Karla Johnson is a second-year PLTW Launch Lead Teacher at Nancy Elementary School in Nancy, Kentucky.
After teaching PLTW for less than a month, I knew parents HAD to see what was going on in the lab!
I immediately started taking pictures because I wanted parents to see for themselves what their children were doing on a daily basis. I wanted them to see their faces as they accomplished a difficult task, and I wanted them to become informed of all things PLTW!
I paired these classroom images with captions that provided brief descriptions of the students' work, including the challenges they faced and constraints they considered while working together to find solutions. Our monthly class newsletter was up and running!
I received wonderful feedback from administration and parents on our monthly newsletter. Students were equally excited when they appeared in the newsletter! With all of these pictures taken daily, I submitted them to the local newspaper and the PLTW Lab at Nancy Elementary was featured in the newspaper eight times! Not only were the parents seeing what was happening, but everyone in the county was, too.
This was an easy, great way to keep parents – and the community – in the loop about all the great things happening in our PLTW Launch classroom.
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