Hello 4th and
5th grade families,
This has been fun! What a crazy couple of months. All of the school cancellations and late starts can make it difficult to find routine, but our staff and students have done their very best to ensure optimal learning opportunities are taken advantage of.
Our teachers continue to grow in the area of literacy instruction and during our February 18th professional learning we continued to learn more regarding best practice in our writing instruction. We embrace explicit, clear instruction in writing. Just as public authors rehearse, draft, revise, and edit their writing, so too our SIS students participate in these essentials of the writing process. In some places that haven't embraced the Teachers College approach, kids are assigned writing and it is corrected, but they are not taught the strategies that proficient writers use. Our state of the art writing instruction spills over into how we teach reading too. Our teachers think about how students' work with any one skill will be different in each grade level. Read-alouds, for example, become a time to mentor our kids in the higher level comprehension skills that they use when reading their own books independently.
This work is difficult and we know parenting can be as well. Please know that we stand with you as your son or daughter continues to grow in all facets of their lives.
