Good Afternoon! 

Welcome back! We hope you had a restful and safe Thanksgiving Break.

There are three full weeks of school in December before Winter Break and we have a lot planned. Additionally, we are hopeful that the November sicknesses have run their course and we can get back on track with our attendance goal of having each student at school 90% of the time or better. This means to meet this goal in December, we need each student present at school for at least 13.5 of the 15 school days. Let's do it!

See you in the morning!

Sincerely,

Mr. Janson & Mrs. Watson

One of our goals this year is to increase building-wide alignment of our weekly social emotional learning lessons, content, and economy of language. With that being said, we have a "SEL Question of the Week" that we discuss in our morning meetings and always aligns to monthly focus. Ms. Watson creates a weekly video to launch the week as well.

Please ask your students about these questions and about the conversations they are having at school!

December's Focus: Excellence (continued)

Week 1: How does paying attention help you show excellence?

Week 2: What can you do when things get hard?

Week 3: How can you change an unhelpful thought into a helpful one to help you learn and grow?

Week 4: How can reflecting on your learning help you grow?

In nearly all grades, student portfolios were sent home on Friday. Inside you will find various assessments from the last couple months in addition to the Trimester 1 report card. 

These portfolios are our consistent, universal tier of communication with you about your student's progress and the content we are covering. One of our major improvement strategies as a school is to strengthen our Family and Community Partnerships through pro-active, transparent, two way communication between our school and each family as well as increase the opportunities to collaborate to ensure exceptional growth for each student.

These portfolios will be sent home five times throughout the year. You might be wondering, "What do I do with it?" Great question!

1. Sit with your student

2. Read the cover page

3. Review and talk about each artifact together

4. Leave everything in the portfolio

5. Sign the cover page and return it to your homeroom teacher!

We will be tracking return rates for each individual classroom with the expectation and goal that we receive 100% of the binders back by Friday, November 21st. Wonderful prizes to the classrooms with the highest return rates and fun raffles for those with their binder returned each day.

Due to both kindergarten teachers being out at the end of the week, kinder portfolios will be sent home early this week.