Week 26: February 24, 2017

Happy Friday!!! 

Housekeeping: 

-Mr. Erickson will be in the building, along with four (4) other elementary Principals to do Instructional Rounds. We have not identified specific grade levels to observe so I wanted to inform the school of their visit in March. Once a date is confirmed, I will inform you all!

-Be sure that all students are accessing DreamBox. This is an expectation for students to complete! I received the monthly usage for January-February. Below you will find the highest number of lessons completed:

Terezon – 535 Lessons

Erney – 381 Lessons

Jackson – 371 Lessons

Fernandez – 333 Lessons

Rosas – 278 Lessons

Haefele – 239 Lessons

Congratulations Teachers for your focus and dedication to incorporating this into your daily rotations!

-It is that time AGAIN…Interims! Please be mindful of deadlines and timelines from Mrs. Moller’s email.

Leadership Opportunities:

Teacher Leaders and Building Leadership Capacity - V

Learning Facilitator: Facilitating professional learning opportunities among staff members is another role for teacher leaders. When teachers learn with and from one another, they can focus on what most directly improves student learning. Their professional learning becomes more relevant, focused on teachers' classroom work, and aligned to fill gaps in student learning. Such communities of learning can break the norms of isolation present in many schools.

Students as Learners: 

-Ann and I did several instructional rounds this week. We were able to visit Kindergarten, 2^nd Grade and 4^th Grade Teams. It was great to see evidence of common planning, high student engagement and active questioning. Grade levels really demonstrated the importance of movement and visuals in the mastery of content objectives! Great job!

Important Dates: 

-February 27^th: Read Across America Begins

-February 28^th: Education Leaders PD – McDonald Out (Otterblad will cover)

                  : SOL Remediation

-March 1^st: SOL Remediation

            : Advisory Council Meeting @ 5:00 p.m.

             : PTA Meeting @ 6:00 p.m.

-March 2^nd:

- March 3^rd: 3^rd Quarter Interim Period

My Current Re-Reading:

Week 25: February 17, 2017

Happy Friday!!! 

Housekeeping:

- Delijah Walton has accepted the Head Start position at Bel Air ES for the 2016-17 SY. Her start date will be Monday, February 27, 2017;

- Mrs. Hammel has graciously developed a 'Bel Air Digital Resources: Databases, E-books a& apps' presentation. She introduces some new resources and reminds us of others that we have available for staff and students. https://pwcps-my.sharepoint.com/personal/hammelca_pwcs_edu/_layouts/15/guestaccess.aspx?docid=1d47c9de2aa1641c5a1540627d2470a8e&authkey=ATTYDcSRLz_XDwJgAmDDjTQ

- Staff picture will take place next Friday at 8:30 a.m. in the cafeteria. We will be wearing our Bel Air Staff Shirts (received this school year) and jeans. 

Leadership Opportunities:

- I truly thank the following staff members for attending the MAP Continuum training session on Tuesday, Jan. 31st; Mrs. Hoover, Ms. Moore, Mr. Fain, Mrs. Hulse and Mrs. Farrell. We learned some new tools and are looking forward to grade level conversations to help remediate and enrich our students.

Teacher Leaders and Building Leadership Capacity - IV

Classroom Supporter: Classroom supporters work inside classrooms to help teachers implement new ideas, often by demonstrating a lesson, co-teaching, or observing and giving feedback. Blase and Blase (2006) found that consultation with peers enhanced teachers' self-efficacy (teachers' belief in their own abilities and capacity to successfully solve teaching and learning problems) as they reflected on practice and grew together, and it also encouraged a bias for action (improvement through collaboration) on the part of teachers. (p. 22)

Marcia asks Yolanda for classroom support in implementing nonlinguistic representation strategies, such as graphic organizers, manipulatives, and kinesthetic activities (Marzano et al., 2001). Yolanda agrees to plan and teach a lesson with Marcia that integrates several relevant strategies. They ask the principal for two half-days of professional release time, one for learning more about the strategy and planning a lesson together, and the other for co-teaching the lesson to Marcia's students and discussing it afterward.

Highlights of the Week:

- SOL Remediation: Week #1 is complete! Thank you to the instructors; Ms. Jewell, Ms. Williams, Ms. Terezon, Ms. Fanto, Mrs. Farrell, Mrs. Fiorio, Mrs. Findley, Ms. Morrison, Mrs. Peters, Ms. Harrington and Mrs. Dunleavy. Thank you to Mrs. Quattrone (for support and direction), Mrs. Carter (for securing snacks), Mrs. Chestnut (for supply ordering), Mrs. Slaughter & Mrs. Ramos (for being absolutely amazing with the copying, distributing, documenting and organizing all permission slips! Thank you, Ms. Erney, for taking on the task of SOL Coordinator! 

Students as Learners:

-  During 2^nd Grade’s Instructional Rounds, we observed students identifying continents as they begun their Geography Unit.

-Elmer V. read to me and used fluency, intonation and was invested in the reading of his graphic novel. I love hearing the students read to me. They surprise me when I ask about their favorite genre or author. They open up to me about why they love reading or embrace the encouragement I offer to get them to read daily! Thank you, Mrs. Brown, for allowing Elmer to earn time to read to me!


 Important Dates:

- February 20th: NO SCHOOL - Presidents' Day

- February 21st: McDonald out (Mr. Provencio or Mrs. Ellis will cover)

                      : SOL Remediation

- February 22nd:  SOL Remediation

- February 23rd:

- February 24th: Staff Picture @ 8:30 a.m. in Cafeteria

                        : Job Fair – Quattrone & McDonald out (Mrs. Otterblad will cover)

My Current Study:

Week 24: February 10, 2017

Happy 100^th Day of School! 

Housekeeping: 

- If you have done or planning to do something in recognition of Black History Month, please share so that I may highlight in the Panther Press and on the School Messenger page. 

-Our staff meeting on Tuesday will be about 30 minutes. We will present Service Awards and have a PNC Bank Presentation. Our staff meeting with embedded PD will be presented in a Flipped Meeting presentation that will be sent out during next week.

- Mrs. Hammel has found some great courses that may interest you. The county is offering Mindfulness Courses and you can register through the Online Professional Catalog under the Culturally Responsive Instruction curriculum. They are courses that teachers have to pay to take but each course gets 15 hours of re-certification points.  

CRI 710 - Mindful Educator Foundation Online Course Series, Part 1: Mindfulness Fundamentals

March 3 - April 13, 2017 (cohorts for PWCS) register for session 2016450071001  or

April 7 - May 18, 2017 (cohorts for PWCS) register for session 2016450071002

CRI 711 - Mindful Educator Foundation Online Course Series, Part 2: Mindful Educator Essentials

April 20 - May 31, 2017 (cohorts for PWCS) register for session 2016450071101   or

May 25 - July 5, 2017 (cohorts for PWCS) register for session 2016450071102

- Thank you to Mrs. Hoover's class for the beautiful 'Thank You' card for purchasing the rug! 

Leadership Opportunities:

- Given the SOL remediation numbers and the lack of a teacher to facilitate the club, we have decided not to have Soccer for Success this Spring season.

- Building Leadership Capacity – Part II will be held on March 30^th at 3:30-5:30 p.m. at Colgan H.S. Please view the flyer sent on via email for registration specifics.  

Teacher Leaders and Building Leadership Capacity - III

Curriculum Specialist: Understanding content standards, how various components of the curriculum link together, and how to use the curriculum in planning instruction and assessment is essential to ensuring consistent curriculum implementation throughout a school. Curriculum specialists lead teachers to agree on standards, follow the adopted curriculum, use common pacing charts, and develop shared assessments.

Tracy, the world studies team leader, works with the five language arts and five social studies teachers in her school. Using standards in English and social studies as their guides, the team members agree to increase the consistency in their classroom curriculums and administer common assessments. Tracy suggests that the team develop a common understanding of the standards and agrees to facilitate the development and analysis of common quarterly assessments.

 

Highlights of the Week: 

- 100^th Day of School was a major success!

- PTA Family Bingo Night was much fun! A huge thank you to Ms. Roop, our fabulous PTA Teacher Representative; Ms. Morrison for set up and clean up; Mrs. Kempf for being our interpreter/DJ/Bingo Number Displayer/Air Control; Ms. Jackson and Mrs. Black for attending; and Mrs. Quattrone for being our Resident Photographer/Alternate Bingo Caller/Closer. We had countless volunteers who helped out with creating such a wonderful atmosphere for our families; Mrs. Peak, Connor Peak, Sara Peak and Mr. Brian. Our PTA received so many accolades and for the first time in 9 years, parents assisted in the cleanup…quick, fast and in a hurry!

-Our Bel Air Smashers remain undefeated after CRUSHING Montclair E.S. They single handily won in three straight volleyball games! BA Smashers cannot be touched! Excellent job Smashers!

Students as Learners: 

• 3^rd Grade students worked through vowel patters and suffixes through a SRA Lesson with our Title I Reading Teacher;
• 2^nd Grade’s 100^th Day Celebrations are amazing! They had 8 rotations for the students to go through from building a 100 cup structure to skip counting by 10s to 100 on ice cream scoops to creating a 100 dot gumball machine. The kids were ecstatic and working so well together.
• Students are committed to content vocabulary through the studying of their Content Word Study Cards!
• 5^th Grade students worked through fraction addition and subtraction equations. Students identified their favorite strategies and were able to show me how to effectively use the great common denominator to solve and illustrating the fractional equations using graph paper.

Important Dates: 

• February 13^th: Core Extension Begins through May 12th
• February 14^th: Happy Valentine’s Day
  • Small Group Meetings with Mr. Erickson (Mrs. Otterblad will be here in p.m.)
  • Staff Meeting @ 4:00 p.m.
• February 15^th:
  • School Board Meeting @ 7:00 p.m.
• February 16^th: Have You Filled a Bucket? Assembly 3-5 @ 9:30 a.m. and K-2 @ 2:00 p.m.
• February 17^th: Award Ceremony; K-2 in a.m. and 3-5 in p.m.
  • Sunshine Committee Social: Chuy’s on Prince William Parkway @ 4:30 p.m.

  

My Current Reading:

Week 23: February 3, 2017

Happy Friday!!! 

Housekeeping: 

- Thank you for being flexible, patient and understanding with the logistics of the SOL Remediation Program. 

In doing any type of programming, you must have criteria and data to support the identification of students. Once that was made available, then student names were given for feedback. I truly thank Farrell, Harrington, Hulse and Palmer for "reining" it back in and using the MAP Linking Study and CSA data to further identify students in need of remediation. 

Thank you for not "reading into" the decisions that I decided to make...I trust each of you to provide input and feedback on our students. Time was the challenge considering that we needed to maximize our time to remediate our 3-5 students. 

I am super excited to create a baseline for the SOL Remediation Program, collect data and reflect so that we are able to strengthen the program every year. The ultimate goal is to minimize the number of students needing remediation and I believe that we will get there. 

- We do have an emergency staff meeting on Wednesday the 8th directly after school to discuss budget and personnel decisions for the 2017-18 school year.

Leadership Opportunities:

- We are preparing for Soccer for Success in the Spring and if you are interested in supporting the coaches and providing the supervision of our students, please contact Mrs. McCoy, as soon as possible. The times are 3:45-5:00 p.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thank you!

- I truly thank the following staff members for attending the MAP Continuum training session on Tuesday, Jan. 31st; Mrs. Hoover, Ms. Moore, Mr. Fain, Mrs. Hulse and Mrs. Farrell. We learned about new tools and are looking forward to grade level conversations to help remediate and enrich our students.

Teacher Leaders and Building Leadership Capacity - II

Instructional Specialist: An instructional specialist helps colleagues implement effective teaching strategies. This help might include ideas for differentiating instruction or planning lessons in partnership with fellow teachers. Instructional specialists might study research-based classroom strategies (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001); explore which instructional methodologies are appropriate for the school; and share findings with colleagues.

When his fellow science teachers share their frustration with students' poorly written lab reports, Jamal suggests that they invite several English teachers to recommend strategies for writing instruction. With two English teachers serving as instructional specialists, the science teachers examine a number of lab reports together and identify strengths and weaknesses. The English teachers share strategies they use in their classes to improve students' writing

Highlights of the Week: 

- Mrs. Kempf has earned her Masters Degree in ESOL from Concordia University. Congratulations Mrs. Kempf.

- Mrs. Hoover was recognized as a nominee for the Dale City Civic Association's 'Teacher of the Year' award. She is currently our 'PTA Teacher of the Month'. Congratulations!

- Mrs. Mayers has received a promotion through the Head Start Office as the Early Childhood Education and Disabilities Specialist.

Students as Learners: 

- Kindergarten students were observed strengthening their fluency using pointers while reading and attending to each word.

- 1st Graders worked on using adjectives to describe things in their writing.

- 5th Graders worked on distinguishing facts and opinions in 'What Really Happened?'

- Everyone is encouraged to read the walls around the school building. Our student displays are engaging, literacy rich, and saturated with vocabulary. It keeps us abreast of what our students are learning throughout the year. Great job! 

Important Dates: 

- February 6th: Core Extension Begins

                        Admin. Assembly @ 9:45-12:00 p.m.

                        Principal's Meeting @ 12:30 p.m. (Otterblad to cover)

- February 7th: Fire Drill 

                        Admin. Assembly @ 1:15-3:30 p.m.

- February 8th: Emergency Budget Meeting @ 4:00 p.m. 

- February 9th:

- February 10th: Open Job Fair @ 8-12:30 p.m. (Otterblad to cover)

My Current Re-Reading: