NOVEMBER Family Newsletter

November is one of the most amazing months of the year. It's a time to honor and celebrate gratitude and the beauty of change. In Second grade, our scholars are learning that change is okay and it's even more special to change with friends.This is a season focused on family, caring and gratitude. I am happy to report that we have so much to be grateful for in our school:

• Last year, we applied and won the LEAPS grant which will bring additional after school support to 50 scholars for the next 3-5 years
  
• Year 2 of the CREATE grant which provides resources for the arts for scholars in grades 3K + PK
• An Increase in enrollment of over 50 new scholars and families
• Overall attendance of 90%, it's cool to come to school!
• Teacher development coaching in Math + ELA for Eureka Math squared and Wit and Wisdom
• A strong start in strategic small groups in response to iReady and Acadience data

I am also grateful for our staff, they show up for our scholars and try their hardest to ensure that our scholars are learning and growing. At the core of my gratitude, there is you - our mighty group of supportive family members. I thank you for all that you do to help us cultivate an authentic home place of learning and care for our children and staff through your constant communication, feedback, patience, and support. We truly value your input.

Most importantly, I am grateful for the love of our scholars! Their bright and beautiful smiles really make everything worth it! Thank you for trusting us with your most valuable posessions. Our scholars show up daily as their authentic selves, eager to start anew no matter what the day before held, and they are relentless in their pursuit of learning. It is our students that remind us of resilience. It is our students who challenge us adults to do and be better.

I look ahead to this new month with excitement as we push upwards and onwards together, and as we see even more progress in our students' academic learning and social-emotional growth. We look forward to partnering with you during family conferences this month and community feast! We appreciate you!

With deep gratitude,

Mrs. Cierra Williams

-Proud Principal

CRobinson57@schools.nyc.gov

929-202-3293

i-Ready Personalized Instruction Guidance for Families

As a school community, we've completed our beginning of year ELA and Math diagnostics through iReady. iReady isa web-based program that helps teachers personalize instruction for students in grades K–8 in reading and math.

Please click on the link below to support your scholar using i-Ready. At home you can access guidance for using i-Ready including login and technical support. Learn how you can support your student with i-Ready.

curriculumassociates.com

Acronyms are a great way to help students remember important steps and strategies during instruction. Two of our school wide learning strategies and favorites are the RACE and CUBES. The RACE strategy helps students remember the steps to write an awesome reading response and the CUBES problem solving strategy helps students slow down when solving math word problems!

RACE Strategy Set

This Race Strategy Set can be used at home while scholars are practicing and doing their homework to help your students learn the steps to achieve a perfect score on their short response! It includes the resources you need to help them learn, practice, and reinforce the steps of RACE.

CUBES Strategy Set

This problem solving strategy helps our scholars slow down and really think about the problem. This strategy should also be used at home to support your scholars with solving their math problems accurately and helps them check their work.

Our school-wide attendance goal is 90%! DAILY! You can help us continue maintaining a strong scholar attendance by continuing to make sure that your scholar(s) arrive on time, every day and communicating with our attendance team for excused absences. Thank you for supporting our increased efforts for timeliness, so we can maximize learning time. Scholars with perfect attendance for the month of November will receive a SPECIAL CELEBRATION!

We want to make sure that you are fully connected to us. Please make sure that the main office and your scholars classroom teacher has the correct email and most updated phone numbers for you. It's crucial that you receive all the texts and memos throughout the school year. For some of you, it may be that your email settings block our messages and for others, it may be that we do not have accurate information. If your phone number changes, please call the main office 929-397-9566 so that we can send home a blue card to be updated of any new information.