Post date: Jul 09, 2013 5:51:12 PM
Hello Discovery 7th Grade Parents,
My name is Chris Heumann, and I'm going to be your student's homeroom teacher at Discovery this coming year. This will be my fourth year at DCS and it continues to be such a great fit for my teaching style and views on community, students, and learning. Although I already know some of you, I'm eager to use my time off this summer to get to know all of the families and students for this coming year and plan good lessons.
In order to gather some information about you and your student I've created an online form that I'd like you to fill out at your earliest convenience. It asks for some contact information as well as your perspectives about your child and suggestions from me to consider as I get to know them. This email is being sent to the addresses given to me by the office and/or those in the directory, so it will likely arrive in more than one email box (father, mother or both). You may fill in the form separately or together -- diverse perspectives are certainly valuable.
While teaching 7th grade science in Cupertino and Santa Clara I developed a website that has been useful to students and parents in the past. The home page has a quick "picture-a-day" slideshow of my summer so far. ;) I've resurrected my old "Life Science" section (haven't taught that in 3 years, but did it for 22 before that) and am in the process of organizing the Language Arts section more, and creating a Social Studies section as well. I'll also be revising most of the existing pages and adding a few more in order to make it useful during this upcoming year.
I value strong and sincere relationships with the kids and plan on treating them well and working them hard. I'm very interested in using a variety of hands-on, text-based, and online tools this year in order to make your child's learning experiences as deep, interactive, and efficient as possible. Most powerful learning experiences, in my opinion, occur out in the real world, so I'm hoping to venture off campus quite a bit this year (often by public transit so as to take the driving pressure off of you).
Again, please fill out the form linked above and check out the website if you have time/desire. I'm very much looking forward to meeting each of you and am eager to become an asset to your child's 7th grade experience.