happens in the gym, not in our classrooms. It’s very low-stress and easy.
But Open House is such a different experience.
Our Open House happens about a month into the school year (late August). Parents come to our rooms, sit in their students’ desks, and stare at me for a full hour.
On that evening, it is of the utmost importance that I am prepared. Things go more smoothly when you’re prepared. And there is less room for error when I’ve mapped out how I want that hour to go.
So today, in the spirit of all things Open House, I have some success tips to share with you!
Use Your Slides as a Script
I HIGHLY recommend preparing a slideshow or presentation to go off of while you’re speaking to your families. This keeps you on track, ensures that you don’t leave anything out, and helps you cut down on rambling.
Use your slides to map out all of the most important talking points of the evening. I’m not recommending that you stand there and read your slides to your families (because that is not engaging instruction, and we all know it). But I do recommend having everything you want to talk about in helpful little bullet points on your slides so you can reference it as you go!
I use this slideshow. I love Canva, but doing them in Google works well, too!
Give Parents Access to the Information
In the time that you have for an Open House presentation, you are going to throw a LOT of information at your families at once. Everything from class birthdays to absences to grading policies to behavior management…it’s a LOT.
Your parents will appreciate having some sort of tangible way to remember what you said as the year goes on. I recommend doing one of two things:
Prepare a back to school flip book for them to take with them when the night is over. You can include your most important information in the flip book to pare down what you said to the basics.
Email your slideshow out to parents so they can refer back to it at any time. This is the easiest route, because it doesn’t require prepping something separate!
Remember that not everything has to be done during Open House.
It can be tempting to set up a zillion stations for parents to stop at and complete forms, look at student work, sign up to volunteer, etc. BUT, simpler is almost always better. My preference is to have one or two pieces of work at my students’ desks. Parents sit at their child’s seat, so they can review work right there at their seat. I don’t mind parents going through student desks if they want to see more!
I prefer to prep forms, volunteer documents, etc. digitally and email them out to parents either right before or right after Open House. This means that the entire time they are in my room, they will be reviewing work at their student’s desk, listening to my presentation, and asking questions. I’d rather use my time to connect with the parents and set the stage for the year by sharing all of the most important information with them!
If you email home forms, student surveys, volunteer sign ups, etc. then parents can complete those things on their own time, not yours!
Hopefully these tips help you plan your smoothest, simplest Open House ever!
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