Math Newsletters
It’s okay that there are 6 weeks left of school when I decide to revive a monthly math newsletter that I’d created for my district last year but stopped when the pandemic hit. I’ve been busy! I had 4 issues done by then.
Here is Issue 5 for May 2021.
I think a newsletter is a great way to share snippets of information and resources periodically. I hope to encourage you to start one if you haven’t already. As a TOSA, my audience is the teachers in our K-8 district. I take in the following considerations when creating this newsletter:
It’s a one-page deal. There’s a study that shows a high correlation between length of newsletter (or email) and how fast it gets deleted. (I don’t know of such study, but I’m willing to bet.)
Contains mostly consistent features. Mine has six:
Number Talks: One way to empower students is to have regular routines that invite students to share their mathematical thinking and allow for discourse, and I hope our teachers are doing that.
Visual Pattern: Because duh! :)
Problem/Puzzle/Quote/Fun Fact/Cartoon: Whatever you’d like to share!
Math Resource: There are so many! Make sure it’s something that you actually use and find value.
Featured Blog Post: I read/peruse a lot of math blogs when time permits. Being one of the editors for mathblogging.org helps. I try to find posts written by teachers, or at least written when they were in the classroom.
Good Read: I seem to have more math books than there are acronyms in education. I only feature the ones that I have read more carefully.
Please feel free to use mine as a template if you’re not sure where to begin. You want to include features where you have plenty of contents to draw from. We’re all busy, so committing to the publication of a regular newsletter should be something you want to work on rather than dread. Mine is set for monthly (during the school year) — okay, so I failed for the last 13 months — but you might set yours for quarterly. A weekly newsletter might be an overkill.
It’s a challenge to serve K-8 teachers in terms of specific contents, which is why it’s not my intent. But I hope that a first-grade teacher sees the May issue above and is encouraged to try a number talk that’s appropriate for their class and/or check out openmiddle.com to find the right grade-level task. They may find a visual pattern and have students use it to count the number of objects instead. As for the rest of the features, I hope we can carve out time to read and work on math problems in a recreational way.
I would love to see what you create!
