April 11, 2011

By Allan 　

Hello Everyone,

Five items of note for this week:

• April 15th Planning/PD Day – This Friday was originally a PD/Planning Day, but was changed into a day for teacher planning and for planning for the next school year in light of the enormous staff cuts. My plan for the day will be to hold an optional 2011-2012 master schedule planning meeting for each school this day. Corridor will meet at 9:00 in the library. YG will meet at 1:00 in the library. My goal for the meetings will be to create a draft schedule to later share with the entire staff of each school for feedback. If you are not attending the meeting, but would like to provide some input, please email me your thought before the meeting. Also, don’t forget that Monday, April 18th is a furlough day!
• Madison Middle School Band Assembly – The Madison Middle School Band will be performing for us this Tuesday in the cafeteria. The performance for YG will be from 9:30-10:00. The performance for Corridor will be from 10:10-10:40. This assembly is optional, so that’s okay if you have something else going on in your classroom.
• 2011-2012 District Elementary Calendar – Attached is the 2011-12 instructional calendar as approved by the Board on 4/5/11. Completion of the 2011-12 work year calendars should be completed later this month.
• Walk + Bike Challenge Month – Similar to “National Walk + Bike to School Day”, May is Walk + Bike Challenge Month. Info, stickers, ribbons, and temporary tattoos are available along with other prizes if anyone wants to take this on. “Safe Routes to Schools” is sponsoring the event and along with the prizes will give us score cards for all our students to track their trips. Safe Routes will collect the cards at the end of the month to tally and award prizes. Kids can also log trips online each week to be eligible for more prizes. If anyone is interesting on heading this up for your school, just let me know. More information can be found on their website.
• Helping Students to Motivate Themselves – Here’s an interesting article that is based upon a new book “Helping Students Motivate Themselves: Practical Answers to Classroom Challenges” by Larry Ferlazzo that tells of the dangers of Incentives and Rewards and also goes into better ways of motivating students, which include:

• Applying What We Know About Motivation in the Classroom
• Praise Effort and Specific Actions
• Build Relationships
• Use Cooperative Learning
• Show Students the Economic and Health Advantages of Doing Well in School
• Creating Opportunities for Students to Help Make Decisions

The book goes against the grain a bit, but the article has some good points to consider.

Have a good week everyone!

Allan

This entry was written by Allan, posted on April 10, 2011 at 4:22 pm, filed under Announcements, Articles. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.