My Class Newsletter

How can I make my classroom newsletter worth reading?

There are many tools I could use to make my newsletter look great and appeal to parents. First off - I want to make sure the content is relevant and informative without being too long and too much to read. I want to add visual interest with graphics, such as borders and clip art and creative use of font and text. I think the most important tool to use would be artwork and pictures from a digital camera. Parents and students LOVE to see themselves in a newsletter and pictures are a great way to give them a quick snapshot of daily life in a classroom. I also think that including some of the student's work - either artwork or quotes from papers (anonymous) is a wonderful way to add to a newsletter. Other tools you could use in an online version (you could be sure to print the website address in your take-home copy) are streaming audio or video of events in the classroom. That is a neat tool to use because it really gives the parents the feeling of "being there", and would encourage the use of the technology.
Most importantly, I do believe that it is important to be thorough - but you do not want to overwhelm them with information because they will not read through all of it if there is too much - and you don't want to waste more paper than is necessary. Providing parents with information about what they can find on the school website, such as monthly lunch and school event calendars and upcoming events school-wide, is also a great thing to add to a newsletter. Some parents might not even think about checking the site for info.