Thank you everyone that is helping out with reading month. Just a reminder of some of the things we are doing to help encourage students to learn to love reading. If I am missing anything at all please let me know as I am going to be emailing parents sometime next week.
-Every student gets a free book from the school
-I Love Reading month kickoff assembly February 5th
-Every teacher has a poster up letting students know what they are reading (the reading posters you already have up in your room)
-I Love Reading Bingo in class
-Teachers dressing up as book characters on February 19th and reading to students
-I will be coming around on February 22nd to read The Dot to each class
-Students dressing up as their favorite book characters on February 22nd
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| Collaborating and talking The Book Whisperer |
I know at the staff meeting I said we were getting rid of Six Flags. A few notes on that:
-I am so thankful we have a culture where you can openly question my decisions, I hope we never lose that. I am wrong plenty of times so always feel free to speak up.
-In your own classroom I highly encourage you to not incentivize reading. Here is just one article talking about that and why I feel that way A Closer Look at Reading Incentives Programs- Alfie Kohn
-Yes quite a few of you joked why I cared so much about Six Flags tickets, and I know I am not making that better by typing this all up right now :) I get there are much more important things to talk about. But by now I hope you know that I do want us to have a culture of questioning what we do, and never just doing things because that is the way it has always been done. A good example of that is the reading pins. It has been done every year since when this school first started. Now we spend that money on actually buying kids books and I think we all agree that is a much better use of money. I also want there to be purpose in everything we do. Six Flags tickets does nothing to actually help kids learn to love to read and honestly most of the time parents just feel out the form last minute.
So with all that being said yes we will still have Six Flags tickets because families (and staff too) love the free tickets. When we talk about I Love Reading Month I don't want to emphasis Six Flags. As long as we are focusing on the other things at our school to help students love reading and not the incentive I can live with that.
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| Tracy did an awesome job adding some life and color to the conference room. |
Book Whisperer
It was awesome to hear the discussion going on during the staff meeting and I am looking forward to hearing more at our next staff meeting. I love the fact we are having great discussions around reading and how we can get students to love reading. A reminder that Chapters 3 and 4 need to be read by the next staff meeting on 2/10 as well as filling out the 4 A's for your Chapter.
You don't need to do anything with this but here is where you can access all the protocols if you need for your own class: Book Whisperer Doc
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| 5th grade cell project |
Report Cards
There were questions about when report cards go home. They will go home on March 11th.
A Look at the Week Ahead
2/1 Casino Night tickets go on sale
2/2 SST Day in the morning
2/3 PTC Meeting
2/4 TK, Kinder and Incoming student information night 6pm.
2/5 Reading month assembly 1:30-1:50. Staff Happy Hour is on the calendar for 2/4 but because of information night and musical practice we are moving it to Friday. I know Fridays are hard but if you can make it, I'm buying. 3:30, place TBD.
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| 1st grade Science Lab |
Tech Tip of the Week
I probably won't do this every week but if I come across some easy tech tools I might share them here. There is an app called ChatterPix Kids that is free. Basically you can take a picture of anything and draw a line where you want to make a mouth and then give that object a voice. In the classroom I could see teachers using it to have students take a picture of a character and have that book character speak. Here is an example Ella made:
Interesting Articles I Read
A Closer Look at Reading Incentives Programs- Alfie Kohn
25 Things Successful Teachers do Differently- Teach Thought
The 4 Essentials of a Successful Genius Hour- E School News
Why Americans Should Not be Coming Up With Their Own Solutions to Teacher Training Issues- Heching Report
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