Phillips Friday Focus
March 2, 2018
The Power of Influence and Motivation
You are the one person in the classroom that can wield the power of influence for the next couple of months. Use this time, not only to review and cram, but as an opportunity for your teacher superpowers to motivate our students. Remember how we felt during the weeks leading up to the TEA visit? Pressure, loss of sleep, and stress put us on edge. We have to find a happy medium of keeping classroom morale high while teaching the mechanics of the test. Worksheet coma is rarely successful, let's motivate and make learning fun with the review over the next few months.
No down time, free days, or days when we don't bring the best version of ourselves to school. Every day, lesson, and student interaction matters.
Benchmarks next week
We will be giving teachers tickets for students that use their strategies on the benchmarks and they will be entered into a drawing with their tickets. 10 tickets per grade level will win a prize. Please continue to reward all students in your classroom for using strategies in some small way so all students that displayed effort will get a little "way to go". This can be as simple as just earning a privilege they would enjoy. We will draw for the big prizes next Friday.
Our hope is they will see the benefit of strategies with better Benchmark grades and it will motivate them in May!
What's Ahead...
March 5- Telpas Writing samples due, organized and rated, 6:00 School Board meeting
March 6- 5:30-7:30 Latino Family Literacy Project
March 7- Math Benchmark
March 8- Reading Benchmark
March 9- last day of Third Quarter, grades due
March 19th week- Data Digs on Benchmarks during department meetings
March 20-5:30-7:30 Latino Family Literacy Project
March 21-4th grade GT day, All Staff STAAR training after school
March 22- Team Blackbear Field Trip, 4th grade Intervention Tracking meetings during conference times
March 23- 3rd grade GT day, 3rd grade Intervention tracking meetings during conference times
Happy Birthday!
7- Karina Valdez
22- LaDonna Robinson