My first few years of teaching I used communication notebooks in my elementary special education classroom.... and I HATED them.  For those who are not familiar, a communication notebook is a notebook passed between home and school to communicate between families and school staff. It sounds good in theory, but in my experience it was not.  Why did I hate these darn notebooks so much?! they were time-consuming... and the absolute worst time of the day to add something that is time-consuming is during pack up and dismissal. It is chaos enough as it is! they were ignored... every teacher knows which notebooks, binders, folders, etc. are checked every night and which ones are not. Which essentially means you have just wasted your time writing in the notebook.  they were negative... written communication about student behavior can be easily misunderstood and can lead to defensiveness which is not an effective way to foster a parent-teacher relationship they leave out the stude......