Home Notes
Home notes are means of communication between the teacher and parents. Home notes can take a variety of forms depending on the age and abilities of students. They can be sent either daily or weekly. Typically, younger students or students with greater needs have daily home notes. The main idea is to give the parents a daily snapshot of the student’s progress and areas of needs.
The success of a home note program is the fact that the parents know what the expected behaviors are, as well as their child’s performance. It also allows the school and home to work together in rewarding and reinforcing the expected or desired behaviors and extinguishing the undesirable ones.
Home notes can also be a powerful tool when used along with a behavior contract if one has been developed by the school personnel. It is important that parents and teachers meet before implementing use of the home notes to have a clear understanding of how the home notes will be used, so the outcome is beneficial to the child’s growth academically, as well as socially.
Home notes should be returned initialed or signed to the teacher. This ensures that they have been seen by the parents. Ideally, there should also be a space on the home note for parents to write a comment for communicative purposes.
