Maude Saunders Newsletter
Week of January 13, 2020
At Maude Saunders, we are...
One School
One Team
with One Mission:
EXCELLENCE A+
Goals:
- Have a positive mindset each day toward students, parents, & staff.
- Build team efficacy through collaboration.
- Create a school culture reflecting excellence in ourselves and our students.
- Build cognitive capacity in our students through high expectations.
Mission & Vision:
To be a place where all students succeed and achieve to their maximum potential with a curriculum that is a dynamic response to each student's needs.
Vision:
Maude Saunders Elementary School will create and sustain a school climate that encourages student success.
In the Spotlight - Krisy Spence
Thought for the Week
Differentiated Accountability: We are proudly educating 543 future leaders.
Preventing and Solving Discipline Problems - We will be exploring behavioral strategies each week, including how to deal with challenging students.
Summary for Chapter 4 will be sent through email this week.
5 Components:
- Positive teacher-student relationships
- Clearly defined parameters of acceptable student behaviors
- Monitoring skills
- Consequences
- Strong content instruction
Let's continue to be consistent with our classroom procedures and school norms so we can continue to reduce referrals.
INSTRUCTIONAL FOCUS - Relevance - 5th way to get students excited about learning
Here are five effective ways to get your students excited about learning:
1. Encourage Students
Students look to teachers for approval and positive reinforcement, and are more likely to be enthusiastic about learning if they feel their work is recognized and valued. You should encourage open communication and free thinking with your students to make them feel important. Be enthusiastic. Praise your students often. Recognize them for their contributions. If your classroom is a friendly place where students feel heard and respected, they will be more eager to learn. A “good job” or “nice work” can go a long way.
2. Get Them Involved
One way to encourage students and teach them responsibility is to get them involved in the classroom. Make participating fun by giving each student a job to do. Give students the responsibility of tidying up or decorating the classroom. Assign a student to erase the blackboard or pass out materials. If you are going over a reading in class, ask students to take turns reading sections out loud. Make students work in groups and assign each a task or role. Giving students a sense of ownership allows them to feel accomplished and encourages active participation in class.
3. Offer Incentives
Setting expectations and making reasonable demands encourages students to participate, but sometimes students need an extra push in the right direction. Offering students small incentives makes learning fun and motivates students to push themselves. Incentives can range from small to large giving a special privilege to an exemplary student, to a class pizza party if the average test score rises. Rewards give students a sense of accomplishment and encourage them to work with a goal in mind.
4. Get Creative
Avoid monotony by changing around the structure of your class. Teach through games and discussions instead of lectures, encourage students to debate and enrich the subject matter with visual aids, like colorful charts, diagrams and videos. You can even show a movie that effectively illustrates a topic or theme. Your physical classroom should never be boring: use posters, models, student projects and seasonal themes to decorate your classroom, and create a warm, stimulating environment.
5. Draw Connections to Real Life
“When will I ever need this?” This question, too often heard in the classroom, indicates that a student is not engaged. If a student does not believe that what they’re learning is important, they won’t want to learn, so it’s important to demonstrate how the subject relates to them. If you’re teaching algebra, take some time to research how it is utilized practically for example, in engineering and share your findings with your students. Really amaze them by telling them that they may use it in their career. Showing them that a subject is used everyday by “real” people gives it new importance. They may never be excited about algebra but if they see how it applies to them, they may be motivated to learn attentively.
https://teach.com/what/teachers-change-lives/motivating-students/
Top 10 Achievement Boosters For Students ©2016 Eric Jensen
9. RELEVANCE
WHAT THIS MEANS:
Many students walk into a class asking the question, “What’s in it for me?” While that question may seem a bit selfish and even harsh, put yourself in their shoes. A survey was done with over 81,000 kids. Over half of them said that the only reason they were in school was that 1) it’s the law, and 2) their friends are there (Yazzie-Mintz, 2007). This speaks quite loudly to the challenges we all have as educators to make our curriculum relevant, whether it is Common Core or state standards. When you look at the list of all content areas that are required for students, you’d be hard pressed to say, “Kids will love these!” Instead, we get kids who think school is boring and they simply tune out. It’s no secret; creating relevance can be tough. Here are some suggestions.
HOW TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN:
Chunk the content down to smaller “bite-sized” chunks. Use buy-in strategies to get students involved right at the start. Sometimes, once a student is involved, they can get caught up in the learning and it takes on a life of it’s own. At the K-5 level, use the “bigger kid” challenge (if you have 2nd graders, entice them with the opportunity to do something only 3rd graders would get to do), use a simple reward such as a privilege, make the task extra fun (maybe add music to it?), teacher enthusiasm, evoke curiosity (“What will happen next?”), affirmation of
value of activity, be gross (better if it is ugly, dirty, weird or it drips), allow kids to make a new friend and include movement. Provide more choice to students of all ages. Ensure you have pre-selected the choices so everyone will be happy. Then “sell” the choice to them so they realize that it is valuable.
At the secondary level, be a bit edgy or risky, use peer pressure, bump up the challenge, stair-step the activity into super micro-bits, increase work amounts with friends, provide opportunities for kids to gain peer status, be experimental, help them find their voice for something they really believe strongly in, allow them to wed content with solving local problems, let them carry out their vision to work for something much grander. Finally, immerse the work by inside respectful and caring relationships. With all kids, especially kids of color and from poverty, a key piece of the puzzle is relevance of instruction based on a student’s culture, history and “story.” Remember the narrative from item #1 above?
Now we are combining all three and this is a blockbuster of an idea. An example is Ms, Henderson’s class (real teacher). She teaches middle school English but her class is about giving kids a voice. Ask kids for what’s wrong in the world and every middle school kid has got an answer. Now turn the question around to, “If you knew someone important would listen to you, what would you say we should do about it?” She says, “We write to change the world.” This is relevance based on culture and the kid’s story. And it works; she gets three years worth of academic gains for every year she teaches. Her kids work all semester to write a paper so good that someone will listen to them. The teacher arranges a VIP audience for the kids to read their paper to at the end of the semester. Not a dry eye in the house!
From the desk of our own Krisy Spence
The first step in setting up successful parent conferences is letting parents know what to expect. If possible, email or send home an agenda that lets them know what will be covered and how long the meeting will last. Be sure to begin with a positive and include a section for parents to ask questions and share information. Often, fear of the unknown keeps parents away!
Important Information
- 4G & 5G Field Writing Test: Please walk quietly down halls to avoid disrupting testing on Tuesday, January 14th from 8:30-10:30.
- House Points: Please continue to award points for students.
- Individual Data Chats: Mr. Johnson and I will be scheduling Individual Data Chats in the next few weeks. I encourage you to go ahead and share your individual data with your grade levels and identify patterns and trends that can be addressed during your PLC. Please let Mr. Johnson and myself know how we can support you in this process.
- Individual Student Goal Setting: Please complete K-12 Lift Student Goal Sheets and make sure you document in your lesson plans.
- Final Evaluations: Let's begin our final evaluations in January. I want to have ALL evaluations complete by the end of April 2020 (before testing).
- Review Proposed Standards: In a Just Read, Florida! presentation yesterday, they boiled the most significant proposed changes in the new standards to the items listed below. Please review the standards and submit feedback through this link: https://www.floridastandardsreview.org/
- Skyward: Anyone that has submitted TDE into Skyward must upload an attachment (agenda, email requesting you attend, etc.). If you did not do this, please go back and upload your attachment. NOTE: You do NOT have to submit TDE into Skyward for trainings we have on our campus. This was just clarified at my Principals' Meeting. So for our Data Chats, you do NOT have to upload an attachment.
- Comp Time: Please do NOT enter comp time for Faculty Meetings. Loveta will enter Faculty Meeting Comp Time into Skyward for all that attend. If you leave early, make sure you write the time you leave by your name. Also, please remember that comp time must be pre-approved. For parent meetings, please upload an attachment to indicate the time-frame in which the conference was held.
- Lesson Plans: Please make sure your lesson plans are on your desk and accessible each day. I may need to refer to them when doing a walk-through.
- FOCUS: Please keep your grades updated and make sure your grades are standards-based and you have the correct number of grades per the SPP.
- Parent Communication: How are the positive phone calls home progressing?
- Safety: Please keep all classroom doors locked.
- Attendance: Attendance should be completed by 8:30 a.m.
- Transportation Notes: Please make sure these are sent to the front office no later than 8:30 a.m. Also, make sure transportation notes are picked up from your box before dismissal.
Calendar Additions:
NOTE: Please let Mrs. Bonnie know if you have events that need to be added to the master calendar. Ms. Bonnie will begin this week entering what we have on the master calendar so far.
MLK Day Performance - KOD
12:30 - (1st, 2nd, 5th Grades)
Please explicitly teach how to be a good audience and monitor students during the performance.
We will call by grade level so we can begin on time.