NWE Game Plan!
News You Can Use!
Friday, January 15, 2016 [Volume 1, Issue 7]
We hope you had a great first week back with students! It's exciting to see you back at work with the students in our building doing what you do best!
Shout Outs:
-Awesome job K-3 on successfully completing your MOY mCLASS Assessments with Blue Folders in cRaZy December!
-Awesome job 4-5 on successfully completing your MOY F&P Assessments with Spelling Inventories in cRaZy December!
-Awesome job 3rd Grade on doing all of the above plus Portfolios! You all have your plates full!
Good Luck:
-Best Wishes to 3-5 as they begin MOY USA Test Prep Assessments next week!
-Best Wishes to K-2 as they begin MOY Math Assessments soon!
We are almost through the MOY "storm" of assessments! Do what you do best every day & soon we will be back to full instructional mode! Heads up, you can do it!
Upcoming Events! Please mark your calendar & also check the school-wide online calendar frequently:
January:
15 - Report cards go home
18 - Holiday...schools closed
19 - Midyear USA Test Prep Benchmark Assessments Begin
22 - Cardinal Carnival
26 - Awards Ceremony: 3-5 @ 9:00 & k-2 @ 1;00 in MPB
29 - Kindergarten to Northside High School to see "Princess & Pea"
February:
11 - Magnet Schools Open House ...5:30 & 6:30
26 - Northwoods Spelling Bee @ 1:00 in MPB
January Staff Birthdays!
News from your Literacy Coach
Kidblog Anyone?
The Power of Belief! New Year Literacy Goals for Students! [+Flipped Videos of Interviews]
As for me I've set 3 Literacy Goals for the remainder of this school year, what about you? I plan on asking my intervention students next week what they would like to accomplish too!
Click HERE or below to read about the benefits of setting Literacy Goals in your classroom!
News from your Digital Learning and Teaching Facilitator
SAMR in 120 Seconds
SAMR Levels Defined For You!
In a substitution level, teachers or students are only using new technology tools to replace old ones, for instance, using Microsoft Word Online/Word 2013 to replace paper and pencil. The task (writing) is the same but the tools are different.
Augmentation
Though it is a different level, but we are still in the substitution mentality but this time with added functionalities. Again using the example of Microsoft Word Online, instead of only writing a document and having to print it out to share with others or emailing a document, Office 365 (Microsoft Online, PowerPoint Online, OneNote Online and Excel Online) provides services like auto saving, auto syncing, and auto sharing in the cloud. Students can share documents with teachers and other students.
Modification
This is the level where technology is being used more effectively not to do the same task using different tools but to redesign new parts of the task and transform students learning. An example of this is using the commenting service in OneNote, for instance, to collaborate and share feedback on a given task. Teachers can comment on students work and the student can get immediate feedback. Students can comment on each others work for peer feedback.
Redefinition
If you are to place this level in Blooms revised taxonomy pyramid, it would probably correspond to synthesis and evaluation as being the highest order thinking skills. Redefinition means that students use technology to create imperceptibly new tasks. As is shown in the video (SAMR in 120 Seconds), an example of redefinition is when students connect to a classroom across the world where they would each write a narrative of the same historical event using the chat and comment section to discuss the differences, and they use the voice comments to discuss the differences they noticed and then embed this in the class website. In our case, the collaborative section of a Class OneNote notebook would allow for student collaboration and commenting and voice comments.
News from your Instructional Coach
Attendance Studies
There are several studies out there about attendance and how it affects our students and their achievement. You can click on the blue link and go to the study and read all about it. What I tried to do was put a pieces from each study in this document, but not all of them were allowed. Please do go to the studies and look at the information. Very eye opening.
Our attendance and tardies for the second 9 weeks are on the chart in this section as well. This is a good time to have a conversation with you students about the importance of being in school and how them being here is so important to their learning.
All of the studies that I have read say the same thing, communication is the key! Communicating with the kids, parents and community about how important it is to be present. It sounds like such a small gesture and like it will not make much of a difference. But if we take that as our first step toward helping bring out numbers down then we are starting to do something.
Attendance in Early Elementary Grades: Associations with Student Characteristics, School Readiness and Third Grade Outcomes, Applied Survey Research, May 2011. A study commissioned by Attendance Works suggests that attendance in the early grades is critical to sustaining the school readiness skills that preschool or Head Start programs can help children to develop. This study conducted by Applied Survey Research examined the progress of 640 young California children in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties where research has consistently shown a strong correlation between a high score on their local school readiness assessment measure and third grade reading proficiency. Students who arrived at school academically ready to learn—but then missed 10 percent of their kindergarten and first grade years—scored , on average, 60 points below similar students with good attendance on third-grade reading tests. In math, the gap was nearly 100 points.
Chang, Hedy & Romero, Mariajose, Present, Engaged & Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades, National Center for Children in Poverty: NY: NY, September 2008. This report documents the consequences, prevalence, potential causes and possible solutions to children missing extended periods of school in grades K-3rd. Although students must be present and engaged to learn, thousands of this country’s youngest students are academically at-risk because of extended absences when they first embark upon their school careers. Nationally, an estimated one in 10 kindergarten and first grade students are chronically absent (i.e. miss nearly a month or more of school over the course of a year). Absenteeism in the early grades can reach even higher levels in particular schools and districts. The good news is that chronic early absence can be significantly reduced when schools, communities and families join together to monitor and promote attendance, as well as to identify and address the factors that prevent young students from attending school every day.
Why Does Chronic Early Absence Matter?
Figure 1: Chronic absentees in kindergarten have the lowest academic performance in first grade
Chronic early absence matters because it adversely affects academic successes and affects large numbers of children, especially in some communities and schools. NCCP’s national data analysis found that chronic absence in kindergarten is associated with lower academic performance in first grade for all children regardless of gender, ethnicity or socioeconomic status. The relationship is especially strong for Latino children, who had much lower first grade readings scores if they were chronically absent in kindergarten. This relationship appears to reflect the consequences of less time on task. Participation in full-day as opposed to half-day kindergarten seems to lessen the negative impact of chronic absence in kindergarten among poor children. Going to school regularly in the early years is especially critical for children from families living in poverty, who are less likely to have the resources to help children make up for lost time in the classroom. Among poor children, chronic absence in kindergarten predicts the lowest levels of educational achievement at the end of fifth grade.
The above is an excerpt from the study.
Do Absenses Make a Difference?
Our Attendance and Tardy Information for 2nd 9 Weeks
Absences
K – 167
1 – 172
2 - 145
3 - 98
4 – 141
5 – 122
845
Tardies
K – 147
1 – 148
2 – 101
3 – 98
4 – 80
5 – 67
641
Absences were multiplied by 6 hours for a total of 5,070 hours lost instructional time!
Tardies were multiplied by 5 minutes, but not all students were only 5 minutes late. However, with just 5 minutes there were 3,205 minutes of lost instructional time.
News from your EC Program Coach
When You're Just "Feeling So cRaZy Right Now"
Let's face it, our lives are stressful. We have so many different hats to wear 24/7, students getting the material needing enrichment, students not getting the material needing reteaching and modifications, district assessments, workshops, angry or unhappy parents, trying to teach with 10 million other things that need to be done, and did I mention the things going on in our personal lives as well?? Sometimes it feels like our lives are like roller coasters, just when we think we've reached the top there is a surprise dip with a twist and turn to keep us constantly topsy-turvy.
With all of the stress going on in our lives, and the students' as well, sometimes we can get a little crazy, or as Mrs. Radcliffe put it, "cRaZy". Our tolerance levels are down with the students, our parents, our co-workers, and even our loved ones. We get snappy, rude, and often forget to actually listen to those around us. Even our kids seem to get a little out of control.
When our worlds, and those of our students, get a little out of control and cRaZy, we need to take time for ourselves. I read somewhere that when we find that we have no time to do things for ourselves is the time we need to do them the most. So here are some great websites related to making our lives less cRaZy, AND we can teach them to our students as well. Some of the strategies can even be done together.