https://blogs.4j.lane.edu/chinn/?p=2073
Hello Howard Staff,
Fourteen items of note for this week:
• Staffing Allocations Distributed on Friday – Principals will receive staffing allocations this Friday, April 12th. Staffing plans will be due less than two weeks later on Thursday, April 25th. Once I get our allocations, I will email staff what we received along with a comparison to this years amounts. As I said in my email earlier, to give us adequate time to process potential staffing scenarios, I’ve flip flopped our Staff Meeting (now on April 16th) and Collaborative Meeting (now on April 9th) dates and added a second optional Staff Meeting on April 24th for staff to give final input before I submit our final plan. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions around this.
• Ems Reading Incentive Assembly, 4/11 at 9:00 – A repeat from Shelly’s email last week, but Thursday, April 11th is our Em’s baseball EMazing Reader Assembly. We will all meet in the gym at 9am so Sluggo can motivate kids to meet their reading goals and receive 2 tickets to a baseball game. See the attached assembly map for logistical details.
• Friday, Planning/Partial Furlough Day – This Friday is a non-student planning day and for certified staff it is also a four hour furlough day. For everyone else, this is a normal work day.
• Elementary College Awareness – You’ve probably heard the term “College and Career Readiness” being thrown around a lot, but here are some things to mull over as possibilities for how to plant some seeds at the elementary level.
• Title 1 April Newsletter – This month’s Title 1 blog post mostly consists of an avalanche of Title Coordinator tasks and deadlines, but there are a couple good articles if you’re interested.
• Caring School Community Scales – Even though this is probably too late, here is a document that is not quite a survey, but a host of scales that you could use as a student questionnaire on school and class community. They are set up by age and only cover grades 3-6. I was thinking this could have been a good pre and post measure for teachers how have CFK implementation as your professional goal. Let me know if you decide to use any of this as downtown folks are interested to know how it worked out.
• Fire Drill, Tuesday at 12:35 – Weather permitting, we’ll hold our April Fire Drill this Tuesday 1:15. Please plan accordingly.
• PE Office & Equipment – My sister was here last week, showing me some things in the PE closet, and told me that she always stored the gym mats against the gym wall so there was better access to equipment in the PE office. She and I went ahead and moved the mats to where she’d kept them in the past, so now staff should have better access to PE equipment in the office, but let me know if anyone feels the mats should go back into the PE office.
• Children’s PEACE Project honoring the visit of the DALAI LAMA to Eugene – The Eugene Sakya Center is co-hosting the visit of the 14th Dalai Lama to Eugene with the University of Oregon, on May 10th, at the Matthew Knight Arena. Our center will be decorating the venue with the artwork of Eugene’s children, and would love to have students make PEACE flags*, PEACE pictures, or PEACE poems from the angle of, what peace means to them. See the attached letter for details and if you’re interested, email former 4J principal Evie Matthews (eviematthews@comcast.net).
• 6 videos to spark student interest in STEM – You may or may not be familiar with the educational trend of focusing on STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math), but here are six videos (PreK-12) to inspire interest in STEM.
• Social and Emotional Learning Research Review – Very much related to our pilot of the Caring School Community curriculum, this article discusses the importance of how social and emotional learning can have a positive impact on students’ academic performance.
• Classroom resources to celebrate National Poetry Month – In celebration of April as National Poetry Month, Edutopia Editorial Assistant Matt Davis in this blog post suggests several resources for teachers to include poetry in classroom lessons. Among them are poets.org, a sort of “one-stop shop” for poetry, and ReadWriteThink, which includes poetry-focused lesson plans for students in all grade levels.
• The Death of “Whom” – Okay,maybe this is my geekiness showing through, but I loved this grammar related Atalntic article excerpt. According to Megan Garber, whom, America’s least favorite pronoun, is inexorably falling into disuse. It’s used less and less frequently in books, magazines, and newspapers in recent decades – and, she notes, the slogan in Ghostbusters didn’t read, “Whom you gonna call?”
• Schedule of Events for the Week – See the Google Calendar for future events, but here are the events of note for this week:
April 8 (M)
Referral Free Window Begins
1:00-1:45, Allan to BEST Principals Meeting (Ed Center)
2:30-2:00, Allan to Elementary Principals Meeting (Ed Center)April 9 (T)
9:00-10:00, March Book Winner Giveaway
12:35, April Fire Drill (weather pending)
2:30-3:30, Collaboration TimeApril 10 (W)
8:10-8:40, Allan covering reading group
8:30-12:30, Dental ClinicApril 11 (H)
9:00-9:30, Ems Reading Incentive Assembly (Gym)
2:30-3:30, IPBS Meeting (Room 10)April 12 (F)
No Students – Planning Day (Partial furlough for teachers, 4 hours planning/4 hours furlough)
11:00, Allan to All Admin Meeting to Receive Staffing Allocations
Have a good one!
Allan