Week of April 6

 

What is going on?

• Caring for Kids Follow-Up Opportunities – Two separate Caring for Kids training are being offered to teachers, one covering Morning Meeting and the other covering Cross Age Buddy Activities. PD on each of these will be offered twice- once during the school day with sub time provided, and once after school with extended contract offered. The hope is that this will reduce teacher time out of the classroom for those who prefer an after school offering. Attendance is optional, but you may choose to attend a session on one or both topics or none at all. Register on the 4J Workshops webpage and the AESOP sub code is “Caring for Kids.”

• Job EXPO Information – The Job EXPO will be this Thursday. I have verified with HR that I can offer internal applicants through the EXPO process but because we have hard to fill positions, I can bypass the process too. The ELL Position does not fall into that category.  The grade level immersion positions can go directly external. I will be making a trip to Portland on Tuesday to recruit heavily for the 1.0 1st grade and  0.5 5th grade positions.

• Boxing Up Old HM Materials – If you have old HM materials you are done with for the year, let me know and I will have Craig box them up and label them for you. All I ask of teachers is that you group the items you want to discard by the categories listed on the packing label Marlee sent out. And if you didn’t read the email Marlee sent to cert_all too closely about packing up materials, the gist of it was you can keep the parts of the old program you want and to box-up and label the parts you do not want to be shipped downtown. Let me know if you have any parts of the program you’re ready to get rid of. Another reminder from earlier, let me know if you’d like me to have Craig deliver your grade level Journey’s materials if you’re ready for them. I’m planning to give folks planning time with the new program on our two remaining PD days.

• Title 1 Newsletter – Here is the latest district level Title 1 Newsletter that went out to all Title 1 Coordinators and principals. This month’s issue is again mostly coordinator specific information and tasks, but there is a short article from Beyond Heroes and Holidays by Enid Lee titled Looking Through an Anti-Racist Lens that’s a good read.

• Student Headsets for Classrooms – I am working on finding the most effective headphones for the classroom for our building.  It is not hard to find good sounding headphones, but good headphones with microphones that work well on laptops of various ages appears to be a challenge. We are going to purchase enough headphones with mics for the 4th grade iPad project as a start. They will be Apple earbud microphones which should work well in any Apple product.

• School gardens provide informal setting for learning – Our school garden is much to be proud of. And soon, we’ll have a deluxe area for the school garden in the new building. Take a look at this blog post on students and gardening. Students are more likely to try fruits and vegetables they have grown themselves, asserts Julia Parker-Dickerson, director of education programs for KidsGardening.org. In this blog post, she highlights how school gardens can provide an informal setting to teach students about nutrition and engage the mind and body.

• Autism and biliteracy- Here is and an interesting article on autism and biliteracy published by the BBC

• The economics of being bilingual – Know more than one language? How your bilingual brain could pay dividends

Enjoy the week!

Joel

Uncategorized | Comment (0)