Johnson Memo: July 2012

Hello,

I hope this email finds you enjoying the summer! Here's a long list of updates for you:

If you haven't already "heard it through the grapevine" Ms. Johnson and Mr. Reinke have accepted teaching positions in other districts. They will both be missed tremendously, but we wish them luck on their new teaching positions. Ms. Koellen (familiar guest teacher face) will be taking Ms. Johnson's position (pending board approval tonight) and we will be interviewing candidates for Mr. Reinke's position tomorrow.
The new math curriculum is here...most of it. The manipulative kits won't be here until August, but you can at least pick up your teacher guides and student books if you would like. There will be online access as well. As soon as I have that information for you I will email it out.
We have small buckets for each of the 5K-5th grade students to go with the Bucket Filling theme. These will be in the office next to mine to get when you would like (quite a few have been asking for these).
Classrooms are getting cleaned this week and summer school session 2 starts next week. Here is the classroom usage for session 2 of rooms being used by summer school teachers:

        Classroom        Summer School Teacher
        Mane                Biwer
        Abegglen          Rusch
        Bingen                Schuett

I know that some of you don't plan to be here for a while, but when you do, here's some thoughts on getting your room set up for the new school year:

Daily 5 & Cafe Bulletin Boards - You will want to display your “I” charts in an orderly way so that they are easy for the children to see. This year most of you should also have the CAFE bulletin board displayed and used for goal setting with the kids.

Anchor charts – Creating anchor charts with the students in key. You would not want to post anchor charts you made with last year’s students because this year’s students will not have any ownership in that. At the end of the year if you want to laminate anchor charts and make big books for kids to use for word work or read to self or centers that is a great idea. Creating them together promotes a literacy rich environment and kids have ownership in “decorating” their classroom.

Here is an AWESOME site I found for classroom set up ideas. It's like a Pinterest board just for different classroom set-ups!

Here's a great blog post on setting up classroom libraries from the blog titled, Clutter-Free Classroom (the insurance man would like that!)

Ideas I found on Pinterest (some have links to click on for more info):