Books - Still missing several Walnut Hills' Love and Logic books. Please return those to me ASAP. If you have any other book study books, please drop those off in my office as well. I will need The Leader In Me books back as it appears we will have a number of staff/parents engaged in that book study in June.
Speaking of The Leader In Me...if you were not able to join the study in May, we'd love to have you take part in our June study. This would be open to any staff member (associate, teacher, nutrition, custodian, etc.) and I'd like to especially extend the offer to our returning staff at MGE. Please add your name by clicking here. I will send information to those interested early next week.
Speaking of the book study...we are going to offer a Leadership Breakfast for all teachers next Tuesday morning (work day). The office staff will begin serving a "waffle bar" at 7:45a. At 8:05am, a member of the book study group and I would like to present some information for about 10 minutes around our learning during The Leader In Me book study and talk about MGE's next steps. RaeAnn will share next steps for WDE as well. This breakfast is open to all teachers and any other staff member who'd like to hear more. See you Tuesday morning!
Dates to note for 2013-14 is already in the works. Please bookmark the site and add any dates your team already has planned for the upcoming year.
Last Day Clap Out - 5th Graders will participate in a Clap-Out Parade at the end of Friday. See the details below:
- K-4 students will sit in the hallways against the walls/lockers by 3:25 p
- At 3:25p, 5th graders will begin to walk through the building starting by the 4th grade and progress all the way through the building to the kindergarten hallway. Encourage K-4 students to clap!
- They will turn around (U-turn) in the K-pod so they can proceed by each other and the main office and out the front doors.
- Students/parents may take pictures by the sculpture area before heading to the bus/cars.
- Two 5th grade teachers should lead the bus students to the north sidewalk and stay with them. Two 5th grade teacher (and SPED staff should be at the parent pick-up area)
- When all the 5th graders have exited, we will dismiss students as we always do at 3:40p (walkers and bus by bus). Do not dismiss early!
- All teachers should be in hallways and then outside to help on last day! Grade level teachers should be out at the sidewalk to wave goodbye to students on buses. Related Arts/SPED at parent pick up or buses.
Final Thoughts for the Year
...please find time to read on. Even if its next week. :-)
We have much to celebrate, but wanted to share out with the entire staff some of the data our teachers saw last week at our last PD and my commentary/beliefs on why we saw this data.
First, we met our academic goal of 80% of our students reaching
the end of the year benchmark expectation! Way to go team!
Next, last year, our building was on the NCLB watch list, specifically
for the performance of our low-SES students in the area of reading.
This past year, we had a significant reduction in the percentage of
students not proficient within this same sub group in reading.
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| Maple Grove Students |
This nearly 10% reduction at MGE was even more amazing considering
the district percentage for Low SES students did not change hardly at all.
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| All Waukee Students |
We won't know whether our No Child Left Behind status will change due
to this data, but we should celebrate regardless!
We saw very similar results in math for our Low SES students! In math, we
also noticed a large increase in "advanced" or high performing students at MGE.
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| MATH SCORES - IA Assessment |
So...what was the trick or the magic? I have thought a lot about this
and believe it has a lot to do with the people (you) and the focus we
had this year. Lots of work, learning and implementation of concepts
around Teaching with Love and Logic and the conversation, ideas and
implementation of activities with students around Growth Mindsets.
Is that too easy of an answer? I don't think so. I saw a quote during the book
study, The Leader In Me, that I have seen a ton of times before but it hit home
even more this spring:
You care. They notice. You "work" less. They work harder.
I've seen it over and over and truly believe this spring, you lived through it.
Some can say that Waukee is getting too big and what we do now won't work
as we continue to add kids, adults, families, buildings, etc.
...but you showed it can work. We made it work with 770+ kids.
Each day.
Every day.
Until the end.
...because you cared. Because you noticed. Because you believe.
I cannot tell you how I excited I am to continue our work we've been doing
this year around mindsets, love and logic, leadership, feedback and engaging
students in assessing their own growth. It's good stuff and we will continue
to grow it (including outside the classroom walls) and making it our own.
Enjoy your summer and be ready to get fired up again this fall.
It will be another fun one.
I believe.
