Intermediate Staff Newsletter
For the Week of January 29, 2018
Dear Staff,
A huge thank you to Brooke Shackleford and Jenny Core, along with Mrs. Calamari for running an extremely successful book fair! We sold approximately $16,000 worth of books at the fair. When we look at our reward money from Scholastic, that breaks down to us being able to spend either $8000 of Scholastic money or $4000 given to us in cash. Combined with the money from the school fund, what was purchased at the Junior Library Guild with funds from PTO, and the 76 books that were donated by families to the library at the fair, we have grown our library tremendously this year! We started the year with 1,800 fiction books. We have added 940 new books to the library this year. Additionally, we also have approximately $750 in donations from families who donated money to the library during the book fair. Thanks to these efforst we will definitely be able to serve the 6th grade students in our NAIS library next year!
Let's make it a great week!
Katie and Kate
Supporting Our Students
R Factor
Last week we highlighted Get Your Mind Right in our staff newsletter. This week we'd like to talk about the third discipline: Step Up. Life deals us thousands of events every day. Once we have identified the outcome we want we can press pause, get our mind right and then step up to making a disciplined response. The hard part about this discipline is that we need to step up now, every day regardless of the unpredictable nature and adversity of life's events. This week, we challenge you to step up to a discipline response to a challenging event. Maybe it's how you respond to reviewing your MAP data, or the discussions you have with colleagues in the lunch room, or maybe it's even when a student doesn't have work complete. How will you step up this week?
News to Share
Dibels:
-Be sure to complete all 3 passages even if the student didn't hit the stopping points
-Be sure that this is administered by a teacher, assessments should not be completed by a parent volunteer
-Benchmarking Materials can be found here (this is a Google Drive Folder shared with you earlier this year)
- If you need an extension to finish, please complete your most critical students first, but you can have until Friday, February 9 if you need additional time
2. Performance Coach books were purchased for ELA and are being ordered this week for Math. This tool is to be used here at school, please do not send it home to be worked on completely with parents. This tool was intended to provide teachers with a resource to coach students on areas of weakness. This can be done during Eagle Period, during a rotation of Reading Groups, or with a Parent Volunteer to guide them.
3. Battle of the Blizzards is back! For those of you that are not sure what this event is, let's recap it. On February 5th, 6th, and 7th from 4:30-7:30 PM, students will be invited to attend Battle of the Blizzards at Dairy Queen located on Route 62. Once there students can vote for their favorite Grade Level Blizzard (which are specially designed by our amazing grade level teams) to win the Golden Scoop! Dairy Queen donates 20% of sales back to the school. Teachers are invited to volunteer or bring their own family to Dairy Queen to help serve Blizzards, talk with students or just jump in and help! If you are interested in volunteering, click here. We hope to see you there!
4. The first round of OTES is almost complete! Be sure if you are on a full evaluation to go in to etpes and pin both your walkthrough and your formal observation by Wednesday, January 31st. If you have questions about this, please email your evaluator. You may start setting up second round formal observations beginning in February. Please arrange those with Donna. For the second round of OTES you can decide if you would like to have a pre-conference.
5. ELA teachers, you are invited to attend a Lucy overview on Tuesday after school in Kristen Messenheimer's classroom. Any ELA teachers are welcome to come (even if they are not in the writing class) to hear an overview of their grade-level units from teachers that have several years experience teaching them. This will be from about 4:15-5 PM.
6. Jump Rope for Heart Kick Off Assembly: This Friday February 2, we will have two back to back assemblies in the NAIS gym with one starting at 9:15am and the other around 9:50am. This assembly will include an overview of the Jump Rope for Heart campaign that benefits the American Heart Association and include a performance of a competition jump rope team from Dublin. The tentative schedule will be S Wing and E Wing to report at 9:15am, and R Wing and I Wing to report at 9:50am (we will make an announcement for the second group to report, as soon as the gym is cleared from the first group). Look for an email to come out early this week confirming the details of this event.
Week at a Glance
Announcements: I-Wing- 6th Graders- See Pledge Schedule
Monday, Jan. 29th-
Tuesday, Jan. 30th- Staff Meeting-please bring devices to E wing;
Wednesday, Jan. 31st- ELA Meeting in Missy Mackey's room; Pre Alg. A Meeting 8:30
Thursday, Feb. 1st- Science, Math 6, Math 5, Social Studies 6 Meetings 8:30
Friday, Feb. 2nd- R Factor Core Team Meeting Adam Kolp's room; Jump Rope for Heart Assemblies 9:15 and 9:50am; Food Truck Friday; 5th Grade Choir Blue Jackets Performance