Thursday, September 20, 2012

Last spring CapEd funded two grants for our school; the paraprofessionals with the brain based items and Angie Young for a lego brick lab.  CapEd has chosen Angie's program to film for possible inclusion in future commercials.  The film crew will be here Monday to film different advanced groups as well as a Lego lesson with Sandy's class.  Congratulations Angie, and thank you for putting Middleton in the spotlight again.

Dr. Friend has been working with the district counselors over the past several years, bringing guidance and conversations around needs in this department.  We experienced cuts in this area a few years back and tried covering in multiple fashions.  Yet the fact was that Angie was being asked to not only serve three schools but 1,500 students.  This was a heavy load.  The district finally agreed to hire two additional days of counselor support for the elementary schools.

After multiple postings we had no certified counselors applicants.  Brooke Winston applied and was interviewed.   She is working with the district to apply for an emergency credential which will certify her for the year while she completes her requirements at BSU.  This week the district hired Brooke for the open position and redistributed Angie's time.  Beginning Tuesday Brooke will be assigned to our school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Angie will work with Mill Creek and Purple Sage and we will have three hours a week of her assistance with our PBIS work.  

We met today to facilitate the transition.  Kindergarten character lessons will move from Fridays to Tuesdays at the same time.  Brooke will start the social skill groups that Angie advertised and will follow up with the students Angie has been seeing.  Please continue to complete the referral form and submit to my box so that I can divide needs between Teresa and Brooke.  Brooke would also like to make herself available to upper grades for lessons.  This would help students gain confidence and awareness of our new counselor.  Just let her know.  Welcome back, Brooke!

Here is a brief message from Angie: "I want to thank you all for making me feel so welcomed and appreciated here at Heights the past year and a half. I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to work with such an amazing staff and students. I  look forward to the new opportunity here and still being able to see and work with you all."

We are missing two microphone headsets PLUS a full microphone system!  First grade is missing a lot of BASIC reading materials from the Open Court reading program, including multiple class sets of letter cards, read aloud books for each unit (x2), and various teacher editions.  We also seem to have lost a class set of  M-Comp universal screeners somewhere between students taking them and them being scored.  Please keep a look out for these items.  Hopefully we will be able to clean closets soon so that we can find things and put things away properly.

I also see a need to fix the system of getting copies and projects complete in the teacher workroom.  Some paraprofessionals are here early to complete work that has been left for them, but the copier is busy with other teachers making their own copies for the day.  That is neither good or bad, just a glitch to the system.  Teachers who have left items with what they think are specific directions are receiving copies they either can't use or are difficult to use, causing a great amount of waste in paper and copy costs. Things like word sorts being printed back to back so that they can not be cut out and sorted, wasting 900 copies!  Mass printing of Book It calendars is another example.   Possible solutions are to assign assistants to grade levels for such work or to map out blocks of time so that they can focus on specific tasks.   We can talk about this at leadership meeting and hopefully find a solution to the system so please provide information and feedback to your representative. 

And to finish for the evening.... here are a few objectives found posted in classrooms:

• I can use place value to add whole numbers.  I can use place value to round numbers to the nearest ten or hundred when adding 2 & 3 digit numbers.
• I can use properties of addition to solve equations.  
• I can use strategies and models to add numbers.  
• I can recognize fact families.