DCIS Connect
An 8th Grade Newsletter. Edition 1
Something to Crow About - a Wonderful First Week!
We are so grateful to our students who showed up this week with their smiles (underneath their masks, of course) and their positive energy. Our students are so happy to be back in school!
Heads up, in week three students will start to use a writing notebooks . The set-up process takes some time, but we reap great rewards in student organization when we start using them for journaling and note taking. Thanks for providing your child with notebooks, scissors, glue sticks, and tape!
Thank you so much for the fantastic turnout at Back to School Night. It was great to see so many parents who are so active in their child's educational success.
Thursday folders will go home next Thursday. Our Thursday folders are a way for you to keep tabs on your child's grades and also allow you to have weekly conversations with your student about what they can continue doing to support their success or what they might need to change. There are ALREADY grades in our grade books for the first week. This week you will notice that there are very few assignments in the grade books because most of our week has been filled with iReady testing and get to know you activities. Please look for the folder next week, you are our vital partner to ensure your student's success this year. Filling out the Thursday folder each week will make sure there are NO SURPRISES at the end of each grading period and will help your child keep on track.
Thanks again for all of your support!
Mrs. Daley and Mrs. Kaneshina
How to Help Your Child Succeed at School - By Jessica Lahey The New York Times
Key Values
There is so much to think about each school year, but above all else, these simple rules can help keep you focused on what’s most important for school success.
Do
- Focus on the process, not the product.
- Encourage kids to self-advocate.
- Keep a long-term perspective.
- Maintain a healthy sleep schedule.
- Love the child you have, not the child you wish you had.
Don’t
- Overschedule.
- Worship grades.
- Encourage helplessness.
- Compare kids to one another.
- Love kids based on their performance.
Value the Process Over the Product
Very young children are naturally driven to learn and explore. They are at the very beginning of their lifelong quest to understand and gain mastery of the world around them. As they reach out, fall and get back up again, they gain a heightened sense of mastery, competence and self-efficacy. Somewhere around kindergarten, however, parents and teachers begin to undermine this process by devaluing the process of learning and replacing it with a mad dash for the end products. Suddenly, the intrinsic motivators of natural curiosity, competence and self-efficacy are less valuable than extrinsic motivators such as stickers, points and grades. Unfortunately, extrinsic motivators undermine kids’ desire to learn over the long term. Want your kid to lose interest in school? Pay them for their A’s and worship at the altar of grades. If you’d instead like your kids to remain curious and hungry for mastery, here are some tips for re-orienting kids’ priorities.
- Keep report cards off social media and the refrigerator. We can tell our kids that we value learning all we want, but when we gush over grades and stick them to the refrigerator, we show them that what we value most are the grades. Of course, grades are what most parents are stuck with, even if they are flawed and incomplete indicator of learning as well as what’s known as an “extrinsic motivator,” which has been shown to reduce motivation over the long term, undermine creativity, and encourage cheating. Some schools have moved away from letter-based grades and are using reports focused on mastery- or standards-based evaluations, which can help parents and kids focus on what’s being learned rather a grade. No matter what kind of report your child gets, humble-bragging about it on social media only feeds parental competition, raises the pressure for kids and teaches them that your love and approval is contingent on the content of their report card.
- Focus on the process they used to get that grade. When we invest less energy and emotion in the number or letter at the top of the page, we can begin to ask our children questions such as, What did you do to get this grade? Which study techniques worked for you and which ones did not? What are you going to do differently next time?
- Look forward, not back. The best question parents can ask when faced with a grade, whether high or low, is: How are you going to use this experience to be better next time? This technique works particularly well for anxious and overly perfectionist kids, because they can get stuck in a negative feedback loop, obsessing wholly on the numbers and grades. Helping them shift their focus back to the process can alleviate that anxiety, particularly when we help them prioritize the aspects of learning they can control.
Model: Talk about your own failures and successes with your kids, showing them that you, too, are invested in the process of learning. If you berate yourself over failures, so will they. If, however, they see you being brave and learning from your mistakes so you can be better next time, so will they.
Reminders:
Week one of 8th Grade has to an end. We have completed our first iReady Test - students will be sharing their iReady results with you very soon. Routines and procedures are being learned. Please feel free to email us with any questions you may have.
Reminders:
Monday 8/23-Minimum Day - all sites
Monday 9/6- No School - Labor Day
Monday 9/13 - Staff Development Day - Non Student Day - No School
Monday 9/20 - Minimum Day All sites
Monday 9/27 - Friday 10/1 - Parent Conferences Minimum Days All Week
CONTACTS FOR MRS. DALEY AND MRS. KANESHINA
Mrs. Daley's email - angela_daley@etiwanda.org
Email: angeladaley@me.com
Website: kanley.org
Location: 12345 Coyote Drive, Rancho Cucamonga, CA, United States
Phone: 909 803-3300