Head U Gator News
April 10, 2016
A grateful heart
...Cindy Felker, who has a student finishing his dyslexia training and immediately began looking for how she could fill his time spot with other students in need of assistance.
...Karen, who went to a DI tournament several weeks ago and spent her Saturday judging DI teams. We had an appeal that went out from our teams who had to supply a judge in order to compete and Karen volunteered. She had to spend a Saturday before that being trained, so many thanks for investing, Karen!
...Lynette, for sharing a story about her own growth that I'll share later in the newsletter.
...Michael, for helping with the Gator Gallop today!
TSR and PDAS
Lynette's story
Jeanette met with them about some learning she was doing, and they decided to start working on things they were thankful for. Lynette quickly realized that they needed a model, so she began writing things she was thankful for including her gratefulness for them and their uniqueness.
The climate has greatly improved, to the point that both Lynette and Jeanette feel like it has been a huge success for both of them, but the part I wanted to share was Lynette's own reflection. She said, "I realized I was part of the problem. I had gotten so sucked into the negative climate that I wasn't being positive and thankful for the good. I was only seeing the negative. When I began focusing on the positive and praising them for the good things they were doing, it made a HUGE difference in their behavior."
It takes a really big person, and a very mature educator, to recognize their own part in a situation and then work to improve upon it. I asked Lynette if I could share because I think we've probably all been there, and it's hard to point at ourselves as a possible cause in a bad situation. However, since the interactions we have with our students (or parents, or other colleagues) ARE impacted by our responses, we have to be willing to examine ourselves and then work on things that we can improve before we can expect others to do so. Thanks for being honest with yourself and with us, Lynette, and for allowing me to tell this story for the benefit of all of us.
small group minutes
We didn't have a lot of data for this week (I didn't send a reminder Friday) so I took the cumulative information from January and averaged that:
Reading: 87%
Math: 79%
That's since January of this year. I think we have reading down, but we probably still continue to work on making small group math instruction more effective.
Ian Byrd
Anniversary celebration
GTU
This week:
Monday, April 11
Art Club, 2:45
Tuesday, April 12
La Academia Spanish 2:45-3:45
GTU begins
Wednesday, April 13
choir
Thursday, April 14
Marimba Band
Mad Science
Math Lab
7:00 Anniversary celebration
Friday, April 15
Bowman Sports and La Academia Spanish
Ranger's game for staff
Saturday, April 16
Rachel's Challenge Rally and 5K