"Parent beliefs are likely to be influenced by teacher-parent communication. In other words, parents may benefit from well-organized teacher-led communication actions, regardless of the parents' initial mindset when their children start school. When teachers take actions to cultivate instructional partnerships with parents, those parents are more likely to support their children's learning at home, and the students of these parents are more likely to be perceived by the teachers as positively involved in classroom learning activities" (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, Teacher-Parent Communication Actions).

We discussed strategies for communicating with parents:

• When sending home good news send it with the child.
• When delivering bad news deliver it directly to the parent.
  • Follow follow the policies set by your school.
  • keep records of your communication with parents

As a class, we developed a "Welcome to the School-Year" outline, then composed a letter and merged it with our sample data to produce 20 personalized letters to parents.

Mail Merge - Task List:

1. Develop draft of document. - Spell Check, Grammar Check, Proof Read!
2. Note every place within the letter that can be personalized. (names, he/she, relationships, etc,)
3. Create or modify exisitng data source (Excel, Access, Word Data Source)
   1. When you create your data source - You must save it to a place where you can find and retrieve it later!
4. Insert merge fields into document
5. Merge document
6. Review - then save, then send, or print.