Five Things
November 30, 2020 Roselawn Internal Newsletter for Staff
Welcome back! I hope everybody found time to relax and recharge themselves. Mr. Nelson and I look forward to seeing everybody Monday.
As always...enjoy this week's Five Things!
Staying Safe and Healthy
This week we enter a new month and a new trimester, however, we will continue to operate within the guidelines of our health and safety plan. These steps were proven to be successful in trimester one and we will continue to utilize them at the start of trimester two:
- Please continue to meet virtually with grade levels and departments. Keep the distance between yourself and other staff members as much as possible. The biggest obstacle we could face is potentially having staff quarantined, remember to make interactions virtually if possible, and those that are face to face to make it quick and within that magic 6 feet range.
- The state extended the mask mandate until January 21st. Be firm with students right off the bat, as returning after a week of not wearing a mask at home we will possibly have some loose behaviors with mask-wearing. Remember, if you need Mr. Nelson or me to speak to a student please let us know.
- Lunch and recess will remain on the same schedule. This week coming back grades 5, 3, and 1 eat in the cafeteria, other grades eat in the classroom.
- As a building, we have done a really good job with transitions and staying apart as much as possible. We know the bathrooms can be tricky, but please continue to follow the same routines and processes we used in trimester 1.
We want to thank everybody ahead of time for keeping these safety precautions front and center.
Update on Remote Learning for Quarantined and Virtual Students
Our materials pick up process will remain the same. Nurse Jessica will email the teachers, then once materials are placed out at the pick-up table, Steve will call the families for pick up. If a computer power cord is needed, I am checking them out through my office.
We have also tweaked a couple of things for those students who are quarantined and attending school virtually:
- We have removed the virtual circles that occurred every morning for students. This was a valuable time, however, as more students became quarantined we were missing a large number of students and it was the same 3-5 students attending every day.
- It was starting to conflict with classroom time. As the school year progressed our classrooms became better at offering synchronous instruction and the virtual circles were many times a conflict for students who needed to be joining classroom time.
- The window to submit attendance will be extended until 3:30 PM. That will allow teachers the day to make sure that virtual students have engaged in the following ways:
- Work turned in on the digital platform.
- Written/oral communication between teacher and student.
- If any of the above occurs before 3:30 PM, then the student can be considered present.
4. Teachers can mark virtual students present in the morning and then change to absent if any of the above does not occur by 3:30 PM.
5. We will continue to communicate to families these attendance expectations as well.
Upcoming PBIS Meetings
I want to share a big Thank You to our PBIS team for planning our first-trimester celebration. It was really fun to be able to watch the event and it also looked like our students were enjoying themselves. It is important to celebrate these accomplishments, especially in a year with many challenges. Our staff and students have done an amazing job. I also thought Mr. Kowalski played an excellent turkey, which added to the fun.
Our PBIS Tier 1 team will be meeting on Monday, December 7 from 3:15-4:00. We will be planning our January reteaching of all of our expectations. It is hard to believe we are to this point in the school year.
Our PBIS Tier 2 team will be meeting on Monday, December 14 from 3:30-4:00. Currently, we have 6 students who are in CICO. We have some really good data to look at during our Tier 2 meeting. Our students are responding nicely to these supports - relationships, feedback, praise, and corrections. They are receiving a lot of this throughout their school day. This is the reason why this intervention can be so successful. Our goal for our Tier 2 students is a ratio of 10 positive interactions to every 1 correction (10:1).
Playground School Wide Booster
During November's PBIS Tier 1 meeting, we planned how we were going to do grade-level boosters in November and a school-wide booster in December. Our behavior data supports having a school-wide booster around the playground. We met as a recess team on Monday, November 16th to plan this booster.
The booster will run from December 7 thru December 14. Each classroom will get feedback on three areas:
- Safe - We kept our hands and feet to ourselves.
- Respectful - We listened and responded appropriately to the directions the first time.
- Responsible - We picked up our equipment and lined up in a timely manner.
Each classroom will get a score in all three areas following each recess. All classes that earn at least 80% of the points for the week will be invited to decorate a gingerbread house in the PD room during one of their recesses during the week of December 14. One recess teacher along with the classroom that earned the reward will decorate the houses during a recess. We will put together a schedule of this once we know how many classes have earned the reward.
Odds and Ends for the Week:
- Thanks for getting all the report cards ready to mail out. Our team will start stuffing envelopes Monday afternoon and we will plan on mailing them out Tuesday.
- Picture retake day is scheduled for Thursday, December 3rd.