ENSC Family Notes
February 2, 2015
School Cancellation Days
We have now used all of our built in make up days and our next step is to add on Thursday, June 4 and Friday, June 5. March 23 and 24 are set aside as make up days. As I have said before, these two days present issues with families who have already made plans for spring break. A way to use those days is to make them eLearning days giving students two weeks to complete their work. However, this means our K-4 students will take home iPads for two weeks.
K-4 students have now taken their iPads home on four different eLearning occasions. One of these turned into a five day weekend. From those opportunities, there were very few issues. The students have learned to take care of their devices and protect it to the best of their ability. Our ultimate goal is to allow our K-4 students to take their iPads home regularly. To ease our way into that practice, the students will begin taking their iPad home every Tuesday beginning February 10. This allows teachers to design some of their regular homework to use a bit of technology.
Thank you all for the support you provide to your children and to East Noble School Corporation.
Active Bills in the Legislature
SB 40 - Proposes full day kindergarten financial reimbursement.
SB 170 - Teacher performance assessment. Requires the IDOE to develop, and the state board of education to approve, a method for measuring student growth throughout the school year to be used to evaluate a certificated employee as part of the school corporation's staff performance evaluation plan. Requires a school corporation's staff evaluation plan to be based upon, in part, student growth during the school year.
SB 269 - Requires all students to pass a Civics Test (the test administered to become a US citizen) before graduating or receiving a waiver.
SB 301 - Age for compulsory school attendance. Provides that, beginning with the 2015-2016 school year, a student shall enroll in a kindergarten program not later than the fall term of the school year in which the student becomes five years of age (rather than seven years of age).
SB 302 - Employment contracts for nonunion teachers. Provides that a teacher who is not a member of the exclusive representative (union) may enter into an employment contract with a school corporation that contains terms that differ from the terms set forth in the collective bargaining agreement.
SB 304 - Requires an individual who seeks to receive an initial practitioner's license as an elementary school teacher to demonstrate proficiency in the recognition of specific learning disabilities related to reading, including dyslexia.
The above bills are just a few of the many filed. If you would like to read about additional bills, go to this link: http://iga.in.gov/legislative/2015/bills/
All Star of the Week
This week’s Staff Member of the Week is Kris DeLong. Kris serves as the ENSC Social Worker. She spends her days adding a layer of support to kids and families in need by seeking out medical services, food, or attendance support to ensure that all ESNC students are academically successful. In addition, to these duties, Kris helps support the Special Education department by conducting intake conferences and meeting with parents. Kris goes above and beyond her duties at all times. Kris’ focus is always on what is best for students, whether that is meeting with parents at 7:00 PM because that is the only time that they can meet or trying to arrange bus transportation for a student who was placed in emergency foster care. Her days are packed moving from one situation to the next, often dealing with the unpleasantness that faces many of our students. We are lucky to have such a dedicated staff member. Kris is truly an asset to ENSC and our students.
Enjoy Your Week
Ann
Building Notes
Alternative Learning Center
With all the delays and cancellations there's not too much to report this week at the ALC. The students are close to hitting the 100 credit mark for this trimester. They have three more weeks to finish up classes before the new trimester begins (02-23-15-trimester 3 starts).
The e-learning days have been going well. Students need to remember these are school days and attendance is taken. If you do not complete e-learning work expectations, then they will be marked absent on those days.
Enjoy the snow!
Avilla Elementary
OUR Kindergarten classes celebrated their 100th day of school this week with activities that centered on the number 100! The activities included licking suckers 100 times, singing songs, counting 100’s collections, making crowns and eating 100 cookies. OUR 1st graders got into the act as well. The 1st graders celebrated by creating 100 cup towers, and building 100’s with unifix cubes. It is hard to believe that we have been in school for over 100 days. Spending time with students and families like the OUR’S time flies because of all the fun!
On Monday OUR 4TH, 5th, and 6th graders spent some time at the Kendallville Public Library listening to author Adam Gidwitz speak with students about his journey to becoming an author. Mr. Gidwitz is an outstanding story teller and he kept his audience intrigued throughout his talk. We want to send a HUGE “THANK YOU” to the Kendallville Library staff for inviting Mr. Gidwitz to the library.
This past Friday Kevin Dreibelbis from the Noble County REMC visited OUR 6th graders and talked about applying for this summer’s Touchstone Energy Camp. This is a high adventure camp for 6th grade students only throughout the state. Mr. Dreibelbis talked with the students about what the camp was about and the importance of filling out the application completely and accurately. He explained to the students how important communication is between people not only verbally but written. Thank you to Kevin for visiting OUR school.
East Noble High School
Clearly, within education there is a strong emphasis on reading, writing, and mathematics. However, science classes are where students get to put all that together to create, build, and discover. Our science programs and extracurricular opportunities provide kids with hands on experience within a variety of disciplines. Whether it’s testing a new hypothesis or testing an unproven design concept, our kids are taking education into their own hands to push themselves to levels they never knew possible.
- The Forensics classes were visited by Sargent Dixon and Knight this past week. The class is learning the various drug classes and how various drugs are detected. They learned more about the roles drug dogs have, their capabilities and how good Knight really is at his job.
- The Genetics class is working on a class project that revolves around the theme of whether “handedness” is inherited or a learned behavior. We are collecting vast amounts of data from inside EN that reaches from athletic fields to the fine arts. We’ll being disaggregating this data once collected and putting it up against known genetic inheritance patterns.
- The IED class will be starting our Card Board Canoe Project. IED is one of the PLTW Engineering courses offered at ENHS.
- The PLTW Biomed class is finishing a gel electrophoresis lab where students will diagnose patients for FH (familial hypercholesterolemia).
The Science department has many opportunities to show case student work in a competitive format. One of these is called Science Olympiad. Saturday, January 31st, the science Olympiad group traveled to Purdue Calumet for an all-day event. While there, they competed in multiple science events such as glider construction, protein modeling, anatomy, a Rube-Goldberg device, Bungee Drop and many more events. These students have spent many hours over the past 6 weeks to get ready for the competition. Many of the state’s best science and engineering students will be participating in this event. Out of a regional field of 9 highly competitive high schools, our young squad did very well and posted a 4th place finish, with several individuals earning medals and moving on to the state competition in March.
East Noble Middle School
This week has been a whirlwind week at the middle school with delays and e-learning. February is going to be a busy month too!
Tuesday, February 3 is the Give and Go game to support Riley Hospital at 5:30 p.m. Admission is $5, but if you bring a canned food item it will be $3. Hope to see everyone there to support this great cause.
Mrs. Sibert is starting a S.W.A.T. team here at the middle school Students Working to Advance Technology. Students who would like to help teachers with student updates, cleaning up programs, and basic computer maintenance during NE time are encouraged to apply. Applications will be accepted February 2-6th and the application can be found on the Digital Citizenship Canvas page.
Progress reports are coming up quickly- February 11th will be the date! Parent teacher conferences will be that evening also.
North Side Elementary
North Side's week was a busy one highlighted by the blood drive conducted by the American Red Cross. It was a school-wide effort led by the NS Student Council and helped on by students of all ages that recruited donors. Student council members played many roles leading up to the event including creating marketing materials and spreading the word. North Side can be proud of our student council members as they played gracious hosts for all our guests. Each visitor to the blood drive had a welcoming committee and an escort.
This week also included an eLearning day and preparations for eLearning for the upcoming week. As teachers and staff continue to refine this process many lessons have been learned. Teachers have grown very quickly in their ability to create and find instructional material to make days of eLearning meaningful. The journey continues.
Rome City Elementary
Rome City has been buzzing with reading, writing, and technology this week. First graders got a taste of what a writing prompt is! This writing prompt will help Mrs. Friend see what her writers need to work on and what their strengths are in writing now that we are on day 95 of first grade! They were put to the test and were to use all they have been taught thus far to complete their writing prompt!
First graders also had the opportunity to share their opinions by creating book reviews using the app Shadow Puppet. Thanks to Mr. Yoder for putting together a compilation of the reviews on a youtube video. Click on the link below to view the video. Third grade students enjoyed a night of technology fun and learning at a recent Tech Night. Students and parents learned how to use the app Puppet Show and enjoyed some friendly competition with a Kahoot game.
Archery has started at Rome City. After a few months of waiting patiently for the equipment, students have started practicing archery skills. Carissa Prater is leading archery 2 nights a week at Rome City. Mrs. Krebs will be teaching archery in gym class for grades 4- 6. Students are extremely excited!
South Side Elementary
The weather hasn’t held South Side back yet! Our students are busy visiting our community, visiting with famous authors, being engrossed in civics education remember Marting Luther King, Jr., plowing through their reading and writing goals, and tackling multi-step and tech-enhanced math problems, and building academic stamina and perseverance. Here is a little insight from 5th grade: South Side’s fifth graders were among many area students who attended a presentation by author Adam Gidwitz on Monday at the Kendallville Public Library. Students were mesmerized as Gidwitz retold stories from his series of books based on the Grimm tales (A Tale Dark & Grimm, Gross Grimmly, and The Grimm Conclusion) and spoke about how he went through the writing process. Gidwitz answered questions, gave autographs, and got many students excited about reading and writing.
Fifth graders also have been learning about and discussing Martin Luther King Jr. and have been hearing and reading stories about segregation and how King and others worked to gain equal rights for all. Some fifth grade students then got to see on a smaller scale what that segregation was like. About one-third of the students in each fifth grade class agreed to be segregated from their classmates for a day. The group sat at their own area in the class, ate a different table for lunch, and even used a separate water fountain. At the end of the day, all students wrote about how the day went, how being on both sides of the segregation experiment felt, and for a little while experienced a small taste of what many people went through. One student wrote: “I’m glad I said yes (to doing the activity) because now I know how people felt when they were treated differently or people called them names. I always knew about it not being fair, but I thought it wasn’t so bad. But when I lived it, I felt terrible about how they were treated. That’s not right.”
Wayne Center Elementary
This has been a busy week in kindergarten! On Tuesday, the kindergartners had their 100th day of school celebration. It began with a special breakfast of one sausage link and two pancakes to represent the number one hundred. After the students went back to their classrooms, they did 100th day activities that required students to accomplish tasks in one hundred seconds. Students had to write their names, string beads, toss items into a bucket, stack cubes, and daub gumball circles. They decorated their 100th day crowns and proudly wore them. For Writer’s Workshop, students brainstormed what they would buy if they had $100. After brainstorming, they wrote what they would buy on a writing paper that featured their picture on the one hundred dollar bill. Kindergartners also made an ice cream scoop bookmark, counted by 10 to 100, and wrote the numbers on the scoops. Lastly, the kindergartners worked very hard on a 100th day take-home project! They were to gather 100 items and create a display with that collection. There were many creative projects such as 100 Hershey kisses on a large cookie, a 100 eyed monster, a 100 M&Ms tree, and house made of 100 Popsicle sticks. The 100th day projects will be proudly displayed in the school's front lobby!
The week finished up with a No Excuses convocation featuring Olympic volleyball gold medalist Lloy Ball. He spoke to our students on the importance of perseverance in life and setting goals, even at a very young age. He shared his life experiences of working hard at many attempts to achieve his goal of winning a gold medal. After 16 years, he finally won that gold medal at the Beijing Olympics. He stressed the importance of never giving up on your dreams and to always keep trying. Several lucky students were chosen to wear Lloy’s gold medal and get a picture taken with him! Mrs. Jackson’s 3rd grade class, Ms. Abbee’s 3rd grade class, and Miss Northrup’s 5th grade class created a video on responsibility. This week, they recorded students and staff members sharing what they believe responsibility is. This student-created video was shown during our convocation! Thank you both 3rd grade classes and Miss Northrup’s 5th grade class for putting together an awesome convocation!
East Noble School Corporation
Email: alinson@eastnoble.net
Website: eastnoble.net
Location: 126 West Rush Street, Kendallville, IN, United States
Phone: 260-347-2502
Facebook: facebook.com/eastnoble
Twitter: @ENobleSchCorp