Alakanuk teacher Racheal Kerr shares about the low-tech folder take-home ritual that fostered connection and two-way communication with her families:
A parent walked into my kindergarten classroom at dismissal one day and said, “I was checking the folder, but I didn’t see the note.” I heard her and felt puzzled. For the last few weeks, I had been wondering if my take-home folder system was meaningful beyond the effort of labor it required for me to prepare materials, send them out consistently, hold students accountable for their return, check for completion, and then send back. After three months and some mild successes, it felt like I was taking large amounts of time and effort to get a penny in return.
The next day another parent referenced the newsletter in the folders. It made me wonder if our folder habit was building connections after all. I decided to push into the folders and began sending one homework page a day. Every day, I pulled a page from the reading workbook and put it in the folders. This task is largely teacher-led in kindergarten as the littles do not always remember the steps for placing pages in folders, placing folders in backpacks (when they remember their backpack), bringing it home, and returning it to school. I did it anyway.
Through the second quarter, we developed a culture of homework in kindergarten. Students were becoming excited for their page every day, asking for more, and were excited to return the homework to me. Parents were reaching out to check on the work and progress. My reading scores improved drastically by the middle of year benchmark, and I believe part of this was in creating a better home-school connection with the ritual practice of take-home folders.
Though it is not a perfect system and still adapts to the needs, I saw how a classroom ritual can build connections between school, home, students, families, and teachers. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but each member bought in in some way, and part of that required me to continue even when it felt like it was a lot of time and effort for little impact. If nothing else, it created a way to reach out to each other outside the folders to verify and check in. The habit of the folders is also dynamic and can be adjusted to the needs. For example, the pages through quarter 2 are no longer as engaging for students, so I am working on sending home decodable readers instead.
No practice is better or worse or more sacred to the classroom community, but all practices hold rituals that can be powerful places to connect and learn more about each other. In this, we can build a stronger community focused on relationships and listening to the needs, hopes, and everydayness of our learning.
