Phone Message for Week of 11/25/19

Good afternoon Cub Families,

This is Mrs. Sare with this week's reminders. We hope that you had a wonderful time at our Music and Measurement Night. The turn out was amazing and we can't thank all of our volunteers enough for taking their time to be at DCE to allow our students to have some fun! Who would have thought we would ever be lucky enough to see a helicopter land in our back fields? We also hope that you found your time visiting your child's classrooms and looking through their leadership notebooks valuable. Our students were so excited to show off their progress so far this year with you.

This week is a short week. Our Cubs will only attend school on Monday and Tuesday and will then be heading into our short fall break. Starting December 2nd, our Candy Cane Lane store will be open during the school day. Your child should have brought home a flyer last week that explains how our store runs. This packet included a flyer that shares the date and time that your child will be scheduled to shop and an envelope for you to send in money if you choose. We will also have our Candy Cane Lane shop open in the evening on December 5th from 5:30 to 7:00 pm. At this event, not only can you and your child visit the store, but we will also have Santa on campus, a holiday movie, and many stations of activities for our Cubs to participate in. We hope that you can join us.

Last week we shared some reminders about school jackets and sweaters now that the weather is cooling off. We'd also like to remind you that this same policy applies to leggings and tights. Students are welcome to wear these items, but underneath their uniform clothes. Leggings and tights also need to be solid uniform colors. Thank you for continuing to support our school's uniform policy!

Those are all of the reminders for today. Mr. Vernon and I wanted to also take a moment to express our gratitude for all of our Cub Families. This time of year always causes us to pause and reflect on all that we are thankful for. Deep Creek Elementary is a special place because of our staff, our students and their families, and the community support that we have. The feeling that is in the air when we step on campus each day is energizing. We hope that your family enjoy a few days off together and that you know just how much you and your kiddos mean to us.

Have a wonderful rest of your Sunday and we look forward to seeing our ready, responsible, and respectful Cubs at school tomorrow morning.

Monday Memo 11.11.19

Thank You For All You Do:

Want to keep this Monday Morning Memo brief...  It is hard to believe that the second week of November is here.  Each day, each week and each month seem to go by so quickly.  There is never enough time to accomplish all that needs to be accomplished each day.  So often the day-to-day routines get in the way and making sure you all know how appreciated you are is forgotten.

So simply, please know that we understand that you have some of the most difficult jobs around.  You all do a fabulous job of caring and teaching our students.  You are so very appreciated.

Have a great week.

-Keli and James


This Week's Schedule:

Phone Message 11.10.19

Good afternoon Deep Creek Families,

This is Mrs. Sare with some important messages for our upcoming week.

Tomorrow is Veteran's Day.  Our fifth grade grade students will be hosting a tribute to Veteran's in the afternoon during their specials period.  We appreciate the service that our Veteran's have provided to our Country and look forward to seeing the beautiful tribute that our students will be making to them.

Wednesday is cookie dough delivery day!  Fundraising orders will be available for pick up from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm in our cafeteria.  As you enter our front lobby you will need to stop at the sign in table to pick up your order form that will designate your numbered boxes.  Then, you will visit the designated numbered location in the cafeteria to pick up these boxes and verify the contents.  Please be aware that we will be unable to store frozen products after Wednesday at 6:00, so it is very important that you make arrangements to be able to pick up your items. Thank you again for all of your sales as your efforts has raised a lot of money for our school!

Our Book Fair items have arrived!  Mrs. Riddell is working to get it all set up for our Cubs.  The Book Fair will be open the second half of the week for students to shop and will also be open on Music and Measurement night on November 21.  We love seeing our students selecting new books that they are so excited to read!  

Finally, I have a few quick reminders about safety for our students.  Recently we have had some families attempting to park in our bus loop area before and after school during arrival and dismissal.  Unfortunately, we can not allow vehicles to be in motion in the bus loop while buses are present.  We are working on some creative parking ideas for large school events to help remedy some parking concerns, but on regular school days the bus loop area needs to remain free of moving vehicles during drop off and pick up.  Also, it is important that all visitors that are joining us for lunch in our cafeteria are eating with their student(s) only.  All visitors that eat lunch with a student must be on that student's emergency card in the office.  

I hope that you have had a wonderful weekend with your families.  I look forward to see our smiling Cubs back to school tomorrow morning!

Phone Message 11/4/19

Phone Message 11/4/19

Good afternoon. This is Mr. Vernon letting all of our families know that we conducted a Safety Drill this morning at DCES. We are required to conduct one Safety Drill each month. Today's drill was unannounced to all staff, including myself, and operated by the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office. I am proud to report that our Deep Creek staff and students did a great job with the drill. Our next drill will take place during the month of December, we will make sure that all families are notified once again. Thank you and have a wonderful evening.

Monday Memo 11.4.19

We Survived! Almost...

What a busy week we all just survived!  For those of you that are new staff, you will soon know that Halloween is just the start to a busy holiday season... so put on your seat belts as it is going to be a wild couple of months!  Keeping the routine and structure for your students is very important.  The more that you can keep things the same the less negative behavior you will see kick up this time of year.  This does not mean that you can not do fun holiday activities.  But, looking for ways to integrate these activities into your current structure will be important.  Look at the standards that you need to cover between now and winter break.  Are there ways that you can integrate some holiday reading into your literacy work stations?  Can you use holiday manipulatives for math activities?  Collaborate with your teammates to find ways to keep your focus on standards and classroom structure while still keeping the holiday fun alive for your students!

Safety Drills

Just a reminder that starting this month that we will be starting to have unannounced safety drills.  The Charlotte County Sheriff's Office will be visiting our campus and announcing that we need to go into a safety drill.  Please review your red safety folder to ensure that you are prepared for all scenarios.  ALL STAFF should be prepared at anytime to be the staff member that will need to put us into a lock down.  Please stop by to see one of us if you have any questions about any part of our plan.

Learning Walks

James and I were recently challenged to transition our visits in your classrooms from "walk throughs" to "learning walks."  The change in title alone focuses our attention to what students are learning and how they are learning it.  We have started these walks with a focus on science as this is one of our school's lowest data points.  When coming in to science classrooms, we are taking notes on four areas:

1. What standard is being covered?
2. Is this standard on pace with the District pacing guide?
3. What is the rigor level of the instruction and/or task being completed compared to the intent of the standard?
4. How does the teacher know that students have learned the day's science content?

The starts of our learning walks have uncovered some areas that we are doing well, and others that indicate some improvement that needs to be made.  We are loving that our envelopes for our science question of the week were very full for almost all of our grade levels.  Your students seemed excited to be stopping us in the hallways to talk with us about the question too!  We have also noticed that many of you have been starting conversations with your teams about science pacing and about common assessments in the area of science.  One team even met last week to begin comparing and contrasting the different assessments each team member had been using since the start of the year and discussing how these tests were administered.  We love this! These conversations are important, as some of our classroom visits indicated drastic differences in pacing and standards alignment from room to room in the same grade level. Having common grade level assessments helps to keep the focus clear on what we are supposed to be teaching our students and how we are doing this.  In our learning walks we also noticed that there were some variations in the time of day that you are teaching science based on the master schedule.  We have now gathered your accurate science block times for each teacher and will be continuing our learning walks this week.  As we mentioned at the start of the memo, the holidays often have us change our lesson plans to include holiday themed activities.  We noticed this especially in the area of science.  Many of our grade levels had students experimenting with pumpkins in many ways.  Although our students may have learned a lot, many of the activities were tied to standards of other grade levels... and were even repeats for students across many grade levels.  One example of this is examining the life cycle of a pumpkin.  Did you know that life cycles of plants and animals are written into second grade and fourth grade science standards?    We are looking forward to continuing to visit your classrooms. Please know that our intentions are to simply look for small tweaks that will help us make a big impact on student achievement for the benefit of our students!

Below is a quick peek at our schedule for this week.  

We hope that you have an amazing week!
-Keli and James