#YouMatter

I've been thinking a lot this summer about how much of teaching is relationship building. Knowing our students, understanding them as people, as learners, as individuals is so important. If they don't feel that we are interested in them, that we respect them, why would they believe they have anything to learn from us?

I'm working on some plans for classroom design, flexible seating, more inquiry based learning, passion projects... and what it keeps coming down to for me is having a relationship with my students that is built on trust and care.

Inspired by a tweet from Todd Nesloney (@TechNinjaTodd), I wrote my students a back to school letter that I will print and send to their homes the week before school starts. Although I taught most of the students who will be in my grade 8 class last year, we spent a very limited amount of time together. And after almost three months apart, I want to make sure they hear the message from me that they are important people, and that who they are matters.

Here is a copy of my letter, please feel free to copy/adapt any part of it if you plan on doing a similar thing. I used Bitmoji to create the image at the bottom (it looks more or less like me!), and the Magic Rainbow Unicorns add on for Google Docs to create the rainbow effect of the text.