STEAMing with JSA

MM 2/27/17 Greetings staff, as we embark upon the first leg of our FSA journey with writing transpiring tomorrow. Please exhale and take a deep breath. Please go through and review your strategies and focus on small group discussions with feedback based upon the rubric. The students have prepared themselves for this moment and it is now time for them to shine. Do your best to not create an atmosphere of pressure as it pertains to FSA testing. Students pick up on adult tension and it transfers to the young ones and may have a negative outcome. I am thankful for the wonderful job I have viewed going on in all of the classrooms throughout the year. Now is the time to display a portion of the instruction that has gone on within our JSA classrooms. ELEMENTARY FSA FOCUS STICKY STANDARDS Needing Closer Look:   3 rd   is introducing  RI.1.3:  how historical events, scientific ideas, or technical procedures develop and interact. The 3 rd  standard specifi...

Michael's Memo 2/20/17 Good Evening staff I would like to start off by thanking my administrative team and everyone that assisted with Silent Lunch Duty on Thursday. It was a tremendous success and it goes a long way with establishing the expectations of student behavior within our school setting. I know that we are upon our first assessment and it is just days away. Please remain steadfast and focused upon your standards based instruction within your classrooms utilizing rubric based work as frequently as possible. Secondly, I would like to thank Mrs. Huyhn and NJHS for an excellent dance on Friday for our students and staff members. The students enjoyed the festivities and we actually had students dancing at the middle school dance, with the OPPOSITE sex, APPROPRIATELY :). We have spoken of setting goals for our students with written goals, however this Ted Talks is showing that a great way to motivate change in humans is to utilize a picture to draw your goal. Think about ...

MICHAEL'S MEMO 2/13/17 Good morningI would like to provide some data on discipline for our school breaking it down by at risk as identified in our EWS (Early Warning System) on IDEAS that tracks the information of student absences, discipline, grades, attendance, and test data. We will start to provide you with information on these areas to assist in creating interventions for our students and to work together to make sure we are doing our very best to work collaboratively to ensure that our data is accurate. Attendance Data 83 Students with 10 or more absences Tier III 112 Students with 9 - 6 absences Tier II 282 Students with 5 - 2 absences Tier I Disciplinary Data 7 Students on Tier III 6 or more referrals 15 on Tier II 4 or more referrals 94 Tier I with 3-1 referrals. Highlight 4 The Week I would like to say THANK YOU, to our Wonderful Guidance Department for putting on a magnificent college and career readiness week that culminated in an an excelle...

MICHAEL'S MEMO 2/6/17 I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. If you decided to enjoy Pigfest, Super Bowl, family, outdoor activities, or quiet time at home or away. I would like for everyone going into the week to focus on the quality of assessments that we are providing for our students. We are entering into the FSA season within 22 days. Ask yourself the question of each activity, is this meeting the rigor of the standards, also am I assessing the standard correctly. Proper assessment, leads to proper adjustments in teaching, which ultimately leads to proper learning within your classroom. Feedback to the students are extremely useful in building up their knowledge in each of the areas. Administration will focus on feedback by conducting Rigor Walks together with various grade levels. (Focus on feedback practices to improve instruction). Walk Through Highlight  I would like to highlight the learning going on in Mr. Van Drutens' classroom. Our new instructor ha...