SEL/Culture of Care: All six SEL menus are now available here! I have started working with different grade levels on what kind of additional SEL support they would like. Please reach out if you are looking for something specific, I am more than willing to help!! Your culture of care tip of the week is to lead with empathy and curiosity. We all know that everyone is handling this stress and trauma differently. Leading with empathy and curiosity can help us understand what is truly going on with our students and families. I know some of you have heard me talking about the show, Ted Lasso. Here is a great clip about being curious not judgmental. It’s a bit of a spoiler alert but nothing too major :).Thank you again for caring so deeply about our students. Your hard work is not going unnoticed. Oh and keep those shout outs coming!!!!! I hope you have a fun and SPOOKY weekend!!!
Welcome and Thank you: Welcome to Zack Schulze! Zack will be starting here at Highland as our new Building Engineer on Monday. I look forward to meeting him and introducing him to all of you. I also want you to join me in sending Tim a huge thank you for his hard work during this interim with Brad out. This was not an easy year to be thrown into that position and I am incredibly grateful to him for looking after all of you and the school. Tim will return to his night shift on Monday, so we still get to keep him around!
Meetings Next Week:
- Tuesday – Master Schedule team 2:45-3:30
- Wednesday – Culture of Care Team 2:45-3:30
- Thursday – Staff Meeting 2:45-3:30
- Friday – Safety Team Meeting 2:45-3:30
Transition Week K-3 – I think this could be as early as November 9th but we will have to wait until Monday or Tuesday to know for sure. Half of cohort A will be here on Monday, half of cohort B on Tuesday. Wednesday is Veterans Day. The other half of cohort A on Thursday and the other half of cohort B on Friday. This transition week will give us an opportunity to get our students oriented to our different routines and procedures. Our priority is to first, connect with student, second, teach them the new routine, and third, start providing some academics.
Hybrid Week – Again, the vagueness of the announcement today is really challenging, but I think there is a small possibility this could be as early as November 16th. We will continue to connect with our kids, teach & reinforce a safe and supportive environment and slowly but surely start to turn up the volume on academics.
Reminders on Safety Team and Checklist
The information most pertinent and useful to you from this checklist and our meetings has been provided in my updates as early as September 23rd. Please remember it is your professional responsibility to keep up to speed with these.
- Our safety team is Me, Angleina, Becky E, Amber, Marina, Scott, Shawna, Jay and Asha. Please see any of them for questions about meetings.
- Our meeting notes are posted in the staff room on the bulletin board and linked here. This is a running record.
- Our Safety COVID-19 Checklists are published on the district website linked here: INDIVIDUAL SCHOOL SAFETY COVID-19 CHECKLISTS
Here is this week’s update from TLC.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1orEJbbFRka5SvGrs2wWHZu6iJEf4bNTWfICoTw2YcYM/edit?usp=sharing
Virtual Break Space – From Lorna
Sending out a new Virtual Break Space the Behavior Coaches created for BLP teachers!
This utilizes The Zones and Neurologic Curriculum along with Regulation Tools to help students get back into the Green Zone. Please share freely with your building staff.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zp8Pu06LODW-d1lWwddrX13TTMB5YCNFbLglkkqSWaU/edit
 | START HERE! Bend – La Pine Virtual Break SpaceWelcome to the Bend – La Pine Virtual Break Space! Trying to find ways to integrate regulation tools and a calming space into your classroom? Follow these simple steps to launch a Virtual Break Space designed for your K-5 classroom. STEP 1: Introduce the Virtual Break Space to your stude…docs.google.com |
Tech
Important Webex update. Please read more information in this blog post. It outlines the locked-mute-all feature and more.
Looking for ways to bring more art into your students’ lives? Here’s a site filled with simple drawing tutorials – animals, seasonal ideas, and more. Drawing and creating art with your students can be a fun way to build connections and laugh together. This link takes you directly to some fall/Halloween drawing tutorials. There are several ways to encourage students to share their finished artwork with classmates, digitally. K-2 students can share a photo of their art in Seesaw. 3-5 students could share their art with classmates using apps like Padlet or Flipgrid. 3-5 students could also share their art on their Google Classroom Stream, in a shared Google Slideshow, Google Doc, etc.
With October 31st on the horizon, many of us are thinking about candy, costumes, and spooky things. Want to know one of our fears?… It’s not providing you with timely answers and support. If you email your tech coach during the school week and you don’t receive a reply within a day, please reach out again. While we try to stay on top of our schools’ questions and needs, occasionally our inboxes get slammed and emails can be accidentally overlooked.
The Article linked here is really important and quick read; Please stop expecting normal
The Best Mindset for Addressing Students’ Unfinished Learning
In this article in Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12, Cathy Martin (Denver Public Schools) says many students have entered the 2020-21 school year with “unfinished learning” from interrupted instruction in the spring – “prerequisite skills and concepts that are essential for student engagement in grade-level content that students do not have yet.”
Some parts of in the previous year’s curriculum are more important to success this year than others. Martin believes the best mindset for addressing the 2020-21 school year is not remediation but accelerating unfinished learning. There’s a key difference between the two, she says: “Remediation is based on a mistaken belief that students need to master everything they missed before they are able to engage in grade-level content. Thus, remediation focuses on students’ learning gaps from a deficit-based mindset and then drills students on isolated skills and topics that have little connection with current grade-level content.” This backwards-looking approach results in deceleration and widening achievement gaps.
Acceleration, by contrast, “prepares students for success in the present – this week on this content,” addressing incomplete understanding in the context of the current grade’s standards and treating students with an asset-based mindset. The two key steps: first, selecting “just in time” skills and concepts relevant to current units, with clear connections between the previous year’s curriculum and 2020-21 content and skills. Second, giving informal, teacher-created just-in-time assessment tasks that tell how far instruction has to “back up” to fill in gaps in skills and knowledge. Then teachers can launch instruction that catches students up and prepares them for successful grade-level work.
“Accelerating Unfinished Learning” by Cathy Martin in Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12, October 2020 (Vol. 113, #10, pp. 774-76); Martin is at [email protected].
