Making a great first impression on Back to School Night is so important. It sets the tone for the rest of the school year.
What teacher doesn’t want to make a great impression with parents right away?
It makes the entire school year go smoother when they have a positive impression of you. But what impresses parents? Looks? Personality? The Classroom? It’s hard to impress all parents because let’s face it – each of us has our own idea of what makes a great teacher.
But one thing that is universal, is having your act together or having the appearance of having your act together! I know when I met my daughter’s teachers, I wanted to feel that they knew what they were doing. Being prepared and professional made a huge difference.
So, how can you make a great first impression?
Back to School Night
Most schools have a Back to School night or Open House for parents at the start of the school year. My school always held this in September, because we wanted parents to know quickly what the expectations were and what our classroom rules/procedures were.
Having an impressive and professional presentation is the first way to impress parents. Giving them the information you need to get across and the information they want and need is important.
What Do I Need to Tell Them?
Before you begin, decide on what you want to tell your parents. This list can get you started:
****2020 Update: Consider whether you will be doing Back to School Night in person or sending the information home. Using PowerPoint makes it easy to send the presentation to parents with email. Most parents are more familiar with PowerPoint than they are with Google Slides, so keep that in mind.
Preparing Your Presentation
Whether you start from scratch or purchase a ready to go PowerPoint, you need to have a cohesive and professional-looking slide presentation.
If you want to create your own in PowerPoint, all you need to do is pick a design. Open a new PowerPoint presentation, click on DESIGN:
Choose one of the pre-made designs:
PowerPoint gives you the option to choose a layout for your pages. This one is for content and titles and works really well for Back to School presentations. Once you choose your design, just follow the on-screen instructions to add text or pictures.
If you are short on time or just don’t want to worry about it – I have four options available in my TpT store depending on your design preference:
All of these presentations have pre-labeled slides to save you time! They also have editable slides that you can personalize as well.
How to add text boxes, information, and photos to your slides
If you are using my ready to go PowerPoint slides, adding text is SUPER easy using text boxes.
Go to the slide you want to add information to and click insert.
Click on text box, then go to the slide and draw a box.
Now, just type in the information:
If you want to add photos – just click on insert and instead of a text box, click on photos and add one from your files.
Proofread Your Presentation
Once you have all of the information inserted into your slides – check for SPELLING & GRAMMAR!!!
Making a great impression means no typos.
*** If this is your first time making a Back to School PowerPoint – SAVE IT in a safe place. Next year, just update it and you are ready to go!
If you spend the time NOW to create a professional informative presentation for parents, you will reap the rewards of a better parent-teacher relationship throughout the school year! Make a great first impression!
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Thanks for sharing great tips!!