Hawthorne Happenings - November
From the desk of Mr. Mahal
Dates to remember
November 3 - Parent/Teacher Conferences from 3:30-7:30
November 7 - Parent/Teacher Conferences from 7:30-7:30
November 14 - PTO Meeting in the Media Center at 5:00
November 22 - Fancy Lunch (more information to follow)
November 23-25 - No School to observe Thanksgiving Break
Donut with a Grown Up
We had a terrific turn out for our Donut with a Grown Up event! It was great to see so many students and their families enjoy time together, have great conversation, and time to connect. Thanks to those of you that could attend with your child(ren) and we look forward to hosting this again next year!
Parent/Teacher Conferences
We have Parent/Teacher conferences coming up that are scheduled for each family to have thirty minutes with your son/daughters classroom teacher. Interpreters are also scheduled into the conference but if there is an extra time that we need to help support with an interpreter, please let Darci know in the office.
We will have two different survey's for our families to take to help us continue to listen and learn from our care givers voices around our Level 1 and Level 2 work is going from your perspective. Level 1 is a Safe, Supportive, and Collaborative environment and Level 2 is Effective Teaching in Every Classroom. Thank you in advance for helping us collect our care givers voice to continue learning where we can improve!
We look forward to continuing to partner with our families to provide excellent educational opportunities at Hawthorne and also at home! School/Family partnerships are extremely valuable and we appreciate the opportunity to work with each of you in this journey.
Multi-tiered Systems of Support Meets the Academic, Social, Emotional, & Behavioral Needs of All Students
Academic
All students receive core classroom instruction. When students are not successful, teachers analyze the situation to determine the cause. School MTSS teams problem-solve by reviewing student progress and data in order to determine what a student needs. MTSS teams then create an implementation plan to address the student’s challenges.
Social, Emotional, & Behavioral
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions. Our schools teach these skills and behavioral expectations through age-appropriate social emotional curriculum.
Encouraging Positive School-Home Relationships
We believe that a positive school-home relationship is vital in order to ensure students' success. We encourage parents to participate in their child’s education by reading with their child every night, helping with homework, communicating with teachers, attending parent-teacher conferences, and by partnering with caregivers to encourage consistent attendance.
Who do I contact if my child is struggling and needs help?
Contact your child’s teacher, school counselor or principal with your questions and
Opportunities.
Drop Off/Pick Up Update
Our drop off/pick up system is overall going very well - thank you to all of you again for helping support us in making sure everyone stays safe during morning drop off or afternoon pick up!
A brief reminder for dropping off in the morning - please do not park your vehicle or drop your student(s) off in the middle of the street when dropping off on Sheridan. If you do have to come in the building, please park on Sheridan past the blue handicap sign as that area prior to school is open for vehicles to quickly drop their student(s) off.
The afternoon pickup is also going well. We continue to try to help students being picked up get to their car quickly so there is also minimal parking happening on Sheridan. Please also be aware that we are encouraging all of our students that get picked up from families to do so on the Sheridan Ave. side of our building. We also have our students cross the street at the end of the block as that is where we have crossing guards to help with safety.
Finally, we are great partners with ThorneCrest but our families should not use their parking lot to pick up/drop off students. Their parking lot is for their employees and they now have signs up to post to anyone other than employees from using their parking lot. Thank you in advance for making that adjustment if you have found yourself using their parking lot.
Continuous Staff Learning
On October 24, our staff had an opportunity to choose from a variety of topics to continue learning how to increase our capacity to do great work with students during what we call an "EdCamp"! Our own teacher experts led sessions on Writing, Google Slides, De-escalation strategies, or how to best use IXL (to name a few) to learn more about and how the ideas can be utilized in their classroom.
Taking this time to support each other on how to continuously improve is vital to supporting our staff with what they need to support each student academically, socially, or emotionally. It's also important for our staff to learn and support each other as we know this time together is great for our district Tiger Pride!
News from our School Counselor
We are doing great things in our Second Step Program! We’ve had 4 assemblies where students had the opportunity to participate both in-person and virtually. It feels so good to be all together in the gym again! Our 2nd and 3rd grade students have been learning all about empathy and respect. The ability to identify others’ feelings using physical, verbal, and situational clues is essential to developing empathy. Being able to label feelings as comfortable or uncomfortable lays the foundation for coping effectively with difficult emotions. Accurately identifying others’ feelings helps students make friends and avoid conflicts with peers. When asking your student how their day went, urge them to use a different feeling word other than “good”!
Digital Carnival Success
Thank you to those of you that attended our first annual Digital Carnival! We had a great deal of fun hosting in the gym opportunities for our students and families to learn more about being safe online and in the digital age.
