February 21, 2020

Hear Ye, Hear Ye

• The collaboration on Monday was energizing and productive. I heard many in-depth conversations that ended with consensus as well as clear success criteria rubrics.  Great Work!
• Students were so excited to receive tickets for showing kindness at recess this week. They seemed so proud of themselves when they were recognized for their kind actions.
• Students were engaged and followed assembly expectations at this week's assembly.  It was music to my ears to hear their laughs and giggles!

What's Happening at Dodgeland?

• Monday, Feb. 24
• Read Across America Week Starts with Assembly at 11:30 in the elem. gym
• School Board meeting at 6:30pm
• Tuesday, Feb 25
• Wear Red Day - Clifford the Big Red Dog Day
• Wednesday, Feb 26
• Vocabulary Parade at 8:15am
• Grade Level Data meeting for Grade 2 @ 12:05
• Elem. Staff meeting @ 3:10 in the IMC
• Thursday, Feb 27
• Author Visit, Stef Wade
• 8:30-9:15 for 4K-2nd grade, and 10:15-11:00 for grades 3-5
• Kindness Day - Do a Kind Act - Piggie & Elephant Day
• Jenny is gone for the day
• Read Across America Family night 6-7pm
• Friday, Feb 28
• Pajama Day - Good Night Moon Day

Nitty-Gritty

• PD Day Follow-Up
• Our last full PD day is on March 16th.  Before the day, please complete success criteria for 3 of the domains for ELA.  Art, Music and PE - Complete success criteria for 1 of your grades.
• Next steps for our Target-based grading planning is:
• Finalize our report card format (I'll take your information from Monday's grade level discussions to bring a second draft to analyze.)
• Brainstorm and create success criteria for the Citizenship grading rubric
• Finish the rest of the domains for ELA.

• Reminder:
• Please look over the scope and sequence documents and sign up to preview the Bridges Math from the email that was sent on Monday.  On March 2, I will be sending a survey to get your input and opinions. If you have any trouble getting on the site, please let me know.

• Assembly Follow-up
• In case you are interested, there are some follow-up activities to our energy conservation assembly from Tuesday.  Click here to see activities that you can use in your classrooms.

PD Spotlight

This week was Random Acts of Kindness and next week we start Read Across America with a theme of Kindness and Empathy.  There is a lot of research that has been reported regarding the benefits of kindness.  What I find interesting is that the kindness does not have to be given or received in order to benefit a person.  In fact, observing others being kind to others has noticeable benefits to the observers as well.  I watched this Ted Talk called "Kindness is the Cure."  The whole video is about 16-17 min. long and I realize you may not have time to watch the whole thing in one sitting.  However, I would encourage you to check it out.  So as we emphasize kindness and encourage our students to create habits of acting kind, it is also important that they are observing kindness as well. The past week (and this upcoming week), we have been (or will be) focusing our attention on kind acts.  Just as Cindy Grimes states, "Energy flows where our attention goes and it grows in your conscious awareness, whether it is objectively true or not."  I challenge us as a team of educators that are working hard to help our students develop strong SEL skills and habits of kindness, to pay attention to the kindness we see around us every day and allow our students and colleagues to benefit from observing kind acts that we participate in too. 

Friday Funny