BAS Roll Through, Love and Logic Strategies Review and Celebration Reports

Staff,

On Monday, during your common planning time, Amanda McCarthy and Kara will be reviewing with you the important updates within the new F+P Benchmark Assessment.

On Wednesday, November 14th Chris and I will be rolling out the next Love and Logic classroom strategy:  Setting Limits with Enforceable Statements. We will also quickly review the previous strategies listed below.

• Neutralizing Arguing:  broken record . . . I respect you too much to argue . . . Probably so . . .  I’ll listen when you voice is calm

• Teacher/Student Relationships (friendly eye contact, smiles and friendly touch) One sentence intervention:  I notice that . . . Will you stop doing that just for me?

• Delayed Consequences:  Oh, no this is sad. I’m going to have to do something about this. But not now . . . later . . . try not to worry about it. Then “plug holes” in your consequence

• Empathy:  says to a child: You are capable! Because we love you very much, we care about how you feel. But because we love you so much we will not rescue you from your problems or poor decisions. Deliver a strong dose of empathy, or sadness for the child, before you deliver the consequence.

Examples of empathic statements:
This is so sad. This is hard. Oh, this is never good. Bummer. Oh man.

Finally thanks again for all your hard work connecting with students and families through greetings, goodbyes and postcards home. It is now that time of year to fill out celebration reports for the great things you see your students doing. You should have copies of the Celebration Reports in your PBIS binders.

Jan Richardson Guided Reading Lesson Plan

At our early release this Friday, I will have a very brief staff meeting in the media center to review the collective commitments below. Please bring your Jan Richardson resource and sources of ELA student data (instructional reading levels, MAP data, anecdotal notes, letter/sound checklist, assessment summary, etc.) for planning a guided reading lesson. From now, until we meet again with Carolyn in January, here are some of the collective commitments, we'll need to agree upon at the Friday meeting.

Collective Commitments

• Provide letter tracing and small group instruction for Pre-A learners and guided reading for readers at the Emergent, Early, Transitional and Fluent levels. 

• Use our PLCs to plan guided reading and commit to using student data to drive the process. Below are the Jan Richardson resources to use to analyze student data. 

1. Pre-A lesson:  Letter/Sound Checklist (306)
2. Emergent Lesson:  Assessment Summary (61)
3. Early Lesson:  Assessment Summary (114)
4. Transitional lesson:  Assessment Summary (168)
5. Fluent lesson:  Assessment Summary Assessment Summary (229)

• Engage students in meaningful literacy activities when not involved in guided reading. When these activities are writing based: think authentic writing yes, worksheets no.  
• Instructional coaching (four touch points) provided to each classroom teacher. Lesson planning meeting prior to teaching, observing the coach teach a lesson (or you teach and Amanda observes), coach observes you teach and a debriefing meeting with you and Amanda. 
• In each regular education classroom (K-5) at least one guided reading group should be done with fidelity, from now until January, following all of the Jan Richardson components. This builds the foundation for a guaranteed and viable guided reading curriculum.
• Support implementation through PD, the PLC process, coaching support and classroom walk-throughs. 

Love and Logic and ELA PLCS

Staff,

At Tuesday's staff meeting, the Love and Logic topic to be covered by Chris Strop is empathy. The remainder of the staff meeting is set aside for your teams to continue on with your ELA PLC work. Make sure you bring whatever items you need for your PLC.  If your team hasn't already, make sure you agree on when you are going to commonly assess your essential learning. This Thursday is your next Day 5, please use this time to also build on the work you'll complete on Tuesday.

Tuesday Staff Meeting

Staff,

This Tuesday at our staff meeting, Brian and Chris will assist us with two of the Love and Logic Classroom strategies. Please also bring your laptop to this meeting because you'll be taking a very brief survey to help get a baseline on our knowledge of trauma-informed care. This survey will help us, as well as the other elementary buildings, with our next steps to support our students who have experienced trauma. 

Before the meeting on Tuesday, I will be sending staff the link to the survey and the password. Please do not take the survey prior to the meeting, because I have some directions when starting it. Thanks!

Day 5 and Late Start This Week

Staff,

On Tuesday, during your Day 5 meetings, I'll review with you our SMARTgoals for the 18-19 school year, and how your SLOs can help support our overall building goals. Please bring to these Day 5 meetings your ELA curriculum guides because I will be giving you copies of your grade level MAP continums which we will be aligning to the ELA curriculum guides on Thursday.

On Thursday, we will have a staff meeting at 8:05am in the media center to get you ready for your SLO writing. If you have time prior to Thursday, please log into mylearningplan through class link and review your strengths and areas for growth within the standards/indicators from last year's professional goal setting plan found in your 17-18 evaluation folder.



 Later on Thursday, you'll be updating your reflections within the professional goal setting plan for 18-19. You'll also have time on this day to dig into the MAP continuum to align concepts and skills to your grade level's ELA priority standards. 

Won't You Be My Neighbor

Staff,

This past Friday, it was the 51st anniversary of Mr. Fred Rogers recording the first episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. In honor of this day, Google shared the following Doodle on their search engine (see below). The Doodle, "aims to be a reminder of the nurturing, caring and whimsy that made the show feel like a television visit between Mister Rogers and his young viewers." I found it the perfect introduction to our movie night on Tuesday. Again we will start at 4:00 pm in Mrs. Filarsky's room.

On Monday, During your Day 5 common planning time, continue your ELA work using the four questions PLC document you started last week during our staff meeting. Again please focus on a ELA priority standard you want every child to meet.

At our Tuesday staff meeting, we'll check in to see how the first two Love and Logic Classroom strategies are going:  Greetings and Neutralizing Arguing. Chris will then introduce the next one:  Delayed Consequences. Here's the agenda for the staff meeting. Please also bring your EDM4 Manual so you can do some planning during the second half of the meeting.

PLC Staff Meeting

Staff,

At our staff meeting, we will start with some celebrations from the first week. Be thinking of anything you might want to share from the following categories: student learning, collaborating with colleagues or results of our work.

The Love and Logic Classroom strategy to be rolled out on Tuesday is neutralizing arguments. Our ELA PLC agenda item will be focused around digging into the ELA curriculum guide to understand how the priority standards are infused into these revised documents.  Teams can also work on deciding which priority standard they'll plan, teach and assess together. I have linked the District essential document google folder.  Within your grade level's folder, you'll find the table of contents, it includes a link to the deconstructed priority standards which are helpful for your planning too. Here's a link to the agenda for Tuesday. Hardcopies will be at your table.

On Wednesday, during your Day 2 curriculum common planning with Teaching and Learning, they will be going over report card changes now that we also have priority standards for ELA. These meetings will be held in our conference room.

Over the weekend, I came across this Edutopia article regarding greeting students at the door. It highlights the benefits for both students and teachers. I found it reinforcing of the greetings and goodbyes we've collectively committed to this year.

Welcome Back

Staff,

I am looking forward to a great first week of school with you and your students. On Tuesday we have our staff meeting at 8:05am to review the NH staff guide. I'll have some quiz questions to highlight important information found within it. Staff are welcome to come a little early on Tuesday (7:30am) to help us get our flags displayed along the front sidewalk. Our Patriot Day program will start at 2:50pm by the flagpole.

On Thursday, September 13th we will have our PBIS stations. Please refer to your PBIS binder for your station schedule. Then Friday is our first PLC common planning time. Your work will be focused in digging into the new ELA Curriculum Maps. 

Final Week

Staff,

Thank you for all you've done to make the 17-18 school year a successful one for our students. On Monday the petting zoo will be here from 10:00am-1:00pm. K-3 teachers have signed up for times, but there are some openings if intermediate grade levels want to try to view. Here's the schedule with the times still available. 

Our last day of school at a glance.

9:00 am - All School Meeting

10:30 am - Yearbook Signing

2:10 - 2:40 pm - Specialists covering afternoon recess for teachers.

2:45 pm - Kickball

No Specials

Finally, starting at 9:00am on Monday, certified staff can draw times in the office for checkout on Wednesday. Teachers on cycle for evaluation, who have not reviewed their end of year SLO with me, will need to do this on checkout day. Teachers not on cycle for evaluation will have their SLOs finalized after Wednesday. Please double check that you have submitted both your PPG and end of year SLO.

Last Full Week of School Updates

Staff,

We are sprinting toward the end of the year with so much to do in the next week and two days. A reminder to have your end of year SLO and PPG submitted to me by 11:59pm on Monday, May 14th. 

Other events happening this week are the following:

• Monday, May 14th:  5th Grade Track and Field at EP Rock
• Tuesday, May 15th:  4th Grade Track and Field at EP Rock
• Wednesday, May 16th;  4th Grade Field Trip to Warner Nature Center
• Thursday, May 17th:  K-3 Track and Field Day, Fun Run and First Grade Field Trip to Como Zoo
• Friday, May 18th:  Second Grade Field Trip to the MN Zoo and  5th Grade Farewell at 2:45pm

Finally here's an update on a couple of our end of year building SMARTgoal indicators. As a building, we met one of our big reading achievement goals:  55% of K-5 NH students will be above the 60 percentile on MAP (College and Career Readiness). As a building, 56% of K-5 NH students scored above the 60 percentile on the reading MAP (College and Career Readiness). Also regarding reading MAP growth, we had above average results spring 17-spring 18 for our 1st-5th graders. MAP now combines the percentage of students who met their projected RIT and percentage of projected growth met for an overall percentile called the median conditional growth percentile: as a building our students had above average growth 57% (last line of the report below). I wanted to share with you some great achievement and growth news based on your hardwork and the hardwork of your students. Bravo!