Updates from the Principal

February 2015

Dear Parents/Guardians:

It is hard to believe we are more than halfway through the school year. Our students continue to be eager to learn and they are making fine academic progress!

One of our building goals this year is to use a variety of resources and instructional strategies to increase student performance in the areas of reading fluency, accuracy and comprehension; ultimately strengthening our students’ overall literacy achievement. In order to accomplish this goal, we have established a reading committee that has been involved in planning and facilitating monthly professional development sessions for our staff. As part of our professional development, we have examined research on best practices in reading instruction. We have also been completing an online digital campus course, “Teaching Reading in Small Groups K-6” with Jennifer Serravallo.

During this course study, we have studied how to best to meet our students’ individual needs through small-group instruction. Some of this work has been focused on: learning how to conduct effective individual conferences in order to plan for productive small group instruction, crafting strategy groups based on students’ needs and reflecting on our assessments and practices. Further, we have studied student engagement and the importance of goal-setting and its relationship to motivation in learning.

Our future work will be focused on studying how to couple the power of allowing children to talk about books with purposeful and deliberate instruction through book clubs and partnerships. We will also be studying how to most effectively create and use record-keeping and scheduling systems to manage and incorporate all of our new learning throughout the coursework. We will examine a variety of options for note-taking and record-keeping.

Another one of our building goals this year is to continue developing our Positive Behavior Incentive System to communicate exemplar behavior expectations for all citizens in our school community. During the month of February, we will be focusing on the “E” for Empathy in our T.I.G.E.R.S acronym. Throughout the month, teachers will be working with students to help them to understand how their actions and the actions of others could make someone else feel. This message is reinforced in our school song, “How would I feel if someone did that to me?” Teachers will be using classroom meetings and lessons to help our students value the importance of this character trait. Students continue to “Earn Tiger Stripes” as they are recognized for exhibiting these positive character traits at school. In addition, as classroom positive behavior charts are filled, the class earns a “Stripe” to be posted on the large Tashua Tiger in our lobby on the bulletin board outside of the gym. As we reach our goals, school-wide celebrations occur. So far, our student body has earned a school-wide kickball celebration and a Bingo game.

As we start the second half of the school year, we are looking forward to an engaging and productive remainder of the school year for all the students.

Mrs. Neumeyer,

Principal