Clif Notes 11/18/19
50 Years Of Equipping The State & Now Global Workforce!
DATES TO REMEMBER
This Week -
Monday - Mandatory Senior Class Meeting, 8:15am, Auditorium
Tuesday - CTE PLCs
Wednesday - Academic PLCs
Thursday - Academic PLCs. Extra Help-Tutoring in Library
Friday - Steering Committee Meeting, C100
Upcoming:
11/25 - Board Meeting at Hodgson
11/26 - MP2 IPR End Date
11/27 - No School/Offices Open
11/28-29 Thanksgiving Holiday
12/3 - Faculty Meeting
12/4 - IPRs submitted to eSchool
12/4 - Junior Ring Ceremony
12/6 - PD Day/No School for Students
Bistro Cafe Menu for the Week
November 18 - November 22
$1.00 Tuesday
Soups
Chicken Tortellini
Cheeseburger Soup
$2
Entrée
Southwestern Chicken Tacos with homemade Tortilla Chips & Salsa
$6.25
Grill
Grilled Beef Kebobs Garlic Red Bliss Potatoes
drizzled with Balsamic Glaze
Chicken Stir-Fry
with Steamed Rice
$5.50
Deli
Caesar BLT Chicken Flatbread
Virginia Ham with Gruyere and fresh Parmesan cheese and Dijon
*** Also, featuring Turkey, Ham, Chicken & Tuna Salad sandwiches made to order***
$5
Salad
BBQ Chicken Salad
With tomatoes, Cucumber, Red Onion, Beans, Corn and cheese drizzled with Ranch Dressing
$5.25
Desserts
Banana Caramel Cream
$2
Chocolate Chip & Oatmeal Cookies
$1
Homemade Dinner Rolls & Cinnamon Sugar Bread
Fall Blood Drive
Apprenticeship Week 2019
Delcastle will make the annual trip to visit our NAW business partner, M. Davis, in February.
Harker Lab (UD)
National Apprenticeship Week 2019
Successful Project!
Flag Football
Congratulations to our Unified Flag Football team on a great season!
The program continues to grow in wonderful athletes and amazing staff who dedicate themselves to champion the goal of Unified Sports- Social Inclusion through competitive sports.
Kudos to:
- Greta Humphrey for serving as the coordinator for our multiple partnerships with Special Olympics
- Chris Laws and Tom Gears for coaching and developing our student-athletes
- Savannah Bigelow and Maria Stella for your commitment to Club Unified
- Sam Keeper and the wonderful DTHS Drumline for keeping the players and fans pumped!
Our seniors and family during senior recognition game
Let's Go Cougars!
Delcastle vs Middletown...always a great game!
A Note from the Student Advisor's Office
As a reminder, all students must have a clipboard pass which is color-coded for each wing. We ask that you please do not use any other creative object as a student pass. Our monitors do not know every student and they are expected to check student passes.
If you have the wrong color or are without a clipboard, stop by the main office and pick up the appropriate clipboard.
Additionally, if you want a student to come to your classroom during their lunch, they must have a pass.
Below is a color key for the clipboards.
Green – B Wing
Blue – 1st Floor C Wing
Red – A Wing
Yellow- 2nd Floor C Wing
Purple – Basement
A Note from the School Counselors and Guidance Office
As we enter the holiday season and approach the MP2 interims, we ask that you pay close attention to your students' grades, attendance, and behavior. If you notice lagging attendance or concerning or altered behavior, don’t assume someone is already addressing it. Please reach out to the parent/guardian and let the guidance office or student advisor's office know!
General Note
As a reminder, with the weather dropping, field mice will begin to look for ways into the building for warmth and food. We all know that students should not be eating any food in the classroom. We ask that you please be diligent with enforcing this rule, especially during this time of year.
Station Rotation Observation Opportunity
How to Use Chromebooks Offline for Homework, etc.
Many students do NOT have consistent Internet access at home!!!
It is important that we are mindful of this when assigning work that needs to be completed outside of the school building so we do not promote the digital divide through socio-economic bias.
This does NOT mean that homework, projects, etc. should not be assigned to our students. We just need to ensure that the resources are available for them to access offline and teach them how to do so!!!
Please review the attachment below and feel free to go over with and post for your students.
As always, if you need more assistance or have questions please contact me.
~Tara
Delcastle Instructional Focus
Interesting Read - Taking Action on Adolescent Literacy by Judith L. Irvin, Julie Meltzer and Melinda S. Dukes
sing Technology
The use of technology is often highly motivating to adolescents in terms of getting them to read and write more carefully and with more effort. The ability to revise on the computer, to add effects (color, graphics, sound) to presentations, and to code or mark text using word processing features such as highlighting motivates many students, especially when this capability is combined with an authentic purpose to read and write. Some students are much more likely to persevere with skill development if it is presented through a computer program or to complete an inquiry assignment if it is structured as a Web quest.
In the vignette, Kamal and his teammates used a PowerPoint presentation to successfully present their case. The technology was a useful and easy-to-use tool that helped communicate their ideas to their audience.
Connecting Engagement to Improved Proficiency
Although it may be easy to see how these learning conditions stimulate motivation and engagement, the connection to how they build literacy skills and improve literacy learning may be less clear. Obviously, willingness alone does not make one competent. As previously shown in the engagement-instruction cycle (Figure 1.1), when coupled with support and instruction, engagement with literacy tasks that one perceives are worth completing allows for guided practice. Because skillful coaching improves performance during practice, practice allows for improvement to take place.
But just as responsive classrooms do not happen by accident, neither does literacy learning for the vast majority of students. Most students need skillful literacy instruction within the context of content-area learning to support their ongoing literacy development, including explicit instruction in reading strategies and skills and how these can be applied to various genres and contexts. In Chapters 2 and 3, we present, in detail, the types of strategies and skills that reading and writing instruction should include as part of both content-area instruction and intensive interventions for struggling readers and writers.
In the following sections we describe three additional types of academic literacy habits and skills that the research stresses as being necessary for all students to develop to become independent learners: metacognitive skills, vocabulary development, and the ability to generate questions. Competence in each of these three skill areas supports students' abilities to learn content. Teachers' conscious development of each of the three, coupled with attention to motivation, will support engagement with academic literacy tasks and improve reading and writing proficiency. Students' academic success is dependent upon developing competence with each of these, whether or not they are used in conjunction with reading or writing.
Developing Metacognitive Skills
Metacognitive skills allow students to monitor their own comprehension effectively. That is, learners realize when they do not understand something or when something does not make sense. Students with good metacognitive skills can use a variety of “fix-up” strategies when reading or listening, like rereading, listing or visualizing, questioning the text, relating the content to personal background, or using text aids to assist with comprehension. Weaker readers can learn the metacognitive strategies that stronger readers use. These strategies help weaker readers improve reading comprehension and, therefore, improve their content area learning. Being able to use metacognitive strategies independently as needed to strengthen and deepen literacy and learning is the de facto definition of an “independent learner.” This sense of having more control over one's reading and learning through the development of metacognitive skills typically motivates students to sustain engagement.
Developing Vocabulary
Vocabulary development is intertwined with reading comprehension and content-area learning. Students need a variety of strategies they can use to learn and remember the many technical terms, key concepts, and academic vocabulary that they encounter in the study of various disciplines. There is no evidence that “assign, define, and test,” the most prevalent approach used in middle and high school classrooms for learning vocabulary, is effective in helping students to learn words. According to Allen (1999), teachers in each content area should implement purposeful vocabulary instruction to
- increase reading comprehension,
- develop knowledge of new concepts,
- improve range and specificity in writing,
- help students communicate more effectively, and
- develop deeper understanding of words and concepts with which students are only nominally familiar.
Struggling readers and writers and most ELL students also need purposeful attention to the study of words (root words, affixes) and the development of academic language (non-content-specific words found in printed directions, forms, textbooks, novels, and other publications). Throughout the literature, vocabulary development is stressed as a key component of literacy.
***More to read next week***