Monclova Primary
Weekly Bulletin
Events for Week of October 28 - November 3
Red Ribbon Week
Monday, October 28
AWAKE Shirts
Tuesday, October 29
Wear shirt with favorite activity, hobby, color or team
4th Grade School Performance - 9:00 am
4th Grade Music Program - 7:00 pm
Wednesday, October 30
Wear neon colors and crazy socks
Grades due in Power School - 8:00 am
Character Wheel - 9:00 am
1st Quarter Principal Lunch - 11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Thursday, October 31
Happy Halloween - wear black and orange
Fall Parties - 2:45 pm
Friday, November 1
Wear Generals Gear
FB @ Springfield
Announcements
Thank you:
Reminders:
For a $5 donation to AWAKE, you can wear jeans all next week to celebrate Red Ribbon week. Chris will have an envelope in his mailbox.
In your family communications, please remind your volunteers/visitors for the fall party that will be using VisitU for sign in. With the amount of people that normally attend this process will take some time. Encourage them to come early so they are signed in and can join the party at 2:45 pm. Also, parking will be limited, we can not use the south bus lot. Let visitors know they can use the parking lots at the Monclova Community Center.
Please make sure you are keeping up to date on your RtI plans. Those that started interventions on September 16 will need to review progress after this week and update your goal(s). Turn in any changes that will added to the original plan.
Please make sure you have a conference scheduled for each parent, I will send a survey out after conferences to collect attendance data This helps for future planning of dates and time blocks.
Veterans day will be here before we know it, please plan grade level/classroom celebrations as you see appropriate for your students.
Upcoming Events:
Red Ribbon Week - Oct. 28 - Nov. 1 (Dress down for theme days with $5 donation to AWAKE)
Fall Parties - Oct. 31
Parent/Teacher Conferences - Nov. 4, 5
Veterans Day Celebration - Nov. 11 (wear red, white and blue)
Diabetes Awareness Day - Nov. 14 - wear blue and jeans for a free will donation
"Putting the A in STEAM" Family Art Night - Nov. 14 - 5:00 to 7:00 pm
Words of Wisdom and Action..............................
As we have just come off the fall 3rd grade ELA AIR assessment, perseverance and grit were needed by all! It's the practice and methods of practice that helps our students improve and master the skills by the end of the year when they see this assessment, again. And from the work and words of Angela Duckworth........................
Practice Makes Perseverance
The lesson in hard things
September 29, 2019 | Grit
Why do parents encourage their children to play baseball, soccer, or any other sport? Why, for years, did my husband drive our daughter Lucy to viola lessons?
We know that most kids won’t grow up to go pro or make their living playing in an orchestra. Bill Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard, tells me that most of the very serious athletes and musicians whom he admits each year develop new passions once they come to campus.
So why, as a scientist, do I believe these endeavors matter? It’s not easy to do random-assignment studies of sports, music, or any other extracurricular activity. Ethically, you can’t force kids into a pursuit, or prevent them from doing what they love, in the name of science.
But there is correlational evidence suggesting that extracurricular activities are the fertile soil in which passion and perseverance take root. Consider, for example, the economist Arthur Brooks, who had played French horn professionally when he was young. One of the most charismatic speakers I’ve ever seen, Arthur was once asked whether he’d learned anything as a serious musician that applied to his current work:
Number 1…is endless repetitions. It’s reps. It’s getting your reps. Again and again and again. Playing the same passage over and over and over again. Because, until you actually get the reps, you won’t have the ballistic movements into your brain. Which is to say, you won’t be able to bypass your prefrontal cortex in playing music. You need to do everything automatically. It’s just happening too fast. You won’t get technical perfection, otherwise. But that takes reps.
The second is slowing everything down. If you—when you are playing a classical instrument, and you are learning a piece of music, to make it such that it will sound great, flawlessly, over and over again, you need to play everything incredibly slowly—it’s the rule in classical music that you shouldn’t be able to recognize the music. If you can recognize the piece, you are playing it too quickly.
And the last is…an appreciation of failure. You are just going to fail a lot. You are going to fail a lot before you can succeed, because the level of technical perfection is so demanding that there is just a lot of failure involved. Those are really the three things that have guided my ability to…be the president of the American Enterprise Institute.
In part, we send our children to coaches and teachers to learn character. We want them to discover the magic of repetition, of slowing things down to focus on an area of improvement, and failing failing failing in order to succeed.
Don’t tell your kids that the point of competing is winning. The victor doesn’t always walk off the field with the championship trophy.
Do help your kids see the broader significance of practice. A wrestling coach once told me, “I don’t coach wrestling, I coach life.” The founder of a dance program in New Mexico says: “We don’t just teach dance. We teach excellence.” And one of the best math teachers I’ve ever seen tells his students, “Why are you learning math? Because math is hard. And in my classroom, you learn how to do hard things.”
With grit and gratitude,
Angela