Miss Book Fair 2018

Coming soon to Arno…

Nov. 26

Mel-Nap Young 5s visit 8:45

Report Card window open

Nov. 27

Reflections Celebrations 9:00

Nov. 28

No events

Nov. 29

Staff Meeting 7:45

LLI Para training

Nov. 30

PBIS Reward

End of the 1st Trimester

Dec. 3

No events

Dec. 4

Steve @NCI

Dec. 5

No events

Dec. 6

Staff Holiday Luncheon 11:00

PTA Meeting 6:30

Dec. 7

Report Cards go home

Arno Vision

Arno Elementary will provide a system of support to empower

and inspire students to become collaborative learners

that strive for academic excellence

Special visitor to Arno

Lisa Smalley’s nephew, Caleb Foote, starring in ABC’s “The Kids are Alright” paid a special visit to our 4th grade today.  Check out some pics below and you can see his show on ABC every Tuesday at 8:30 p.m.

Please take a moment and read the communication link below for information on our Nov. 26th launch date for the new buzzer security system.

buzzer letter-19kvhyz

From the PTA

Happy Thanksgiving from the ARNO PTA! We hope you all have a happy, safe, and fun Holiday and we will see you back at school on November 26^th!

The Reflections Celebration for the students that have participated in the event will take place on 11/27/18. Invitations have been sent home.

We are in need of a few volunteers to help out during the celebration. If you would like to volunteer please sign up using this link:  https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0f4ca4aa2aa4fe3-20184

The Founders day nominations are due 11/30 please take a look at the link and submit and nomination!

 The categories are (last years winners are listed next to each category and can not be nominated again this year):

§  Outstanding educator-Nikkie Stanley

§  Distinguished service award-Shannon Mihalik

§  Outstanding business partner-ATS Tax Service

§  Outstanding program-Fun Run

§  Outstanding support personnel-Tim Tanskley

§  Council member of the year-Paulette Lenart

§  Michigan Life membership-Michelle DesJardins

All nominations are due by Friday, November 30th and will be voted on at the December PTA meeting. Nomination forms can be downloaded by visiting: https://sites.google.com/site/apptacouncil/founders-day.

Please submit your nominations to the ARNO office in a sealed envelope marked “PTA President- Founders’ Day” OR via email to arnopta@gmail.com with the subject: “PTA President- Founders’ Day”

The next PTA meeting is on 12/6/18 at 6:30 PM. The Founders’ Day voting will be held during this meeting so bundle up and come see us and vote! We hope to see you all there!

Conference totals

 Thank you for another successful round of conf.   Arno had 84% of parents attend this fall, up 1% from last year!

District-wide Holiday Toy Box Drive

The annual district-wide toy drive for local families, as in the past we are looking for donations of new or gently used clothing and toys.  The box for drop off is in the main office at our school until December.  Please consider donating something if you are able.

Board Recognition

Last blog we let our families and staff know that our social worker, Sandy Bennett, was awarded a Career Achievement Award at her state conference.  During the November Board meeting, she was recognized for her efforts and her outstanding work she does to service our Allen Park students, parents, and staff.

The Career Achievement Award is a prestigious honor, not annually awarded by MASSW.  In fact, there have been only 5 in the last 70 years and our Sandy is now one of the elite!

This award is reserved for recognizing an individual who has demonstrated exemplary services as a School Social Worker over a significant period of time, has developed creative programs, services, and/or interventions to improve or enhance the lives of children and families in the State of Michigan.

Congratulations Sandy!!

Christmas Story Time

I would like to once again come around to all of your rooms to give you a holiday 30 minute break, and read Christmas stories to your kids.  Please stop by or send me an email when you would like me to come in starting after Thanksgiving.

Christmas Luncheon

Please mark your calendars for Dec. 6th as we will be having our annual Staff Christmas Lunch.  We will do the one hour block again and will have a schedule when we get close.

Updates on the 3rd Grade Reading Law

Expand button below

Read Grade 3 Guide 638247 7 by Stephen Zielinski on Scribd

New!! Safeties of the Month from Ms. Higgins

I just wanted to share the exciting news of Safety of Month!  Each month I have selected 3 safeties to be “Safety of the Month.”  I have chosen an outdoor safety, a kindergarten/young 5’s safety and a door/hallway/bus safety  The safeties were awarded last month and were super excited for the honors!

If you notice a safety going above and beyond, please shoot me an email with their name, so they may be recognized!

Here are our September and October Safeties of the Month:

September:  Bailey Ellis, Ethan Armstrong, and Adrian Gonzalez

October: Katie Watkins, Sammy Unger, and Peter Lenart

Pop Can Tabs

Madeline Every has been collecting pop can tabs at our schools to benefit the Ronald McDonald House in Detroit for a number of years now and she continues this very important effort.  There will be a collection box in the office where you can drop off pop can tabs off to support her favorite charity.

Techie Time

For some additional intervention…

Readtheory.org

https://readtheory.org/

Accompany your students on a journey through our vast library of reading comprehension content. ReadTheory’s adaptive approach fosters improvement by automatically meeting learners at their own, individual ability levels. Signup takes seconds and no time is spent vetting assignments. Progress is shown on an intuitive report, replete with actionable, meaningful insights. Our program is completely free. 7.4 million students have completed 130 million quizzes on ReadTheory to date.

A Good Tool for Writing Reflections on Stories

Scholastic’s Character Scrapbook offers a good template that elementary school students can use to write about and reflect on the characters in their favorite stories. The template is quite simple to use. Students enter the name of a story and the name of their favorite character on the first page. On the next pages students list ten attributes of the character. The Character Scrapbook also allows students to create pictures of their favorite characters.

As you can see in the image above, Scholastic’s Character Scrapbook doesn’t limit students to human characters. Students can write about and create images of animal characters too.

Applications for Education
Scholastic’s Character Scrapbook could be a great tool for getting students to think about their favorite stories. The Character Scrapbook has an easy print option so that you can print and display all of your students’ works in your classroom.

Early Literacy eResources from MeL.org

October 1st marked the launch of the Library of Michigan’s new, updated,Michigan eLibrary!  Here is a look at a couple of the early literacy eResources available for use: World Book’s Early World of Learning is for PreK-3 grades and through their “Read” link you will be connected to Trek’s Travels and the Welcome to Reading area. Trek’s Travels offers a selection of early reader books with a read-along narrator. Welcome to Reading contains books for new readers with the same read-along narrator. Words are highlighted as the narrator reads so it’s easier for auditory learners to follow along.  Britannica offers Learning Zone which is for PreK-2nd grade kids. This resource offers activity-centered learning to explore, play, read and build technology skills. Letters, numbers, geography, shapes and more are included.

 

 Coming soon to Arno….

Nov. 12

Ad council

Book Fair Week Begins

Nov. 13

BF

SIP meeting 7:45

Stanley obs 9:30

Nov. 14

BF open until 6:30

PBIS Meeting 7:45

Steve in Lansing conf.

Nov. 15

BF

Picture Retake Day

Title I parent night 6:00

Nov. 16

BF wrap up

Nov. 19

No events

Nov. 20

Early Dismissal 11:30

Teacher PD p.m.

Nov. 21

No School

Nov. 22

Happy Thanksgiving!

Nov. 23

Shop ’till you drop

Arno Vision

Arno Elementary will provide a system of support to empower

and inspire students to become collaborative learners

that strive for academic excellence

Congratulations Sandy Bennett!

While attending the annual Michigan Association of School Social Workers State Conference in Kalamazoo, our very own Sandy Bennett was awarded the Career Achievement Award at the banquet last evening – it was a complete surprise to her!

The Career Achievement Award is a prestigious honor, not annually awarded by MASSW.  In fact, there have been only 5 in the last 70 years and our Sandy is now one of the elite!

This award is reserved for recognizing an individual who has demonstrated exemplary services as a School Social Worker over a significant period of time, has developed creative programs, services, and/or interventions to improve or enhance the lives of children and families in the State of Michigan.

Sandy Bennett has contributed significant time and effort to advance the visibility and viability of School Social Work throughout the State of Michigan through involvement on MASSW local and state level Boards, political action and advocacy and teaching, instructing and mentoring School Social Work interns and School Social Workers.  Sandy’s career spans 4 decades and she has been with Allen Park Public Schools for over 20 years.  Sandy’s professional contributions have been significant and far reaching, spanning across the State of Michigan and extending throughout the entire Midwest Region; devoting innumerable hours in support of her beloved profession of School Social Work.

It is with a tremendous amount of pride that we congratulate Sandy on this prestigious and well-deserved honor.  Please join the Allen Park Board of Education on Monday, November 12, 2018 at 7:00 p.m. at the Allen Park High School, Large Group Instruction Room, as we honor and celebrate Sandy Bennett!

OPEN ENROLLMENT FOR 2019 IS HERE.

STEPS TO TAKE IF YOU HAVE NOT DONE SO YET:

Directions:

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Christmas Story Time

I would like to once again come around to all of your rooms to give you a holiday 30 minute break, and read Christmas stories to your kids.  Please stop by or send me an email when you would like me to come in starting after Thanksgiving.

Christmas Luncheon

Please mark your calendars for Dec. 6th as we will be having our annual Staff Christmas Lunch.  We will do the one hour block again and will have a schedule when we get close.

District-wide Holiday Toy Box Drive

The annual district-wide toy drive for local families, as in the past we are looking for donations of new or gently used clothing and toys.  The box for drop off is in the main office at our school until December.  Please consider donating something if you are able.

The Book Fair is Coming! The Book Fair is Coming!!

From the Scary Halloween Cougars

Parade

Creepy Underwear… in Media 

Techie time

Supercharge Student Self-Editing Skills with this Writing Checker for Google Docs

Analyzing your own writing with a critical eye can be hard to do. I know, I try to do it every day and I still miss things that a fresh set of eyes quickly picks up. Like me, students often struggle to critically analyze their own writing. Peer editing is one solution to that problem. Another solution is to use an online writing checker the one that JoeZoo offers as a Google Docs Add-on. JoeZoo’s Monkey Checker is a customizable tool that students can use to evaluate their own written work and teachers, of all subjects, to save a lot of time assessing student work.

Five Key Features of JoeZoo’s Monkey Checker

• • JoeZoo’s Monkey Checker is a part of the JoeZoo Google Docs Add-onthat you can get right here. Once it is installed you can begin customizing how it works for you and your students.

• • You can pick the spelling, grammar, and punctuation rules that you want the Monkey Checker to identify. Many services will identify all errors, but if you want students to be responsible for self-identifying small errors and let Monkey Checker identify the bigger errors, you can have it do that. Or you can use the customizations to set different rules for different classes. For example, I might have Monkey Checker flag all errors for my ninth grade students and only have it flag bigger errors for my eleventh grade students.

• • Many grammar, spelling, and punctuation checkers will automatically fix errors for students. Monkey Checker only suggests corrections. I like that because it forces students to look at their mistakes and make corresponding corrections.

• • Errors are color coded within Google Docs. Errors of the same type are color coded and grouped for easy identification by students and teachers. This makes it easy to quickly identify the type of mistake that a particular student makes most often.

• The Monkey Checker tracks students’ self-editing progress and reports that information to teachers in a word cloud format.

Want to see these features in action? Watch this short video to see how you and your students can benefit from using JoeZoo’s Monkey Checker for Google Docs.

Bonus item!

• An originality checker is built into JoeZoo’s Monkey Checker. Sometimes students don’t intend to do it, but they end up including too much of another person’s work in their own papers. The originality checker lets teachers instantly check if a student copied any part of their work from other students in the class

13 Alternatives to Google Image Search – Chart

I’ve seen and you’ve seen it too many times; a student or colleague needs a picture for a project so goes to Google Images and right-clicks to save the first picture she likes without any consideration of copyright. Even though Google Images does have a usage rights filter there are still better places to find images that are either in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license.

In the chart that is embedded below I feature thirteen alternatives to using Google Image search. All of sites in the chart offer images that are either in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license.

If you cannot see the embedded chart, click here to view it as a Google Document.