au courant
April 4, 2015
Crossing Guards
Thankfully Heidi has agreed to keep our kids safe through the crosswalk again. If you can help out by taking a shift on Fridays or taking the crosswalk in the mornings, please let me know. This is paid time.
Friday is a CRM Day
On CRM days, support staff do not have to attend. However, teachers should feel free to invite any EAs to the CRM meetings if they work directly on literacy with the students you are discussing at your CRM meeting. If you're not sure, chat with Karen or me.
9:00 - Grade 3
9:45 - Grade 2
10:30 - Grade 1
11:15 - French Immersion
1:00 – Kindergarten
2:00 – Daily 5 Cohort Meeting
2:00 – Intervention Team Meeting
Behavior should be treated like academics, and students should be taught the skills they need to execute desired behaviors.
Kids who misbehave or mishandle a situation aren’t automatically punished or sent out of the classroom. Instead, teachers are taught to show empathy, connect with students and reinforce social skills.
Erin Green, Director of National Training at Boys Town
http://www.weareteachers.com/blogs/post/2014/02/18/building-a-positive-school-culture
These resources offer a great many ideas - for behavioural interventions -
~ Looking for Literacy at JSM ~
Daily 5 Check In Which Daily 5 are you choosing today? | Um... Mrs. Pickett? Are you under there somewhere? | Partner Reading Reading each other their own superhero writing! |
Building Stamina Shirley's and Beth's students were 100% engaged in their books. So were the teachers! | Cross Curricular Lorelie's students wrote about their Social Studies project. | Visualizing a Story Lexi's grade ones mapped out their visual images of a story. |
Literacy Discussion Lexi and Sylvia discuss an intervention strategy. | Chit Chat Cheryl's students learned about the sounds in words as they read through her Chit Chat Chart together. | ZAP IT Ana and Emma worked on learning sight words by playing Zap It! |
Cross-curicular Sticky Notes Karen has the students finish the sentence with their ideas. Love to see the music/writing combo here. | Cross Curricular Karen features stories in her music lessons. These would be excellent books to put in the students' book boxes. |
Elbow to Elbow from LS?


Uploading PGP's to Docushare
Refugees


Speaking of evaluations...
Dog Committee
I've been informed we should start with the admin procedure for service dogs, and given a number of questions from Stuart Elle of OH & S. Please let me know asap if you want to be part of this process.
Support Staff Handbook Committee
I am hoping a group of support staff members would be willing to create a new handbook. We should have representation from both veteran and new staff. It should not require more than a couple meetings. Please let me know if you are interested in contributing to this project (don't worry about your flex time).
Year end par-tay committee

Toilet Issues (or, thank you Betty and Kaye for repeatedly and patiently unclogging!)
Any ideas?
On the Horizon...
- It's time to make a class size request for next year. This is where we fill out a form showing our class sizes depending upon the number of teachers we have. Keep your fingers crossed.
- I told you I'd update you after our March 23 admin meeting; we didn't get much in the way of specifics. As of today, I've been called to a meeting on Monday afternoon to get details.
- At this point in time, our kindergarten numbers for the fall are way down from this time last year according to Sophie. I don't know if that is due to something simple (like the fact we didn't start registrations as early as usual), or if we should actually be expecting fewer K programs next year.
- Let me know if you want a change in assignment for the 2016-17 school year. This goes for both support staff and certificated staff members.

March Reading Scores
I need these lists by Friday, April 8 please.
Message from Cheryl Gascoyne...
The Words Their Way resources have begum to arrive and we are currently processing the order. Some of the materials are on back order, and are anticipated to arrive in separate shipments over the next couple of weeks.
As soon as we have each school's order together we will get the materials to you.
If you have any questions please give me a call or e-mail.