It seems that for decades, elementary students (and their parents) eagerly await the reveal of who their teacher will be for the upcoming school year. Some schools post teacher names and class lists on the school’s windows, some send out postcards, and others have teachers call each family to introduce themselves and reveal that they are the assigned teacher for the year. Last school year, on our campus, we tried a new way to reveal homeroom teachers to our families that was loved by families and staff.

We wanted to create excitement and anticipation around revealing teachers as well as the beginning of the school year in general. We created a google slides template to use school-wide which included key elements and a uniform look so that all teachers on campus sent the same type of reveal so that no parents or students were more excited (or disappointed) by what their teachers sent – everyone’s reveal was purposefully uniform and equally exciting! We also took the opportunity of using google slides in presentation mode to embed important back-to-school information from the campus as well as links to google forms to gather important information from parents BEFORE they came up to the school for Meet the Teacher or the first day of school – making these two in-person experiences much smoother and easier and focused on relationship building rather than worrying with paperwork.

Want to see what it looked like? Make sure your sound is ON!

Already love it? Click here to grab your own editable copy of the template! Not convinced yet? Read on!

We purposefully made the template square-shaped so that it would look great when viewing from a phone or computer (but we know most of us check our personal emails from our phones these days).

To get STUDENTS to see the exciting reveal we created, all teachers sent the following email to their parents at the same time on the same day:

Parents:

SHHHH! Please do NOT tell your child that you just received this email from me. Instead, please click THIS LINK and let your child click through the presentation that will open. The presentation is their TEACHER REVEAL! 

After your child sees who their teacher is, please go through the presentation yourself, as there is important information I have to share and some information I need to get from you in order to have a smooth first day (how your child goes home, their likes, how they learn best, etc.). I hope you can make it to Meet the Teacher on Thursday! See you soon!

Here is the link to make a copy of the presentation so you can edit and make it your own!

The template includes a link to make a copy of the embedded google form so you can edit that form as well as directions for how to make the animation of yourself that we included in the example (it is SUPER EASY)!

We haven’t decided how to update and improve this template to make it even more exciting for this school year, but I will be sure to share when we do! Please share more ideas for how you make teacher reveals fun and exciting for families in the comments!