Principal's Corner
August 29th
Back to School Dance
This Friday, WMS will be hosting its Back to School Dance in the gym for 7th and 8th grade students. Teachers are invited to attend this fun event. For the first time, we will be holding it in the WMS gym. That evening, there is also an EUHS football game against Woodlake if anyone would like to attend.
Family Picnic
On Friday, September 9th, we will be hosting our first Family Picnic of the year. This is an opportunity for parents to visit their students at lunch and enjoy a meal together. Teachers are welcome to enjoy lunch outside with students and their families or invite your own family of friends to enjoy lunch with you.
Field Trips
Kristen spent some time with Nicole and Sandy this past week helping us update our ASB accounts. During this process, we've identified additional money that can be used for 6th-8th grade field trips for the 2016-17 school year. This money is in addition to the $2,000/grade level that is available through LCAP with Donya. During the month of September, I would like for grade levels to begin discussing potential field trips that you may want to take students on and what additional fundraising you might want to do.
Learning Goals
I would like to being using TeachBoost this week to provide teachers with feedback using the Danielson Framework Rubric. However, I would like to start off by just providing feedback in the area of learning goals. As part of this, I'll be looking for learning goals being posted, introduced and referred to during and/or at the end of the lesson. I realize that for many of these to be evident, it will depend on what portion of the lesson you're teaching.
You'll want to make sure that your learning goals are related to the knowledge or skill you want students to attain from each lesson. Learning goals are different than agenda items or lesson activities for the day, so you may want to have a different section on your white board or in your room for agenda items and learning goals. At the end of the week, I'll share school wide feedback in this area so that we can see how we're doing as a whole.
PLC
This Wednesday's PLC is scheduled to be a Parent Contact date. This is an opportunity for you to make sure you parent contact log is updated and an opportunity for you to send out grade updates through Aeries. Because we just help Back to School Night, we can count these as parent contacts for August, which should be plenty for the month. If you feel caught up in this area, it's also ok for you to meet with your PLC team if you would like. We will start off the morning in the staff lounge with the Math team leading us through a short team building activity for Circle of Support.