Say It Online
Every year you probably send pages and pages of letters home to parents. Not only does this type of correspondence take up lots of your time; it also creates a lot of paper waste. Consider emailing parents, instead. Maybe you wouldn't use email for the first "welcome to the classroom" letter of the year, but for other interim notices or reports, email works just fine. Ask parents for their email addresses during your first contact with them, or reward students for bringing in their parents' email addresses. (You may want to find out whether parents have any objections to communicating via the Internet.)
If you'd like to keep parents up-to-date with what's going on in your classroom, create a blog or website that they can visit. This would further reduce the need for paper communication! If you have computers in your classroom for student use, your students can even update the website for you. A class website would integrate technology lessons into your classroom and involve parents, while still being tied to the subject matter.
Free, easy-to-use blogging and website tools include the following:
Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/home)
Live Journal (http://www.livejournal.com/)
Weebly (http://www.weebly.com/)
Word Press (http://wordpress.com/)