Core Instruction Reminder:
This was interesting to many of us last year- thought it was worth a revisit! These are the guidelines for direct instruction of new content - how long can kids actually stay engaged and focused during new material in your classrooms?
#McKGratitude2017 Challenge:
We have only a few more days left of the challenge - keep tweeting (and watch your spelling of gratitude!). We will announce our winner (and winning team) next week! Engaging with Poverty in Mind:
Last year, we did some learning work around poverty, engagement, and the brain. I spent some time last weekend looking back through this resource - I forgot about all the great ideas in this book! It may be worth a "revisit" on your part, too!
I am going to highlight a strategy or idea each week to keep these ideas fresh.
Monday Review:
In our work, we discovered that many students are arriving to school each day with disregulated thinking - especially on a Monday morning. Brain research shows that students who are exposed to stress and trauma are basically living in their emotional brain, or amygdala. When a student is stuck in their amygdala, they can't access their prefrontal cortext, which is where learning takes place.
Our job is to help students move from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortext. We learned that a few things help, especially on Mondays:
Safe, welcoming environment - students knowing routines in the classroom, as well as knowing their classroom is predictable and safe.
A positive relationship: Greeting students on a Monday morning with a smile and showing them you missed them all weekend!
Spending Mondays reviewing mastery from the previous week. Students need to be regulated before they can access new learning.
Staff Power Hour:
Our Staff Power Hour is this coming Wednesday, November 29th at 2:40pm in Langlois & Seath's room. We will focus on shoutouts, biases, and guided/small group instruction. Can't wait!
This quote stood out to me this week - appreciating what you already have. I am thankful for our McKinley family, each and every day. This place is a special place with special people. We are very lucky ... very lucky.
Have a great weekend with family & friends! Take some time to relax, rejuvenate, and appreciate living "in the moment".
-Justin
Our team had some recommendations/observations from this data:
Don't let the data stop you from referring students. This data is critical for our team to look at the true picture of what is happening at McKinley.
We saw a decrease in behaviors in the playground - possibly because kids were actually able to start playing on real equipment!
Referral motivators - please take some time to find out the "why" behind the behavior. Why did a student misbehave? What is their motivator? Our team is really looking at this to determine if we need to add motivators to the referral.
Our leadership jar is almost filled. Please keep this is a secret - we are going to have a school wide movie (K-2 and 3-5 at different times) on Friday, December 1. More information to come on this- we will announce this at our PBIS meeting next week. Please keep this a secret!!
The Power of THINK TIME:
I recently came across this on Twitter - it reminded me of the power behind THINK TIME! So often, we are under a crunch and forget about how important "think time" is for our students. It's alright for us to give students time to process and think during lessons. Plus, there is so much power behind making student have "productive struggle" with their learning. My challenge for you is to start providing think time - more than just 15 seconds. See how your students respond and engage with their learning.
Family Listening Sessions:
This past week, we had our first family listening sessions for both our Latino & Somali families. It was a great experience to hear from our families. We had a better turnout at our Somali session on Thursday than our Tuesday session. One of the things I want you to know is how powerful our relationship is with these families. We heard comments of families saying how much they "loved McKinley" and how "McKinley teachers are my family and friends - I can call them for anything". Families are grateful for all you do and how visible you are - and how easy you are to talk to. We have some continued work to do - however, be proud of what these families are saying about you. We are McKinley Strong!
Student Support Position:
In the next few weeks, you will see a position posted for a Student Support Specialist at McKinley. This position has grown from a need around behavior and social emotional needs with our students. The position will work with identified, at-risk students in the areas of social-emotional learning and behavior - he or she will work closely with Annette. This person is not dealing with discipline or students who are escalated. This person will handle things like the Relaxation Room, Check and Connect, and other proactive interventions we are putting into place to make our students successful. I will share more as this position is finalized - just wanted you to be aware.
ASP Block II:
Classroom Teachers, please start thinking of what you focus will be for ASP Block II. We will be sending paperwork out soon - block II starts in January. Also, please let me know who will be teaching block II.
Also, Block I ends next Tuesday! STEAM Night:
Tuesday, December 5 is our Superbowl-themed STEAM night. It's going to be a great night - and get us ready for the Superbowl in Minneapolis!
McKinley- Education Edition:
Last month, McKinley was featured in the Owatonna People's Press Education Edition. This is a community publication for us to highlight the work we are doing at McKinley. Click here to access the Education Edition.
Happy Veterans' Day, everyone!
Thank you to all who served our country!
Gratitude Challenge:
It's been SO cool to see all the gratitude happening on Twitter! We have A LOT to be thankful for! Keep tweeting with the hashtag #McKGratitude2017. If you haven't participated yet, you still have time! Family Reading Night:
Our Family Reading Night last night was a huge success! We had almost 400 people attend! A huge thank you to the committee who did all the planning, as well as volunteering at the event. This building remarkable!
Listening Sessions:
Next week, have two family listening sessions- Latino (Tuesday) and Somali (Thursday). The listening sessions will be from 4:15-5:00pm in the library. The goal of these is to listen and gather information from families on education, McKinley, and their students. Superintendent Elstad will be joining.
Assessment Days Note from Libby:
For years there has been discussion around Home Child School
Day and many have questioned if it is the best venue for accomplishing the
goals that we have at the beginning of the year. This year, many of you
have had conversations about how difficult it is to complete the Fountas and Pinnell
assessments efficiently at the beginning of the year when routines are still
being established.
Several teachers have asked about the possibility of
assessment days at the start of the year. If you would like to provide
feedback around assessment days, Michelle Krell will be available on Thursday,
November 30th at 3:10 in the District Office Board Room.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Buffalo Wild Wings Fundraiser:
McKinley's PTO, in conjunction with BWW, is offering a fundraiser all day on Wednesday, November 22. A portion (I think 10%) of the proceeds from that day will go to McKinley School. This includes take out orders! What a great reason to go eat out!
Important Dates:
Just a reminder of some important dates at McKinley- click here to access the dates. Reminder- all staff should attend our Staff Power Hours from 2:40-3:10pm.
Building Newsletter:
The weekly newsletter will come out later today. Lorri has been out sick the last few days!
At Welcome Back Week, we all chose a word to focus on this year. Just checking in - how's it going with your word? Are you thinking about it? Using it? Living by it? Me- not so much. I need a good reminder to stay focused on my word of the year. How are you doing?
November 6 Staff Development Day:
Monday, November 6 is a Staff Development Day at OHS. Below is the schedule for the day:
7:40-8:00
Coffee & light grab-n-go breakfast at location of your first session
8:00-11:00 Professional
Learning Session 1
11:00-12:00
Lunch (on your own)
12:00-3:00 Professional Learning
Session 2
If you want more information on the agenda, see the email from Taylor Petrich on October 27.
EA's, you do not report on this day. I hope you have a productive day of learning!
Guided Library:
There's been some questions on the Guided Library - just a couple reminders!
1. Please check all guided library books out with Denise
in the library. If she is not there, you can record the barcode
number and email it to her so she knows you checked it out.
2. The guided library books are for teachers to check
out. You cannot check these books out to students. 3. Junior Great Books, Ladder books, EIR books, Bill Nye
DVD’s, the professional library and math manipulatives are all in the
guided library now. We are still waiting on one more book shelf to
make things easier to find, but they are all in there and available for
checkout. Monday Monkey Message & Bell System: I have an email into Maintenance to see when our paging system will be completely up and running. Because the Scoop is now live on Monday mornings, we will not be doing a Monday Monkey Message. Reading Night- Thursday: Thursday, November 9 is our Family Reading Night. This is a day where we will "unplug from electronics and plug into a good book!" Students (and staff) will wear pajamas to school and participate in a reading switch-a-roo at 1:50pm. Then, that night, families can come to school in their PJs and enjoy pizza, books, and family time! A huge thank you to our committee for their work on this night - Mark Langlois, Lori Huisenga, Eric Oppegard, Val Seath, Kathy Feltes, Michelle Meiners, Sonya David, & Laurie Wolhart. A SnapShot of Learning:
Student Council worked with Young Professionals to create Buddy Benches for our playground!
A huge thank you to our staff who agreed to be "pied" at our PBIS Assembly!
Weekly Building Newsletter:
This will be updated at some point today- Friday.
Don't forget to take some time this weekend and "YIELD"..... enjoy a relaxing weekend!
:)
Happy Friday!
Don't forget, Infinitec trainings need to be completed by Monday!
Checking in on our theme... "Make Every Second Count!" How is this going? Are you using it with students? Yourself? I can honestly say, I need to reground myself in this. I'm letting valuable moments and relationships suffer to finish "less important things". This includes my personal life. Let's all hold each other accountable and keep this phrase going... we are in this work for people. Make every second count!
Playground & Morning Arrival:
It's been great seeing the excitement around the playground. I keep asking myself, "What did we do without a playground?" It's been great seeing kids play again.
With the new playground, our morning arrival has created some challenges. I am working with Superintendent Elstad and Bob Olson on some of this plan. For now, we will continue to do what we have been doing. But, please know, there is work going into improving morning arrival. Please continue to be flexible as we get to know our new building!
Unconscious Bias
Below is a one-minute video clip on unconscious bias - and what this means to our work in educating students. Take a minute to watch this - and start to think about what's familiar and what's unfamiliar in your life, day, etc. Our unconscious biases matter!
Engaging (with Poverty in Mind) Strategy:
At Site Team, we discussed the need to bring back some of the strategies we learned (last year) from our work around Engaging with Poverty in Mind. I shared a study guide I found online- click here to see that study guide.
One area we focused on was "building attention skills" in chapter 4. There were three strategies from this section that could easily be used today in your classrooms:
Increase buy-in (plan for engagement, don't just assume it will happen. Plan your "hook"s)
Allow students to create predictions- and revisit those predictions throughout the learning.
Pause & Chunk- throughout students' learning, create times for them to pause and chunk their learning. This is a hard one- the silence can often be awkward. Create these times for students to chunk their learning through collaboration, reflection, etc.
I challenge you to try one of these strategies over the next week- see how it goes! Building Goals:
Site Team has finalized our building goals and action steps for the 17-18 school year. We are continuing a lot of the great work we have started two years ago. Please take some time to read through our action steps and reflect on how your role/work influence these goals. Each of us are educators in some way, shape, or form. Our focus on all kids, all day will continue into this school year (and forever!).
Click here to access the building goals Guided Library
Project We are fortunate at McKinley to have a guided library filled
with quality text to use in our small group instruction.Last spring, we realized that some of the
books are not leveled with an accurate Fountas and Pinnell level (A-Z).When lexiles (which include only quantitative
data*) were highly utilized, a correlation chart was used to level the books to
the Fountas and Pinnell system.Because
Fountas and Pinnell leveling includes both quantitative and qualitative data*,
we have discovered that some of the levels are not accurate. It will be quite an undertaking to check each title in the
guided library and relabel all the books, but thankfully we have an awesome
volunteer (Nancy Kennon) and amazing staff (Denise Carlson and Jane Carlson)
who will be working on this project.There may be a time where we ask for additional support in portions of
this project, but for now we just wanted to make all staff aware of the
situation and how it impacts you with planning and instruction. Until we get things re-leveled, you will want to check the
levels of the books you pull (especially if it doesn’t seem accurate).It is simple to do this by going to https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/bookwizard/
and typing in the title.I prefer to use
the “Level It” app on my phone which allows me to scan barcodes instead of
typing in titles, but there is a small fee for this app.Most of the books we have noticed that are
not leveled correctly are in the upper levels.I want to thank Paige Gilligan for being diligent with checking the
levels of text and noticing that things were not lining up; her attention to
detail is an incredible asset to our school. We hope that this project will be completed quickly, and we
appreciate your patience in the meantime.If you have questions or would like further support in using one of the
leveling resources, please let Libby know. *quantitative data:
the number of words on a page, syllables in words, words in a book, etc. *qualitative data:
figurative language used, background knowledge required to comprehend,
structure of text, etc. Staff Development- November 6
Just a reminder- November 6 is a Staff Development Day. The schedule for the day is:
7:40-8:00 Coffee & light breakfast
8:00-11:00 Professional Learning Session 1
11:00-12:00 Lunch (on your own)
12:00-3:00 Professional Learning Session 2
Please see the email sent out regarding details of the day. It's going to be a great day of learning!
Family Reading Night- November 9
Our first Family Reading Night is Thursday, November 9 from 6-7pm. The theme for the night is "Unplug the Electronics and Plug into a Good Book!" Students will come to school that day dressed in pajamas - and hopefully come to the family night in pajamas, too! Families are being invited to come in pajamas, bring blankets and stuffed animals, and enjoy an evening of pizza and reading. If you are free, consider joining us! We had over 400 students last time we did this!
STEAM Integration Subouts:
We have our first STEAM Integration subouts:
November 7: Kindergarten (AM) & 1st Grade (PM)
November 8: 3rd Grade (AM) & 2nd Grade (PM)
November 14: 5th Grade (AM) & 4th Grade (PM)
Group Pictures for Entryway:
Here are our group pictures for the entryway. I will be hanging these up today:
What a photogenic staff that is focused on ALL kids. Love it!
Happy Friday the 13th!
This made me laugh this morning...
Bounce Cards:
I have shared this in the past, but it's a great strategy to share again. The Bounce Card was invented to teach collaboration, particularly how to have a discussion. During the discussion, students have to respond to each other's statements using one of the "bounces" - bounce, sum it up, or inquire. It's a great way to support kids in having a purposeful, focused discussion that builds on each other's ideas.
Reflection on McKinley:
I had my first Student Advisory Meeting last week where I met with a group of students, had lunch, and asked questions about our school. It was interesting to hear all their feedback- student voice matters! Below are some themes I heard:
Kids love school. They love their teachers and know their teachers love them!
Kids love the new school. Every single one commented on how our school is enormous!
Most kids feel safe all day at school. There were a few kids (older ones) who expressed some concern about not having doors in our rooms. They said "What do we do in a lockdown?" We will be doing some work around this soon, however, continue to stress that our school is safe.
I asked when kids get bored during the day. I had some interesting responses on when and why they get bored. One of the students commented that she gets bored during independent reading. I thought she was referring to just the reading - however, in asking more, she gets bored when she can't talk about what's going on in her book. She said she needs to share what she is reading and thinking to keep interested in the book. Very profound thought!
Overall, kids love school and love you. Thank you for making McKinley a great place for ALL of our kids.
Small Groups:
It's been great to see everyone start to plan instructional goals around small group needs- in both reading and math. As we know, small group is the sacred time that produces high levels of student learning.
I was in a few rooms this week and saw some pretty cool small groups going on - and co-teaching with EL.
Rachel Peterson's Kindergartens during their literacy block. It was great to see very clear expectations and routines set up in this room- you could feel the environment of learning!
Dani Rypka & Laurie Wolhart's fourth graders doing guided math stations. This was cool to see the co-teaching between Laurie and Dani and how engaged students were. Nice work!
Relaxation Room at McKinley:
A lot of you have seen the room next to Annette (and across from Kathy and Michelle) set up for a relaxation room. This room was an idea of Annette's last year- create a safe, relaxing place for some of our students who need a safe spot to be regulated. This is especially important with our students who have experienced trauma. We have a group of students who were "invited" to use the room. They go there with an adult and follow a process - identify their current feeling, take deep breaths, choose a tool (something to regulate), and then identify their feelings again. This is a 5-7 process. It has been working for many of our students! If you need a break, go check it out! Thanks for designing and creating this space, Annette!
Thanks for a great week! I can feel the passion and love in our building around our students... they are truly cared for by each of you. Thank you for that. Your hard work is not going unnoticed.
Rest up this weekend... conferences are right around the corner!
Happy Friday to the greatest educators in the state of MN!
I hope you've had a great week! With being out at two different conferences, I feel like I've hardly been here. A huge thank you to Lorri and Justin Lang for taking the lead on things in the office. Also, thank you to everyone for being flexible this week with different things.
I attended two conferences - one on co-teaching and one on coherence/focus. Both were great and helped give me some strategies to continuing our work on educating all kids.
A couple of random requests/updates:
Team Pictures- please get me your team pictures ASAP. I'd like to get them framed and hung in the main entryway.
The community Open House for McKinley and Owatonna Middle School is Monday, October 30th. The celebration will start at McKinley at 5:00pm and then move to OMS at 6:30pm. More information will come on this - however, if you are free, consider joining us!
This Monday, October 9th, the School Board will meet here at McKinley (Learning Studio) at 5:30pm. They are here for a work session, but also to see our building. Stop by if you are free!
Sumner Visits:
A team from Sumner Elementary (in Austin) are visiting McKinley on Friday, October 13th. The team is here to see our PLC process and the use of formative assessments. This team heard great things from another school who visited last year - and wants to hear more about our work. We will more than likely make a lap through the building and ask people (who are free) about their use of the PLC process.
A huge kudos to our team - we have good work going on in this building!
EL Graduation:
We held our 2nd annual EL Graduation this Tuesday, October 3. We had a large group of students who exited our program. This is a huge reflection of the hard work you are doing to support all learners. It was great to have families, staff, and students come together to celebrate this milestone!
Words You Speak Become the House You Live In...
This came up in my Twitter feed this week - it made me stop and think. This quote made me appreciate all the work you have done to use student-first language. As much as it seems like just words, it truly represents your thinking and actions. There is research to support that an educator's thoughts actually translate to their expectations and interactions with students. A huge kudos to you for all your work on keeping students first - your language and beliefs. All means ALL at McKinley.
Growth Mindset Post-It Notes:
I saw these growth mindset post-it notes on Twitter this week. I can see our building using these - what a great way to give feedback but keep it focused on growth!
In closing, I had an email from Amanda Heilman (Director of Business & Operations) regarding the Bus Company this week. She had a conversation this week with the Bus Company who gave the McKinley staff glowing reviews on how friendly, flexible, and happy you are. It's so true... and we know it. It's great to hear it from others.
