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