Weekly Update - Friday, November 15, 2019

Good morning! Happy Friday!
Thank you for the extra hours this week with Family-Teacher Conferences.  It's great to have families in the building!  

Labels:
I saw this on Facebook this week and loved it.  It also reminded me of the power of labels - "low kids", "Special Ed kids", "bad kids".  Your words become your beliefs and actions.  What words are you using?  Believing?  Acting on?  

American Education Week:

Next week is American Education Week -  a week for us to celebrate all the people who educate our students.  As I have said in the past, we are all educators - we have a role in the education and development of our McKinley students.  Below is a link to some special events for next week's American Education Week!  

Click here to access the events next week

Mindful Art - Guest Bloggers Amanda Gislason & Annette Warner:

Mindful Art group uses the creative process involved in making art to:

• Increase self-awareness
• Help students relieve stress and anxiety
• Help students explore choices
• Help students develop social skills
• Help students process traumatic experiences

Benefits of Mindful Art:

Mindful Art provides a visual and verbal approach to access and address student’s unique emotional needs.  Mindful art gives students a means of externalizing the complexities of their emotional pain. It allows students to express themselves in ways that are less threatening that verbal communication.  

Students who benefit from Mindful Art:

We have found great success using mindful art for students whose emotional instability impacts their education.  For example, students exhibiting symptoms of depression, anxiety, grief/loss and/or PTSD/traumatic experiences.  

Following are statements/comments from students who have participated in mindful art. What I like about Mindful Art:

• We can put on music and be calm
• Gives me time to meet others that are sort of like me
• I loved the dolls we made (worry dolls)
• That I can relax in so many different ways
• It is calming
• It gave me other things to do when I am mad at other people and things
• It helped me with my family deaths
• By talking with others I got a chance to try new strategies
• It helped me feel more confident
• “I am a very closed in person.  I don’t talk to people about my feelings but when I joined I wanted to talk and so it helped me”

MSU Placements:

As you may know, Owatonna is a partner district with MSU-Mankato... this gives us an opportunity to provide field experience hours and full-time student teaching placements. Your partnership and expertise is critical in helping develop our future colleagues! If you are interested in hosting a beginning teacher in your classroom in some way, please share your information using this form: Cooperating Teacher Interest.

*Completion of this form does not guarantee nor require acceptance of candidate placement, it simply is to gather an interest bank. Final placements are at the discretion of the University and District Administrators.

Contact Katie Coudron or Jane Sorensen (TOSAs with MSU-Mankato) with questions.

Why set goals using the Literacy Continuum?

Recently, the idea of finding the time to set goals for each reader and group using the Literacy Continuum was brought up, as some are questioning if it is worth the time now that we have the Guided Reading Classroom resource from Fountas and Pinnell.  Here are my own thoughts as to why setting goals using the Literacy Continuum is well worth the time:

1. If you don’t set goals, how do you know which introduction, discussion and teaching points to use from the lesson?  I so often hear when planning with teachers, “They all look good.” or “I want to do them all!”  To which we can take a look at the goals for the readers in the group and determine which questions or prompts the readers in that particular group need.  Without those goals, for me, it doubles (or triples) the amount of planning time it takes to plan each guided reading lesson, as I really don’t know what kids need to move them forward.
2. When you set goals for readers, you identify what is holding them at their current level, which gives specific information to focus on during prompting and teaching.  My ultimate goal is two-fold: kids LOVE to read and kids can read whatever they want to read.  Therefore, I want to continue to support their growth and advancement in what text they are able to process independently.  If I find those four or so goals for them, then I can prompt while they are reading at the group (when I bop in to hear them) or when I confer.  It can guide which students I call on during group for which questions. Therefore, they have more opportunities to grow in that goal. While the goal is not just to push them through the levels as fast as we can, the goal is to continue to grow in our reading so that they can access any text that they might encounter.
3. How will we know when to move a group on if we aren’t tracking specific goals?  The Literacy Continuum provides so many goals at each level, we can’t possibly track all of that information. If we focus our attention on tracking what has kept them at that level, and then they begin to become solid in those goals, we can confidently move students to the next level without fear that they don’t have every single goal mastered in that level.  

As our students grow in their goals and the level of text, we must continue to revisit the goals we set and add new ones and remove mastered goals based on our reading record data and anecdotal information from guided groups.  Even today, after doing a reading record with a student on an O level text, I had to go back to the continuum to see how the goals for summarizing are stated in that level. In level O, one of the summarizing goal shifts from “Summarize the important information in the next, selecting the information that is important.” to “Summarize the important information in the text in a clear and logical way without extraneous detail.”  The student I had read with had done a great retelling of the story with a lot of important information, but she really had not eliminated any detail. If I had not gone back to both the comprehension rubric, and the continuum, I would not have realized that this is about the level where students need to start really honing in on what is truly critical in the text.  

If we want to have our students receive the most targeted instruction possible, it is critical that we continue to set and revisit goals using the Literacy Continuum.  

Building Weekly Newsletter:
Click here to access the building weekly newsletter


I hope you have a great, relaxing weekend - enjoy the 40 degree heatwave!
-Justin