So I did my annual shift at Santaland this evening playing the big guy in the red suit. It was a fairly typical run for the couple hours I sat in the chair, except for one family….This family placed 12-day old infant in my arms and I think my heart stopped for a few seconds. This five-pound scrunched up bunch of skin and tissue had a pair of eyes in her face that would turn anyone into putty. It quickly brought me back to a time when my own children were that small. What made the scene even cuter was her five-year old sister looking down at her with me with nothing but pure pride and happiness in her eyes. I know this description does not do it justice, but it was just such a humbling and joyful experience I wanted to try and share.
Design Process Update
On Thursday Kevin Gehrig, Ned Meyers (Pine Ridge Elementary), Dana Pederson, and Gina DeLasantos (Ensworth) will be visiting our campus for a couple hours in the afternoon. All the schools are organized into trios to work together on supporting design process at each of the schools. Earlier this week we visited Ensworth and next week is our turn. I will be asking them to interview some of you if they can catch any of you for a few free minutes. This is not meant to be a “gotcha” so please do not worry about the questions or your answers. In general, I have done my best to make the school design work fit the work we already do. Although we have three main areas, it’s safe to say the majority of our energy this year has been poured into the Future Ready Team for the All School Storyline, The Shoshone Visit, and the International Storyline Conference. While we may not have ready-made student-outcomes to measure from this work, I feel (and I think you will agree) that Storyline provides incredible opportunities for our students to learn and grow with the 21st century skills of communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. Given this assumption, more work placed in the area of Storyline will provide more opportunities for these skills to be developed.
To simplify the intentions around the Academic Excellence team goals, I would say that we want to provide some protected, team time to focus on math lesson development. We struggle to find that time and it will never be enough, but we do have to prioritize.
Our Thriving Citizen Team focuses the efforts providing a safe, fun and engaged environment for all students. Our PBIS work makes up the bulk of this work.
Staff Meeting on Tuesday
For our staff meeting this week, we have a quick presentation for the United Way Giving campaign and the rest of the time will be set aside for work with your All School Storyline Science groups. Ideally we should have another half hour to collaborate on that work. It’s not much, but every little bit counts – right?
Assembly Plan
The December Assembly Plan is under development and it will be shorter than the last assembly.
Snow Recess
We are going to approach our Snow Play differently this year. We would like to embrace the snow when it comes and enjoy the experience whenever possible. This means there will be times when we allow students to play on the snow berms. This will create some ambiguity as we will need to adjust where and how students can play in and on the snow as conditions change, but it just doesn’t feel right to constantly tell them to get off the snow. Snowball fights will still not be permitted. More on this later, but I just wanted to provide a heads up.
Heads up: the week of 12/18-12/22 will be a Spirit Week;
- Monday – Crazy Sock Day
- Tuesday – Superhero Day
- Wednesday – Crazy Hair Day
- Thursday – Ugly Sweater Day
- Friday – Pajama Day
Only from the mouths of our kinders: “Are the cookies GMO?” Thanks Deanna, for sharing that one!
Please take a moment to glance at the calendar.