ALMOST THERE!!!!
SEL Concerns Ticket Please use this if you have concerns with a student’s lagging SEL skills and you would like to do some collaboration with us (Heidi T. and/or Brian) to problem solve. Thanks!
FYI Ticket Please use this if you have an incident or recurring incidents with a student. This helps us with follow through, communication and data. Thank you!!!!!
Mileage Club – This starts back up on Thursday March 31st. Parents must be approved volunteers and sign in for their time slot. Yahoo for running!!!
OSAS Math, ELA, Science State Testing – It’s time to exercise those standardized testing muscles again. I will send a separate email to our 2-5th grade teachers with a link to a shared drive with our training materials during the week after spring break. Just as in the past there are several modules required for all staff administering or monitoring the testing environments. I will provide a couple opportunities for Q&A after the modules are completed. Testing will look much more like pre-pandemic times. Our Highland primary testing window will be May 16th through May 27th. The district testing window closes on Jun 3, 2022. Do not stress about this, but just start wrapping your head around this process. It’s also important to remember that the Opt-Out form is communicated at the district and school level, NOT the classroom level.
Wireless Access Point Upgrade – Over spring break our IT department will be switching out our wireless access points around the entire campus. If you plan to come in and work over the spring break [something I highly discourage, as you deserve the time off] then try to avoid Wednesday [possibly Thursday too] as there will be no access to the network and there will be people moving around the building to replace all the devices.
School-Sponsored Events – Skip shared our mitigation process for elementary school-sponsored events and although it’s still a work in progress I feel confident moving forward with some of our events.
- Calendared:
- 1st grade parent painting night – Wednesday, March 30
- Kinder parent painting night – Thursday, March 31
- TBD:
- Culminations
- Variety Show
- 5th Grade Promotion
- PTO-sponsored spring carnival
- ????
Volunteers – We have quite a few volunteers in our system already and I suspect more on the way. We will work to provide updates every Wednesday in the sheet Ashley shared with you but you can always ask us to look somebody up. We will be able to use volunteers for mileage club so long as they are cleared and we will be able to use volunteers for Field Day as well.
Info from Heidi and the Highland Culture of Care Team: Our character trait for the month of March is Empathy. This falls under the SEL competency of social awareness. Here is a link to some resources: Empathy The the questions and topic starters from Jennifer Hauth are also a great resource as we all practice empathy around masking choices.
Culmination Planning: Please use this link to input information regarding your culmination plans. We hope to also put a Variety Show and maybe even a PTO-sponsored spring carnival, so getting our calendar squared away soon will be incredibly helpful.
SEL Lessons: Reminder, I (Heidi) am ALWAYS happy to come in and teach what I call an anchor SEL lesson! I also love helping teachers brainstorm ways to integrate SEL into their day. I have a lot of resources to share with you, just let me know what you need. This is the time of year when we start to see behaviors showing up more frequently and at higher rates. Class meetings, restorative circles and targeted lessons are just a few ways we can help mitigate them.
Parent Newsletter Link – linked here is the parent newsletter. If you ever need to find it, it’s always on the school website each Friday.
High Leverage Teaching Strategies
From Dave VanLoo – Very soon, we anticipate having i-Ready Diagnostic Assessment in place as a replacement for SAT-10, which we have used as an academic assessment as part of the TAG eligibility process. I-Ready should provide a better experience than SAT-10 for staff and students. The hope is to have it available when students return from spring break. This is not 100% finalized, but we are close enough that it is worth getting this on schools’ radar. Here is a quick summary.
Benefits of i-Ready Diagnostic Assessment for TAG
- Group administered and works on iPad (SAT-10 only works on computers)
- 2-hours or less total to complete reading and math assessment
- Clever integration to manage students (SAT-10 requires schools to manage students manually)
- Adaptive test (SAT-10 is fixed form)
- Because it is designed to be used 3x/year, retesting is free and easy when needed
- Newer and more frequently updated norms than SAT-10
- Strong technical characteristics (reliability and validity)
- Math assessment is available in Spanish (SAT-10 is only English)
- Available for 3rd grade or younger if needed (SAT-10 can first be administered in spring of 3rd grade)
We are planning to have schools use i-Ready this spring with a small number of students, in part to help make up for missed opportunities in state testing over the past two years. Recall that in 2020 no OSAS tests were given. In 2021, 3rd graders only took ELA, while 4th graders only took Math. The plan is to provide schools with a list of current 4th and 5th grade students who scored very high on OSAS last year, and have those students take both the Reading and Math i-Ready assessments. Schools are welcome to include other potential TAG-eligible students in this testing as well. To provide a bit more context, here is an estimate, by school, of the number of 3rd and 4th grade students who scored at the 90th percentile on OSAS last spring. Please be aware that we may use a higher standard than the 90th percentile, which would decrease the number of students taking the i-Ready assessment.
Week Preview:
- Monday 3/28
- Tuesday 3/29
- Culture of Care Team 2:30-3:15
- Wednesday 3/30
- Staff Meeting 1:15-1:45
- SIW – Storyline Team 1:45-3:15
- Thursday 3/31
- Friday 4/1