Monday Memo - Week of December 5

Great Things I Noticed Last Week:
*While sitting in a 5K mini-lesson on setting a student excitedly said, "I just made a connection to another book we read!"
*In another 5K classroom students were practicing their Jolly Phonics with the SMARTBoard program and were able to read the following words: coast, grain, punch, and chimpanzee using their sounds.  I bet the 1st grade teachers love to hear this!
*After 5th grade student presentations, the class was asked to give 3 positive comments and 3 things to improve on. I was amazed to hear the feedback given to students by students and surprised how much Daily 5/Cafe language carried over into the feedback for science presentations.
*5th grade started keeping track of "Writing Non-Negotiables" as writing skills are taught in mini-lessons.  You can see the list from one class in the picture on the right.  Mrs. Bingen says that this list has really cut down on the time spent conferring  with students for writing revising/editing--she does NOT help revise if they have a mistake that is on the non-negotiable list. Wouldn't it be great if we had a list of expectations like this at each grade level?

Events This Week:
*Monday - Mentors meeting at 3:05 in Media Center
*Tuesday - I will be gone all day at the SLATE conference (School Leaders Advancing Technology in Education) in Wisconsin Dells.
*Thursday - No Office Day--I'll be spending my day in 3-5th grade classrooms
   K/2/4 Music Concert (including 5th grade band) at 6:30 PM
*Friday - Just a reminder to show your school spirit and wear your school shirt (please help remind your students too)

"Nuts & Bolts" Notes:
*Just a reminder that next week is already mid-quarter (I had to triple check the calendar to be sure!) so make sure you're ready to send home a progress report for each of your students.
* We've added another Tech Tuesday to the calendar for December 20th. I know that's a busy week, but there's quite a few teachers excited about using Pinterest or wanting to learn how before break so Jean and Bethany will be teaching us how that day.

Tech Tip:
*I've seen some great websites being used on the SMARTBoards and in the computer lab that I'm sure students would continue to use at home if they have internet access.  You can show them how to access the site from the student resources on the district webpage (if it's there) or include the web address in your newsletter, which can be quite lengthy and difficult to type at times.  If you want to learn how to make a shortened web address to share with students/parents for home and for easy access in the computer lab you just need to go to http://bitly.com and sign up for an account. Here's a screencast I made to show you how to use this tool. Let me know if you need any help getting started on this.