M-STEP snacks, $200, T-Shirts, $8.00— M-STEP Conquered, PRICELESS
Coming soon to Arno…
May 20
No events
May 21
3rd Grade BAS
5th Grade Parent Orientation at APMS 6:30
May 22
MTSS 7:45
2nd Grade BAS
5th Grade IEPs
May 23
1st Grade BAS
May 24
No events
May 27
Memorial Day– No School
May 28
5th Grade Health Lessons
DATA Dive
K BAS
May 29
5th Grade Health Lessons
NWEA rewards assembly
5th Grade IEPs
APHS Senior Walk
May 30
DATA Dive
SB Retirement Party
May 31
PBIS Reward Clubs
Report Card Window Opens
Arno Vision
Arno Elementary will provide a
system of support to empower
and inspire students to become
collaborative learners
that strive for academic excellence-
Thank you PTA
On behalf of the entire Arno staff I want to thank you for all of the good food and yummy treats throughout this Teacher Appreciation Week! Your thoughtfulness really matters to our staff and they are feeling VERY appreciated this week! Everyone knows it’s a lot of work and coordination to prepare such a wide variety of snacks and meals, gathering all of the volunteers, getting donations, and putting that extra special touch to show how much the staff is valued.
Thank you Again
Mr. Zielinski and the Entire Arno Staff
T-SHIRT Redesign
PTA is in search of new t-shirt designs for next year. . Please send all ideas to arnopta@gmail.com.
M-STEP is wrapped up
Although the scores will not be out for a few months, I can tell you that the effort our kids put into the test year was like no other year I’ve seen it. There were posters, cards for our M-STEPers from the younger grades, clapouts, and kids even writing themselves a personal message of encouragement on scrap paper before they started the test- it was AMAZING. We may not know all of the scores right now, but we do our kids are the BEST and gave their personal BEST and it is all attributable to our hard working, dedicated staff! Cheers to you!!
Kindergarten Roundup Wrap up
The classrooms and gym were packed for our annual Kindergarten Roundup! We had over 60 families attend the evening event and got to meet many of our new families that their future kindergartners. This was big increase in our numbers over last year! Thank you to Nickie, Cristina, Megan, Jeanine, Alyse, Sandy Bove, Amanda Madrigal, and Kelly Danson for all their help!
New Skating Party Announced
The PTA will be holding an end of the year skating party at LP Skating Party FREE admission- you can either bring skates or rent. Thanks to Patty Messer for winning this free party for Arno!
June 18 from 6:00-8:00
5th Grade Band Rocks the House!
Thank you to Mr. Skebo and all of our talented Band students!
Congrats to Wyatt Douglass and Hannah Booher for their Band Awards!
Congrats to our 4th and 5th Grade
What a beautiful spring concert this past Wednesday as we enjoyed any songs from our 4th and 5th graders at the APAC. Kudos to Tracy and Jeff for letting our students shine through song!
Tech Corner
All the apps/extensions you could ever want for Chrome
A NEW WORD CLOUD TOOL: WORD WANDERER
I really like the concept of word clouds. I think they can be a great resource in helping to determine what is important in reading, both for students and adults. They work well for getting to the heart of a piece of writing, whether that is the Declaration of Independence or Moby Dick. And there are a lot of good, free word cloud tools available with a nice variety of features: WordClouds.com, ABCYa! Word Clouds, Tagxedo, Wordle(website is no longer available, but there are desktop versions), TagCrowd, and Pro Word Cloud (which works inside PowerPoint), just to name a few. But there’s a new word cloud generator available that has something the others don’t, and that’s an easy way to manipulate the cloud that is created. Say hello to WordWanderer.
How This Word Cloud Tool Works
Just like any other word cloud tools, WordWanderer allows you to copy and paste text into a box and then creates a “cloud” grouping of the words in the text with those words that appear more often in a bigger font size. The ordering of the words is alphabetical from top to bottom, left to right. When hovering over a word, its relationship with other words, in terms of their rate of proximal co-occurrence in a text, are highlighted in color.
Adding a Context View
WordWanderer goes on to add a contextual view however. Clicking on a word selects it for the context view. Then the word sizing corresponds to how often the other words occur in the text near the selected word: the larger the word, the stronger the association between the words and the selected term. Vertical positioning is alphabetical and horizontal positioning represents sentence positions relative to the selected word. When in context view, the instances of the selected word are displayed below the visualization.
The Comparison View
And there is a third way to view. Dragging a line between two words triggers the comparison view. In this view a word’s size corresponds to the combined association strength with the two words. Here, the horizontal position represents the difference in association between the two selected words. If a word occurs more often with the left word, it will be placed more towards the left side of the screen.
To find a specific word, they’ve added a search function above the visualization. Simply type in a word and hit enter to activate this function. There is also an options feature (top right of the screen) which lets you set which types of words are included, based on their parts of speech. So you can hide common words like the, is, etc. All of the three views show a limited a number of words.
Using the Tool in the Classroom
WordWanderer includes six different pieces of literature as samples, so there is something for your students to practice with. These range from Hansel and Gretel to Jekyll and Hyde. This is a great resource for examining not only important documents and stories, but also critiquing their own writing. Are they using the same words over and over? Have they created strong relationships between words and ideas? Is the big idea that they are trying to convey coming across clearly? For other ideas about how to use word clouds with students, take a look at this article.