Staff,

Her are some updates for the week:

Course Consistancy:

Now that we have begun to smooth out some of the technological road bumps associated with the launch of so many new systems, we must revisit the basic setups of our classrooms and how they fit into the school as a whole. This is an initiative that encompasses not only our school, but also schools within our netowork, and the district as a whole. It is our goal for our virtual classrooms to have at minimum the features detailed below. This week take some time to look at the formatting and setup of your rooms. Do they have the following components? Over the coming weeks we will work as a staff to develop more uniform classrooms to the benefit of our scholars and their families.

Minimum Course Components:

• Welcome from Teacher

• Daily Schedule

• Information / Announcements for the Week

• Classroom Links (Teams or Zoom)

• Classroom Materials o ELA, Math, Etc.

• Encore Links

Instructional Focus:

Formative Assessment (evidenced in gradebook) & Discourse. Continue to focus on ensuring that you are using formative assessments daily when designing your lessons. This will continue to be a topic of PLCs. Bring formative assessment data to your PLC meetings and be prepared to discuss. This should be more than thumbs up/down. Daily assessments should be quantifiable and in line with a measurable objective.

Discourse continues to be a growth point across the board. Challenge students to explain their thinking. Be aware of how much teacher vs. student talk is taking place.

SST Meetings: SST meetings will occur Wed. Mornings @ 9am. Please use the same process as last year to submit student referrals. If you suspect a student is in need of support, be sure to document the current interventions. Feel free to reach out to anyone on the team for intervention suggestions ahead of the scheduled date for the students case. It's better to get an intervention started as soon as possible rather than wait.

Culture Committee (PBIS/SEL)/ Culture Club: In order to simplify things we have combined the SEL committee and the PBIS committee into the Culture Committee. We have also created a student led club which champions both missions under the banner, "Culture Club" (not to be confused with the band). The lead for the SEL portion of the Committee is Mrs. Torres and the lead for the PBIS portion is Mrs. Beets. Both will meet together regularly. The student portion (Culture Club) will be taking care of things like the morning announcements and leading a variety of initiatives designed to improve overall culture. This could include: anti-bullying, beautification, morning announcements, and anything else that would make Artemus Ward an even better place to be. Let me know if you are interested in participating in the student club or if you have any ideas for it.

Quote:

"Every day begins like a blank chalkboard, upon which each one of us can write the poem of our present and our dreams for the future"

-Ricky Martin

That's it for now. I hope everyone has a relaxing weekend.

-Mr. Myslenski

The NWEA Testing window for both Reading and Math in grades 4-8, as well as Math in grades 1-3, remains open and will go through Friday, October 30th. A follow-up testing session will occur Wednesday, October 21st in the morning. There will be no PD that day but PLC's will be held at 1:30 pm. Sped Ed and ELL teachers are continuing to test during asynch time.

A number of teachers have already reached out to me regarding students that are still missing tests. If you have not already done so, please send me an email with student info and we will follow up with phone calls on behalf of Mr. Myslenski.

The district plan for 3rd grade OST Reading has been revised and I will be reaching out to affected teachers next week.

Aimsweb Benchmarking for grades K-3 will continue this week, with a deadline of Friday, October 30th. We are slowly making progress but much work is still needed in order complete the task.

The District’s Special Education Department has purchased DocuSign to facilitate the collection of electronic signatures on IEPs, ETRs, and supporting documentation. We are getting ready to launch DocuSign over the next week. DocuSign is easy to use and will be a game-changer for us when it comes to document management!

Here is our kickoff timeline. Knowing that many of you have already used DocuSign, we are offering multiple ways for you to learn how to use the tool and how it has been designed specifically for CMSD and Special Education.

On Monday, October 19 or Tuesday, October 20…

Activate your DocuSign account!!!

You will receive an activation email for DocuSign on either Monday or Tuesday. Please look for it and check your Clutter/Junk Mail! It will look something like this:

Artemus Ward Students S.O.A.R.

They are Scholarly, Organized, Accountable, Respectful

PBIS Reminders for Remote Learning:

• Continue to narrate the positive and refer to our school wide expectations of S.O.A.R. Please continue to set the expectations that cameras should be on.
  
  
• Greet every student as they enter the virtual classroom.
  
  
• When acknowledging students that are meeting and exceeding expectations; make sure to include why you are acknowledging them in order to motivate others to do the right thing.
  
  
• In order to increase engagement and keep students on task, make sure they the lesson pace is quick. Include discussion techniques either in the chat box or a Poll Everywhere. There should be some sort of check for understanding every 10 minutes.
  
  

Mrs. Beets

PBIS Sample Matrix

Below is a sample PBIS matrix that can be used to state expectations using the S.O.A.R. language. The committee did meet and make some slight changes. Please make sure you are referring to S.O.A.R in your communication with students.

If you would like a blank template to customize, please email Mrs. Beets.

The link from Facing History is still attached if you would like to visit it for opening and closing routines.

Shout out to Ms. O'Donnell for using the Mentimeter during Morning Meeting. She had the students write 3 adjectives to describe how they are feeling and then they discussed the different emotions as they popped up. Fun activity!

The Engagement Team is continually to work to support you and our students in our remote learning. We are making phone calls and troubleshooting technology issues. Please refer to the link below to submit referral to the Engagement Team. You will get an email update within 24 hours of submitting.

Reminder: We are asking that teachers do not refer families to come to the school when a tech need arises. Please fill out the Support Form on their behalf or you can direct them to call the school. Although the office is open, the expectation is that families make an appointment.

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=5hclDfAM6ESigWCfRKquKdZQvGw4iJ5Pv4qtYiNL429UMjVUNTFQT0lWV0k5MVhDQVJTMFNKMFpIRS4u

NEW! Rebooting Remote Learning Devices – Please advise families, and students to reboot their devices. Due to the restoration of the outage that occurred yesterday this reboot will refresh access into their software platforms (i.e. Teams). Please use these instructions for guidance on restarting student devices.

I am attaching a link to a folder of resources for using the "Connect Transperfect" translation service to communicate with our families. The expectation is that you use this service to communicate with any family that needs it. I had an opportunity to use it this week and it is extremely user friendly and effective. To use it Dail the Connect #, Enter the code provided on instruction doc., Enter the PIN provided (5244), and select the language using the provided codes. The link below will connect you to all the resources you need to utilize the service.

TRANSLATION SERVICES CLICK HERE