Week at a Glance

Our first 5 day week with students is in the books! Wow, nothing compares to the first week(s) of school. It is an exciting and fun time that can be physically and emotionally draining. We experience the joy of seeing students and the excitement of the new school year, yet must also navigate (both the good and the bad) of new schedules and new routines. The things that are out of our control can present some of the greatest challenges- late buses, snow (when you begin a school year in January), the need to have inside recess the first week of school, and this year, experiencing the realities of the student physical distancing guidelines we must follow and how it impacts us. It can be a test of patience. Thank you for all your hard work, being flexible, and giving others grace.

The number of substitutes available this year is extremely limited. If you know of a date in the future you will need to be gone, please arrange for your sub ASAP.

The February PTO Meeting is on Thursday, February 4th via Zoom. Thank you for sending me your grade level report of what students in your grade are learning in reading, math, and writing by Wednesday at 4:00. Feel free to keep it brief and I will share at the meeting on Thursday.

Communicating with each other. Thank you for continuing to be thoughtful in your communication and considerate of the volume of email that lands daily in others mailboxes. Below are some key ideas to keep in mind:

• If you have a question and you don’t know where to direct it, send it to Lybe or I rather than sending it out into the email stratosphere (ie. sending it to all Lava Ridge Staff)
• If you receive an email from a colleague and you have a question, clarification, disagreement, etc. Please DO NOT “REPLY ALL.” Reply only to the sender.
• If you are sending a long email with anything but information (emotion, arguments, etc.) delete the email. Then make the time to discuss the issues you addressed in the email in person.

We are getting closer to Valentine’s Day! This year Valentine cards should follow the same safe handling rules as we do for other materials. As you work on plans, encourage students to bring their Valentines to school and distribute them to individual boxes by Tuesday, 2/9.  Valentine’s boxes can then sit until Friday, February 12th, when students can open them at Valentine parties.
•Any candies brought need to be sealed airtight – i.e., foil-wrapped Hershey Kisses are not airtight.
•If students bring their Valentine cards with less than 72 hours to sit, their cards can be laid out on a table and misted with the electrostatic machines.

AM Duty Schedule for February 1-12th

Thank you for all of your efforts assisting students in locating their classrooms in the morning this week. We are anticipating this need to continue as we welcome back 4th and 5th graders next week and our younger students continue to learn their way around campus.

The inclement weather guidelines for staff can be located here. With Lava Ridge K-3 students all-in and 4th-5th grade beginning hybrid, the information in the section about CDL does not apply to our staff.

Lexia and Dreambox will continue to be part of the elementary core curriculum for the remainder of the year. Next week, the Teaching and Learning weekly update will have ideas for how to incorporate this into daily schedules.

A reminder that we will have an all staff School Improvement Wednesday activity at 10:00 on Wednesday. This meeting will be in the Media Center and can also be accessed via my Webex room.

This week we were able to hire an additional kindergarten teacher to help alleviate the class sizes that have been growing in kindergarten since the announcement of the return to in-person instruction. Hannah Johnson has been selected for this position and started today. Welcome back Hannah!

If you were in the building Friday you heard the bells ringing again! Here’s what you can anticipate next week: First Morning Bell: 8:25am; Second Morning Bell: 8:30am; Dismissal Bell at 3:00 (M, T, Th, F); Dismissal Bell at 1:30 on Wednesday. Note: K-2 teachers: There will not be a bell to dismiss your students 5 minutes early.

As part of the Bend-La Pine Schools Excellence in Equity work all families are being invited to complete a survey provided by the non-profit, Youth Truth. Lava Ridge families will receive a link to this survey late today and have until January 22nd to complete. Here is information about the survey.

Below are details for Specials next week:

K-3 – Jan. 19 -22  *Special orientation schedule for students coming to the building.   
*Students only get that one PE/Music in person that week *No WebEx or asynchronous music/PE lessons for the students at home  *Transition to the K-3 all in K-3 schedule on Jan. 25
4-5 – Jan. 19-22  *WebEx at normal 9:00 time  4-5 – Jan. 25-29 *Students in the building for their orientation day will come to PE/Music at their assigned time, all students at home will have asynchronous music/PE lessons posted on Google Classroom because we will be teaching K-3 all day.

Welcome to Sara Blanchard! Sara will be learning all about teaching and learning with Amanda Gylling for the remainder of the school year.

With in-person instruction starting Tuesday, January 19th this will also be the first day with all staff working on site. Our building work hours will be from 8:00-4:00; Office hours will also be from 8:00-4:00 for the remainder of the school year.

A repost of the report card information shared in December can be located here: TLC Update.

We will have a full Staff Meeting on Wednesday at 1:30. This will be in the Media Center and can also be accessed via my Webex room.

Here is a direct link to the Return to In-Person Instructional Plan

If you haven’t yet watched the bus evacuation video with your students please do this during a morning meeting next week. Thank you! Here again is the link.

Hybrid Informational Meeting Q & A for 4-5th hybrid instruction: Wednesday the 13th at 2:30pm in Lindsley Gehrig’s Webex room and Friday the 15th at 2:30pm in Lindsley Gehrig’s Webex room. https://bls.webex.com/meet/lindsley.gehrig

Answers from the 12/16 Wacky Wedesday question of what you discovered, learned, or will take with you as a positive from the past 12 months?

Our January Staff Meeting will be on Wednesday, January, 13th 2021 @ 1:30.

Thank you for being so careful and thoughtful of others and following the Bend-La Pine COVID health guidelines and not coming to school (even after hours or on weekends) if you are experiencing any high risk COVID related symptoms. You can find a link here to the information Michelle shared with us prior to Thanksgiving for more details. Please reach out to Nurse Michelle with any symptom questions you may have and let any of the office staff know if we can help locate materials from your classroom or area in the event you need to stay home.

Report card details can be located in the TLC Update.

From Kerry Morton…Math Book Club! – Are you interested in earning 2 graduate credits while you learn more about Strengths-Based Teaching and Learning?  Well, this is the book club for you!  It will start January 14th and end June 10th. Here is the syllabus. We will have two meetings over WebEx. The remainder of the assignments will be asynchronous in Canvas. Watch for more information about how to register on Performance Matters next week.

Limited In Person Instruction (LIPI) is going well. We are continuing to focus on serving students who are not able to or are not participating in CDL and have been adding students as needs arise and staff are available. If you have a student in your classroom that is not able to participate in CDL and you would like to host them in your classroom from 8:30-10:30 please let Lybe or I know.

Thank you for your time communicating the importance of Lexia to students and families. This is our main source of literacy data for this year and is an incredibly useful tool for providing feedback to move our students’ reading progress forward. Below are some ideas from TLC for encouraging Lexia usage:

Ideas for encouraging Lexia usage:

• Instead of focusing on time on Lexia, focus on units completed. The general rule is that students complete about 2 units for every 10 minutes. So a goal might be: My goal is to complete 4 units each day.
• Acknowledging students who have met usage in your live meetings
• Put students in breakout rooms to do Lexia and drop into each group to give feedback
• If you meet usage you can choose one assignment to not do
• Certificates 

Below are the favorite Disney characters of our staff. Some received multiple votes and the number of additional votes is listed in parentheses.

• Goofy (4)
• Minnie Mouse (3)
• Mulan  (2)
• Mickey Mouse (2)
• Tigger (2)
• Beauty and the Beast
• The Genie
• Cinderella
• Buzz Lightyear
• Ariel
• Olaf    
• Dory from Finding Nemo
• Dr. Stephen Strange
• Merida
• O’Malley the Alley Cat from The Aristocats
• Moana

Here again is the link to the emergency bus evacuation procedures video. Thank you for watching with your students by December 17th.

An update should be coming soon from the District team that has been working on the report card version we will send home in February. I will keep you posted as I receive more information.

The December PTO meeting is at 4:00 on Thursday.  I am planning again to share grade level reports at the meeting. Please send me brief details by Thursday at 9:00 of what students at your grade level are learning and I will share for all with the PTO. 

It has been a wild enrollment ride this school year and we are anticipating the seas to continue to be choppy! Thank you for your help encouraging families to contact Amber if they are planning to make any changes to their enrollment status (moving to Bend Online, moving out of state, etc). This helps us to keep Synergy up to date and provide consistent answers to the wide variety of school enrollment questions that have surfaced during the pandemic.

Our December Staff Meeting will be on Wednesday, December 2nd at 1:30 via Webex in my room.

You rock! Below are the artists and bands you would most like to see perform together at Les Schwab Amphitheater.

The Safety Team met on Tuesday, here are the notes

Some technological gremlins impacted the PBIS Responsibility Video we had planned to send out last week. With only one week until Thanksgiving break we have decided to wait to send it until the first week of December and are still planning to share it with families via the weekly family email.

Wednesday is our Lexia Core 5 SIW activity. For this training we will be meeting in two groups, K-3rd and 4th-5th beginning at 1:30. The training will last 60-90 minutes. We will send out the Webex links for the trainings early next week.

Who from history would the Lava Ridge Staff like to have dinner with?

Thank you for letting me know in advance if you are not able to lead the 2+ hour teacher-facilitated learning blocks or other regular instructional groups you may have on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. This is helpful in fielding questions from families and others connected with our classes.

A reminder of our Lexia live online professional learning on Nov.18, from 1:30pm-3:00pm. We will access this via Webex and will send out a link early the week of the training.

Teachers/staff getting charged overages on their home internet? Bend Broadband’s parent company, TDS is willing to credit back any overage charges for BLP teachers as long as they email TDS from their school email address. Any teacher that’s been impacted should send an email to [email protected], from their school email address with their name and account number, requesting credit for their “data usage allowance overage charge.

From Julie Walker….Hybrid Planning and Support We know hybrid is heavy on teachers’ minds as we continue on this uncharted journey.  We don’t have all of the answers for what it will look like but would love to support you as you start to think about what instruction might look like.  We are offering some drop-in sessions next week.  Please join us. The schedule will be:

-Monday, 11/9 @ 1:15 PM: How Do I Plan Instruction for Hybrid: Questions & Answers Join us in Lindsley’s Webex room (bls.webex.com/meet/lindsley.gehrig )

-Tuesday, 11/10 @ 1:15 PM: How Do I Plan Instruction for Hybrid: Questions & Answers Join us in Lindsley’s Webex room (bls.webex.com/meet/lindsley.gehrig)

-Thursday, 11/12 @ 1:15 PM: Tech and Math Join us in Kerry’s Webex room (bls.webex.com/meet/kerry.morton)

From Nutrition Services – We will be offering meals over the holiday breaks. They will include breakfast, lunch and supper grab ‘n’ go from 12pm-1pm on the following days:

USDA has extended the waivers for summer meals until June 30, 2021. The waivers will allow us to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to kids 18 and under for the rest of the 20-21 school year

Here is a list of books recommended by our staff for others. Enjoy!