Awesome example of Superb teaching at Arno
Coming soon to Arno…
Feb 18
No School- Winter Break
Feb 19
No School- Winter Break
Feb 20
MTSS 7:45
SIP 7:45
MEMSPA conf – Steve
Founders Day Banquet
Feb 21
Safety Committee Meeting 9:30
Feb 22
No Events
Feb 25
No Events
Feb 26
3rd Grade Maple Syrup
Feb 27
PTA Restaurant Fundraiser
District PBIS Meeting 1:00
3rd Grade Maple Syrup
Feb 28
3rd Grade Maple Syrup
SIP Full Day
March 1
Report Card Window Opens
PBIS Reward
Gordon Miller Visit 1:00
Arno Vision
Arno Elementary will provide a system of
support to empower and inspire students to become
collaborative learners that strive for academic excellence-
NWEA Celebration
As you may have watched the video already- we celebrated the student’s accomplishments in NWEA- but they are also your accomplishments. Starting with the first day of kindergarten to holding a certificate of accomplishment- your skills in teaching our Cougars is evident everyday and you should be proud that your the reason they stand so tall…
Cookie Dough Fundraiser Deadline Approaching
It appears that the fundraiser is going well so far. Please remind students that the deadline for all sales to be completed and turned in with payment is Feb. 22
March is Reading is Here! Please see the attachment below
MIRM Teachers 2019-2mbstck
3rd Grade Reading Laws Updates:
https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mde/Read_Grade_3_Guide_638247_7.pdf
February is Black History Month!
Every day this month, the Arno Announcements are highlighting a special African American person in history – ranging from Rosa Parks to Lebron James! During these announcement videos, students are learning interesting facts and accomplishments by past and present scientists, athletes, artists, activists and more.
In addition to this special programming, classroom teachers are extending instruction with various activities. In the school library, there is a designated area of books featuring African American characters and book pertaining to African American history.
Keep the conversation going at home! Ask your child who they learned about in each day’s announcements. Use multiple resources to do more research – like YouTube, books from the local library, and visits to museums and institutions that highlight black history, including:
Henry Ford Museum
Motown Museum
Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History
Detroit Historical Museum
Detroit Institute of Arts
We are so proud of the diversity at Arno, and the new learning happening everyday! Keep it up, Arno Cougars!
Let’s get some Wings!!
buffalo wild wings-y2tyep
Kindergarten Registration 2019
Kindergarten Enrollment Flyer 2019-20 School Year-2ko4e62
Zumba Reward
Arno students finally were able to enjoy the January PBIS reward- Zumba. As you can see below, it takes lots of energy to keep up!
From the PTA
Join us at Buffalo Wild Wings, located at 13655 Eureka Drive in Southgate on February 27 th 2019. All day, 20% of ALL purchases will be given back to ARNO PTA! Flyers will be sent home next week. Flyer must be presented.
-Our next PTA meeting is March 7 th . Arno teachers/staff will present proposals for items they would like the PTA to consider assisting them with. Hope to see you there!
-Spirit wear has been discounted!! Children’s shirts are $5 and Adults are $10 (2x and up are an additional $2) Spirit wear will be available at our March meeting. The PTA accepts cash, check or credit/debit card.
-Join us March 9 th at Spring Fever (9am-3pm at APHS) to bid on gift certificates, baskets and other auction items. You can also treat yourself to some bake goods, and shop the craft show and mom 2 mom sale.
-Mom2mom and vendor tables are still available. More Spring Fever information can be found at https://apptacouncil.weebly.com/
-Do you own a business, or belong to a club or department and want to help AP students further their education? The PTA is looking for basket donations for the silent auction.
-Please email ARNOPTA@gmail.com if you are interested in making a donation.
Are you interested in becoming part of the PTA executive board? If so please email
ARNOPTA@gmail.com with your full name and the position. Your name will be added to the ballot. Voting will take place at our April meeting.
PTA Spring Fever is Almost Here!
Spring Fever Craft & Vendor Show-Now Renting Tables-25klkfa
Here’s a list of the Smencil sales dates:
Trauma Informed Mindfulness – Five teaching guidelines to help stressed students engage in mindfulness programs and fully reap the benefits
January 16, 2018
Do your mindfulness students fall asleep? Daydream? Use the time to plan their evening? Giggle? Try to distract other group members?
These responses might have a variety of reasons behind them. Your students may in fact be tired, unsure of the instructions, or engaging in their habitual social roles.
Or –they may be stressed and therefore having difficulty engaging in the practices, even if they’d like to. Perhaps there was a car accident on the way to school; perhaps their beloved pet is ill and dying; perhaps there is violence in the home or neighborhood.
Because it is impossible to know which of our mindfulness students on any given day are arriving to the session in a fight/flight/freeze stress reaction, following trauma-informed guidelines will allow the greatest number of students to engage in the practices, and thus gain the benefit of them.
Mindfulness practices have many short and long term benefits, and research shows these benefits may be even greater for those who come to them with increased stress or trauma histories. Therefore, these guidelines are even more important when we are teaching to groups known to have traumatic stress due to PTSD, high ACES scores or a current acute trauma such as the death of a parent.
Five Guidelines:
- Give control to the participants through options and choices – When our brain is stressed, feeling out of control, anything that sounds like a demand or command will increase this sense of being out of control. Give options and choices early and often—eyes open or closed? If open, on your lap, on the desk, on the floor?
- Teach ways to self-sooth and calm in advance – When someone is trying to be present—therefore not fleeing or freezing, “fight” is a common response of the brain. Therefore teaching simple methods to self-sooth and calm the nervous system when encountering self-critical thoughts prior to any mindfulness or awareness exercise enhances control. Learning to notice when we are stressed and taking steps to down-regulate our own nervous system is an valuable life skill.
- Begin with orienting students to time, space, grounding and doing a practice to down –regulate the nervous system. Why not start the practices in ways known to calm and sooth, bring us into the here and now, and away from other times and places that might include unpleasant memories?
- Limit silence until students know how to work with it constructively. Our minds wander most during silent meditation, and it wanders preferentially to the unpleasant, due to the negativity bias of the brain. Learning to work with the wandering mind one of the things that builds new neural networks in the brain. Limiting silence for beginners can help grow confidence in the practices.
- Increase structure in the class and in the meditation itself –Structure can provide a sense of security so look for ways to increase it. “If you can name it, you can tame it” is a neuroscience truism. Teaching naming skills for present-moment experiences. Find ways to break down meditation instructions into manageable steps.
Tech Time
How to Create a Self-grading Quiz from Google Classroom
This afternoon I received an email from a reader who had watched one of my YouTube videos about Google Forms. She wanted to know if it was better to manually place the link to her Google Form into Google Classroom or if she should make the Form within Google Classroom. The answer is that it doesn’t really make a huge difference which way you do it because the Form will operate the same regardless of how it was started. All that said, here’s how you can create a Google Forms quiz from your Google Classroom Classwork page.
Ten Overlooked Google Docs Features
On Monday I featured ten overlooked Google Slides features. Like Google Slides, Google Docs has a lot of features that new users often don’t notice. Some these are features that even experienced Google Docs users overlook. Some of these features will save you time, some will give you more formatting flexibility, and others will improve the way that you share your documents.
1. Word Art
Just like in Google Slides, you can insert Word Art into Google Documents. The process of using Word Art requires that you use the “drawing” option found in the “insert” drop-down menu. Word Art is great for inserting colorful headlines into your documents.
2. Insert your signature
Once again the “drawing” option found in the “insert” drop-down menu is quite helpful. Use the drawing pad’s free-form line drawing tool to create your signature and insert it into a document. You can do this with a mouse, but if you have a touch-screen computer it is even easier to do. Inserting your signature is a great way to personalize letters that you send home to parents.
3. File Export
Not everyone with whom you have to share documents is going to jump on the Google Docs bandwagon. For example, I used to write for a publication that only accepted Word files. That didn’t mean that I had to write my articles in Word. I wrote my articles in Google Docs then just downloaded those articles as Word docs before sending them off as attachments. You can also download your Google Documents as PDFs, Rich Text documents, HTML, Plain Text, Open Document, and ePub.
4. Sharing Restrictions
One the original selling points of Google Docs was document sharing and collaboration. That feature is still the thing that makes Google Docs special. In fact, just yesterday at the BETT Show I saw someone presenting just that feature. But sometimes you want to share your documents without letting other people make copies of them or print them. So when you open your sharing settings select “advanced” and you can prevent people from copying, downloading, or printing your documents.
Restricting printing is a great option to use when you just want someone to look at your document for a final review but you don’t want them to print it. For example, when writing up a IEP you might want a colleague to look at it, but you don’t want him or her to print it because you know that he or she is the one who sends everything to a network printer and then forgets to pick it up for an hour.
5. Voice Typing
It used to be that you needed a third-party application in order to use voice input in Google Docs. Now you can just open the “tools” drop-down menu and select “voice typing” to start using voice input into Google Documents.
6. Google Keep Notepad
Are your students using Google Keep to bookmark references for inclusion in a research paper? If so, they can access those bookmarks without having to leave Google Docs. They can access those bookmarks and insert them into their documents by opening the Google Keep Notepad from the “tools” drop-down menu.
7. Change Default Page Layout
The question that new Google Docs users ask me more than any other is, “can I use landscape mode?” Yes, you can use landscape mode. Open the “file” drop-down menu and select “page setup.” From there you can change the page orientation, the page size, change and set default margins, and you can even change the page’s background color.
8. Columns & Grids
Need columns in your document? You can insert those from the “format” drop-down menu. However, the columns will apply to the whole page. If you only need columns for part of the page, use the “table” drop-down menu to insert a simple 1×2 table. The table’s cells will expand as you type.
9. Headers, Footers, and Page Numbers
In the early years of Google Docs headers, footers, and page numbers had to be manually inserted. Today, you can have headers, footers, and page numbers automatically inserted into your document by making those selections from the “insert” menu. You can even apply them retroactively.
10. Import & Convert Word Documents
If your school is transitioning from a Windows environment to a G Suite environment, you probably have old Word documents that you’d prefer to not have to copy and paste or rewrite entirely. You can import and have those old documents instantly converted to Google Docs format. There are two ways to do this. First, if you just have one or two documents you can import them by selecting “file upload” in Google Docs. Second, if you have a lot of Word documents, bundle them into a folder then use the “folder upload” function in Google Drive. Just make sure your Google Drive settings (the gear icon in the upper-right corner) is set to “automatically convert to Google Docs.”
