Saturday Scoop
For Information and Inspiration
Our Collective Work
Consistent Curriculum Implementation In All Classrooms
Meaningful Feedback to Students and Teachers
Social Emotional Learning
Weekly Message
So many compliments this week! Congratulations to 6th grade for completing this year's outdoor school. It sounded soggy, but really fun! Thanks Colleen, Kelly and Max for providing this rich learning experience for our kids. Lindsay and I can't wait to hear the stories. Thanks to all of you, especially Glen and the ELD team, who helped to get the buses unloaded and on their way even at the awkward time they returned.
I was able to watch some powerful conferring in Max's room this week. I thought it was very brave of him to keep going with his conferences when I came in. One thing I noticed was how he left each student with a task at the end of the conference. He gave them each a job to practice as they continued with their own reading. He took the goals directly from the sticky notes and which were posted in the room. I could tell he was really pushing the thinking of each student. We know that conferring is the heart of workshop and I really enjoyed watching Max guide his students to think more deeply about the characters in the books. I could see his students' confidence growing over the course of the workshop time.
Speaking of confidence, I read an article this week entitled Assessment Through Student's Eyes. It talked about helping students get on winning streaks. When students get to celebrate their wins, they build confidence and each little win starts to add up to big wins. Conversely, when students don't get to celebrate those little wins, they begin to lose hope and check out. The article was fascinating so I wanted to share it with you. I encourage you to give it a read. I appreciate watching this staff help students get on winning streaks.
We enjoyed reading the Staff Shout Outs! Keep sending those in! Looking forward to Lap-a-thon and all that next week brings!
Warm regards,
Jennifer and Lindsay
Max's Sticky Note Goals
Winning Streaks Learning Tool
Math Lesson Study
On October 29 and October 30, Gus will visit for two days and lead the math lesson studies with three different grades each day. Each grade level will have 2 hours. This will be broken down into 15 minutes for preview, 1 hour in the classroom for the lesson, and 45 minutes to debrief. Please let Jennifer and Lindsay know the teacher's classroom the lessons will be in at each grade level. We are so excited for this opportunity to collaborate, observe modeled lessons, and reflect upon mathematical learning.
Phonics Units
Committees
Fall Parties
Self Assessment and Professional Goals
- Self-assessment completed in Pivot
- PGG goal complete and entered in Pivot
- Lindsay and I will be asking you about strengths and where you'd like to be pushed this year
We're looking forward to this opportunity to begin our learning journeys together this year!
Paraeducator Roles
As you all know, we are fortunate to have four para educators, Colleen, Edwina, Nate, and Tara, who are so incredibly valuable to the running of our school. In addition to supporting with lunches, recesses, arrivals, and dismissals, they have windows in their schedules where they can support the academic needs of students, as is determined by Title 1 funding.
If they are currently scheduled in teachers' classroom, we have tried to looked at openings the paras have in their schedules, the grade level schedules, and the academic needs of students. If you do have a para educator in your classroom, best practice would be to have them working with the class or grade level students in order that the teacher could work with intervention students. We ask that Colleen, Edwina, Nate, and Tara do not do prep work with their support time. If they have a scheduled time in your room that doesn't feel the best use of their time, let us know and we can readjust.
Throughout the year, we will be meeting with para educators monthly to layer their knowledge of supporting with SEL, Units of Study, and Fosnot.
I want to reiterate how grateful we are to our para educators. The relationships they build with students and staff school-wide is remarkable.
Track
The track looks amazing and is open! You may have noticed that we have not yet opened this up to students at their recesses. There are two reasons for this. First, we have not yet reviewed the expected behaviors and boundaries for the track area. Second, we do not yet feel like we have solution to allow for line of sight coverage.
In order to solve the first problem, middle schoolers will be reviewing track expected behaviors/rules in the Monday announcements. Here is a link to the rules as well.
In terms of coverage for the track, we want to explain what this currently looks like. At each recess, we have three duty teachers. One covers the bark chip area, one the wall ball area/gaga pit/swing area of the bark chips, and the third supervises the field and blacktop area. We would not have eyes on all these areas if we moved a supervision teacher to the track. We've reached out the PTA to see if we can enlist parent volunteers to help supervise the track when we do open it up. We also met with middle schoolers leaders on Friday to problem solve our situation.
We will keep you posted about our progress problem solving and are welcome your ideas as well.
Narrative Writing Samples OCTOBER 8th
MIddle School Math and Science Teachers
In an effort to make sure you get something that is tailored to you on October 11th, I've arranged for you to be able to attend training with Whitford teachers for part of the day. They will be calibrating. Here are the directions they've given their teachers. You will go to Meadow Park to participate if you'd like. If you choose to stay here, please collect the same evidence. We'll use it on October 8th and 11th.
Save the Date-Let’s Calibrate! All Middle School teachers will participate in a calibration on October 11 from 10:10-11:40am.
Preparation for the Calibration Process:
September - Teachers should collect the evidence of three students’ work related to one Academic or long-term learning target.
a. Teachers should use their best judgment in September to select three students who may perform at varying levels throughout the school year on a long-term learning target of their choosing.
b. The individual student tasks within the collection of evidence may cover more than one long-term learning target, but the collection of evidence should be focused around one long-term learning target.
c. Teachers should make copies of the tasks completed by the three selected students around the selected long-term learning target prior to returning the originals to the students.
d. Teachers should print and attach the rubric used to assess each task.