I would first like to welcome all the students and parents to room 19 this fall. I am very excited about the upcoming school year, and I've been spending a lot of time getting things ready for a really wonderful year.
I am particularly excited by the opportunity this year to teach a lot more music and to integrate theater and dance and visual arts into our language arts curriculum. I worked a lot on this last year, and I think it was quite successful. This year, I have even more and better ideas!
First of all, let me invite you to a back-to-school night, just for our parents, Tuesday, September 14, 2004 at 6:00 PM. I will try to arrange some child care for the older kids. If you have very young ones, just feel free to bring them to the meeting. I will be going over what the students will be learning in the year in much greater detail, and helping you understand homework policies. If needed, I will try to arrange Korean translation.
This web log, or "blog" as they're called these days, is a way for me to keep in touch with all of you on a daily basis so that you can know what we are doing in our classroom and what your child should be doing at home to supplement and complete our classwork. I have never done anything like this before, so it is a bit of an experiment.
I invite you to contact me anytime by e-mail. My addresses are jbasse1@lausd.k12.ca.us and johndavidbassett@comcast.net. It really does not matter which one you use as I receive mail from both at work and at home. E-mail works a lot better than phone calls for teachers since we have limited access to phones at school, and often even when we try to call a parent from home, often nobody is there and we're never sure that the message we leave was even heard!
Again, I am very excited and looking forward to an incredible year!
Mr Bassett
