Dear WMS Families,
We have been working hard to get WMS ready for the school year from preparing the building, ensuring student schedules are accurate, to welcoming new teachers to the WMS community.
As you prepare to send your children back to school, please review the WMS SOARS principles: Success, Ownership, Achievement, Respect and Service with your children, as core values of our WMS school community. We are in the process of bringing the school website up to date, and the 2022-2023 Family Handbook with more information about SOARS and other WMS practices will be posted in the coming days.
Moving forward, I will send family smores on Fridays/Sundays, in preparation for the following week. In next week’s Smore, I will share the most important information for the first day of school, September 6th, 2022.
In the meantime, keep reading your One School One Book.
Respectfully,
Ms. Jennifer Chen Fein
Principal
Watertown Middle School
jennifer.chenfein@watertown.k12.ma.uspronouns: she/her/hers
WMS Schedule Information
Schedules for the Year:
Here are some helpful links to schedule information at WMS for the year.WMS General Google Calendar - add this to your own Google Calendar, we will add dates/events throughout the year
First Day Of School Schedule:
The first day of school can be exciting, intimidating, and fun, all at once! To ensure a smooth transition into the school year, we will have a modified schedule on the first day of school. This will allow students and teachers to start the day together in advisory to build community, set school expectations, and understand their schedule. Then, every class will meet for 44 minutes (instead of 53 in our typical schedule), so that students can meet every teacher and practice traveling to their next class. Specials and PE classes, which alternate days, will have students spend about 20 minutes in each class, starting with the class they have listed first. We will end our day in WIN, which will be the advisory groups from the morning, to check in about how the day went, before dismissal. See below for sample student schedules.
What I Need (WIN):
One final schedule structure I want to share with families is for WIN or “What I Need”. This is a period of the day where students can get support and/or enrichment in a number of classes. We plan to have three phases of WIN this year, with these approximate timelines:
September: Students and teachers are in Advisory groupings to establish a sense of community and learn digital literacy lessons.
October - January: Students have some choice and/or are placed in WIN activities, with a “WIN ⍺” and “WIN β” day which alternate. This gives students and teachers the opportunity to work with two groups of students, every other day. Students will be placed in intervention groups based on i-Ready assessments taken in September. Students may also have services such as Resource, be in one or two performance groups, or extend their thinking with teachers who are not working with students needing intervention or academic support.
February - June: Using mid-year i-Ready assessment data, students will be placed again in a “WIN ⍺” and “WIN β” class, similar to those run in the previous months. This gives an opportunity to be in different WIN groupings throughout the year, while still providing consistency.
