McKinley Minute

What an amazing week at McKinley! I am so proud of all of our students! Everyone is working so hard and above all have been kind to everyone! I have seen such good behavior happening everywhere and I couldn't be happier about our first full week! I hope that we can keep up this momentum and make it the best year yet!

Saturday, September 7th: Skipper Passages

September 10th: PTO Meeting 6:00 at Fairport Beach

September 23rd: Picture Day- More information to follow

September 26th: PTO Skating Party at City Skate

Literacy Vision Statement:

All students will grow academically, think critically, and develop a passion for learning.

Literacy Mission:

At McKinley we,

• Use direct, explicit instruction grounded in the Science of Reading to teach ALL students the 5 domains of literacy, plus writing.

• Phonics

• Phonemic Awareness

• Comprehension

• Vocabulary

• Fluency

*Heggerty-Phonemic Awareness

The Heggerty Curriculum is utilized to prepare students to be lifelong learners. Through the use of Heggerty, students learn to hear and manipulate sounds. Students begin to understand how letters and sounds work. With Heggerty, students will learn skills such as counting sounds, categorizing, rhyming, blending, segmenting, and manipulating (adding, deleting, and substituting).

Students in grades K-3 engage in multisensory methods of instructions using Fundations. Fundations is a systematic program derived from research used to teach students their sounds, representative letters and their combinations to form words, phrases, and sentences. Fundations can also be used in differentiated group settings and increased in frequency to serve as an intervention tool as needed for remedial instruction.

*Fundations-Phonics

Students in kindergarten through grade 3 utilize Fundations, which is a multi-sensory, structured language program that focuses on the foundational reading skills of phonemic awareness, phonics/word study, high frequency word study, reading fluency, vocabulary, comprehension strategies, handwriting, and spelling.

Fundations Parent Page

Students in grades 4-5 needing remedial instruction to strengthen their literacy skills engage in Just Words, a program designed to review and build on skills learned in Fundations.

*Just Words- Remedial/ Advanced Phonics

Just Words is an Accelerated Word Study Program to Develop Proficient Readers and Spellers. This highly explicit, multisensory decoding and spelling program is for students in grades 4–12 and adults who have mild to moderate gaps in their decoding and spelling proficiency but do not require intensive intervention.

Mrs. Dubeansky has been teaching for 31 years in the Fairport Harbor District. Teaching Kindergarten has been a highlight for her. She’s married and has three children and a dog. She enjoys coming to work and is excited to see her class! She’s looking forward to a great year!

Hello, I am Miss Cheraso. The new kindergarten teacher! Where I am new to the position, I am not new to Fairport. I had the pleasure of teaching in the preschool the last 7 years. I am engaged & have two littles, Brayden and Savannah, one is in the 3rd grade here. When I’m not teaching, you can find me with my family, reading or shopping!

September is Attendance Awareness Month, a nationwide recognition of the connection between regular school attendance and academic achievement. A student who misses just two to three days of school per month can be chronically absent. Attendance Awareness Month highlights the importance of mobilizing schools, families, and community partners to promote and implement tiered strategies and personalized interventions to reduce chronic absenteeism. When students are not chronically absent, they are far more likely to read at grade level, succeed academically, graduate on time, and be ready for the workforce.

We started our new attendance incentive this week. Everyday a classroom has all of the students present, they get to put a piece of candy in their jar on the office bulletin board. The class with the most candy at the end of the month will win a pizza party. We are also keeping track, and posting attendance by grade level in the office hallway.

Last week, your child came home with the Household Information Survey. Please make sure to fill this out and return to McKinley as soon as possible.