High Point News
Week of: February 9th, 2015
********NEWS*************************
Teacher Appreciation Week
This week is all about you!!! We want to thank each and every one of you for what you do for our students and school. It's such a wonderful place to work and learn. It definitely wouldn't be the same without each of you here!!!
This week you can expect:
- Monday - Muffin Monday and a treat from the Admin team
- Tuesday - Celebration and staff gift
- Wednesday - Wear Jeans and treat from Admin team
- Thursday - Staff Luncheon sponsored by PTA
- Friday - Donuts and Coffee for Breakfast (we will deliver!)
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Silent Auction
High Point's Silent Auction will be coming up March 7th from 7:00 pm -11:00 pm.
We would love for our staff to be able to join us on this night so the PTA is helping to make that possible by:
- Offering a free ticket if you donate something to the silent auction
- Offering a free ticket if you volunteer at the Silent Auction (help is needed at check-in from 6:45-8:00 and then from 8:00-9:00; 2 staff members are needed for each time slot)
- If you are unable to donate or volunteer, the ticket will be $25 for you as well as a guest.
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TOTY and PEOTY Celebration
Please join us Tuesday at 2:50 in the cafeteria for our TOTY and PEOTY celebration. Light snacks and cake will be served. You are more than welcome to wear jeans and High Point Spirit Wear on this day!! Be comfortable because our theme is "Only the Strong Will Survive!"
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Career Week!
This
week we are having 5 Career Week Spirit Days!!
The
class with the most students dressed up each day will have their picture posted
on the website! Please email me with the number of students you have dressed up
by 12:00 each day if you would like your class to have a chance to win this
prize.
The
grade level that has the most TEACHERS dressed up each day
will earn 5 minutes of extra recess for the next day!!!
The
days are as follows:
o Today - “Hats off to our future!”- students can wear hats
o Tuesday 2/10- “Our
future’s so bright we need to wear shades!” – students can
wear sunglasses
o Wednesday 2/11-“Fast
forward to Future Careers”- students can dress up
for a career they want in their future
o Thursday 2/12- “Dress for
Success”- students can dress in a professional/business way
o Friday 2/13-“College
Spirit Day”- students can wear spirit wear from their favorite college
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Extended Team Time Is Back!!!!!
Each grade level will have 1 extended team time over the next month and a half. Sheri Hess will email you the schedule and which Kindergarten assistants will be covering your class starting at 1:30p.m. on that designated Thursday. Lesson plans need to be written out for the assistant and made very clear what is expected. The E.T.T will be held in the conference room from 1:30-4p.m. Grade levels will be working with Sheri on a specific and purposeful agenda for that afternoon.
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Rigor and Relevance
Don't forget to meet with Donnella Cranford during your specials block to discuss the many great things you are doing in your classroom as well as brainstorm new ideas. We will have one more meeting with her in March and then that is it for this year. Please take full advantage of her knowledge and expertise.
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PBIS This Week
From Teaching with Love and Logic: Taking
Control of the Classroom
by Jim Fay and David Funk
·
Remember we all have a need to achieve.
·
Optimal achievement is an individual accomplishment
·
Any system that denies a feeling of success creates
negative reaction.
Productive
classrooms have two primary characteristics:
1. A positive
teacher/student relationship is a key factor.
2. Achievement is defined
as attainment of a goal.
From Amy Dean the Behavior Queen
YES Card
This is
an example of a personal goal setting sheet or behavior interval training. I suggest you write down the behaviors you
would like to see the student decrease – target behavior. Pick a time where you can count each incident
of the target behavior – tallies work just fine. Then get a baseline of how often the student
exhibits the behavior by dividing the number of minutes by the number of times
you recorded the target behavior. This
will give you an idea of how often the student is doing it. This helps you to decide how much time each
box represents. I like to use 5, 10, 15,
or 20 minute increments. When a student
refrains from the target behavior for one time interval, he/she puts a “yes” –
or anything else you deem fitting – in the box.
When the student fills all the boxes in, he/she gets to choose a
privilege not only for him, but for the whole class. This has been a very successful strategy
overall. The idea came from a training I
completed with Dr. Terry Alderman in 2000, and I’ve used it every year since.
Correction
Cards
These
are small, laminated index cards or cardstock cards that have corrective
statements printed on them. These are
used as a non-verbal reminder of the expected behavior. In the classroom discipline cycle, I used one
of these as my Reminder One nonverbal warning.
Choose the card that best fits the corrective statement you would like
to make. Examples: Silence, please. Thank you for your silence. Thanks for getting to work. Thanks for being on task. Please stop.
I only had 3 different ones and never needed any more. Place the card on the student’s desk who
needs the reminder and continue talking/walking. Do not give any verbal feedback to the
student about her behavior. I also put
the number 2 on the back of each card before laminating them. This is used when I need to follow up with a
verbal reminder (Reminder 2) b/c they did not stop disrupting after the
nonverbal reminder. When I approach the
student, I say the following: “If you
choose to continue ________, then you choose __________.” The first blank is the behavior; the second
blank is the consequence they will receive if they choose to continue.
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What I've Been Thinking About…
Why Should We Pursue Learning Targets?
Excerpted from Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today’s Lesson
by Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart (ASCD, 2012)
If you ask a teacher, an administrator, and a student the question "How can we raise student achievement?" you'll likely get a variety of answers. Each answer will reveal a personal theory of action—that is, the individual's mental map for what to do in a certain situation to produce a desired result. Our personal theories of action determine how we plan, implement, and evaluate our actions. They also guide us in deciding which evidence we accept or reject to help us determine whether or not we achieved what we set out to do.
The most effective teaching and the most meaningful student learning happen when teachers design the right learning target for today's lesson and use it along with their students to aim for and assess understanding.
We believe that improving student learning and achievement happens in the immediacy of an individual lesson, or it doesn't happen at all. Teachers design the "right" learning target for today's lesson when they consider where the lesson resides in a larger learning trajectory and identify the next steps students must take to move toward the overarching understandings described in standards and unit goals. Individual lessons should amount to something. The right learning target for today's lesson builds on the learning targets from previous lessons in the unit and connects with learning targets in future lessons to advance student understanding of important concepts and skills. That's why we consider important curricular standards and the potential learning trajectory as we define the learning target for today's lesson. Our goal is to help our students master a coherent series of learning challenges that will ultimately lead to those standards.
Our theory of action rests on the crucial distinction that a target becomes a learning target only when students use it to aim for understanding throughout today's lesson, and students can aim for a target only when they know what it is. Therefore, we use the term learning target to refer to a target that is shared and actively used by both halves of the classroom learning team—the teacher and the students.
Teachers share the target with their students by telling, showing, and—most important—engaging students in a performance of understanding, an activity that simultaneously shows students what the target is, develops their understanding of the concepts and skills that make up the target, and produces evidence of their progress toward the target. Together, teachers and students use that evidence to make decisions about further learning.
Learning targets, when shared with and used by both halves of the classroom learning team, are key to creating schools where teaching is effective, students are in charge of their own learning, and administrators lead communities of evidence-based decision makers. As part of a unified theory of action, learning targets compel all members of the school to look for and learn from what students are actually doing during today's lesson to engage with important and challenging content, develop increased understanding and skills, and produce strong evidence of their learning. In our experience, adopting a learning target theory of action compels schools to reexamine the fundamentals of teaching and learning that positively and powerfully influence student achievement.
What a Learning Target Isn't and Is
A learning target is not an instructional objective (standard). Learning targets differ from standards in both design and purpose. Standards guide instruction, and we write them from the teacher's point of view. Their purpose is to unify outcomes across a series of related lessons or an entire unit. By design, standards are too broad to guide what happens in today's lesson.
Learning targets, as their name implies, guide learning. They describe, in language that students understand, the lesson-sized chunk of information, skills, and reasoning processes that students will come to know deeply. We write learning targets from the students' point of view and share them throughout today's lesson so that students can use them to guide their own learning.
Finally, learning targets provide a common focus for the decisions that schools make about what works, what doesn't work, and what could work better. They help educators set challenging goals for what expert teachers and principals should know and be able to do.
******Math Corner*********************
Ms. McClelland made an awesome and very helpful bookmark for
math students to use with explaining their thinking. Students need to
first write a statement including their answer. Second, write one or two
strategies that you used to solve the problem. Third, write step by step
how you solved the problem. Finally, restate your answer.
In small group, my students were using the bookmarks to
guide them in explaining their thinking when solving word problems.
Students were working on the following learning
targets: I can solve tricky problems that require more than one step to
solve. I can explain my thinking step by step.
****VISUALS OF BEST PRACTICE *******
In Ms. Taylor’s 4th grade math class, students became
“experts” at one aspect of their geometry foldable.
The students started in one common “expert” group with which
they learned about their part of the foldable
(i.e. Line, line segment, an array, etc…) then they counted off
and each “expert” divided among the other 5 groups.
Each group had an expert from each part of the geometry
foldable. Students were to teach it, say it, draw it,
write it,… within their mixed “expert” groups. Students were
extremely engaged and actively learning.
Click on the link below for more information on how to do the
Jigsaw protocol with your students!
http://www.nsrfharmony.org/system/files/protocols/jigsaw_0.pdf
In Ms. Lassiter’s 5th grade class, during the reading of their extended text , her class participated in the protocol called Written Conversation.
After reading up to a big cliffhanger, the students were asked to respond to this question. “What would you do if you were the Tucks, and why?”
Students worked in groups of 3s and each had a different color pen to respond to the original question. After two minutes, they had to pass the note to group members and group members respond via note writing. With Written Conversation, you can have a “discussion” where everyone is actively
talking at once–though silently, and in writing. This is a great way to get all students engaged in a conversation.
This could be used as a ticket out the door, see what the students know about a topic, etc…
1.
*****WRITERS' GALLERY**********
The writers' gallery/pledge is hosted by Ms. Roger's class this week.
The writers' gallery/pledge will be hosted by Ms. Billit's class next week.
******CALENDAR OF EVENTS*******
Monday, February 9th
Career Week Begins
Muffin Monday
Rigor and Relevance During Specials
Tuesday, February 10th
2:50 - TOTY and PEOTY Celebration - Cafeteria
Wednesday, February 11th
Thursday, February 12th
PTA Sponsored Luncheon for Teacher Appreciation Week
ETT - 4th Grade
2:50 - PLCs
Pitchford to New Principals Meeting
Friday, February 13th
College Spirit Wear
Send your tickets down and change your Student of the Week!
******BIRTHDAYS! ****************
Happy birthday to Kelle Pereira TODAY and Nicole Cornibe on the 13th, ! We hope you both have a wonderful birthday!!!
