Monthly Archives: August 2023

Welcome Back Arno Staff!  

“You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting, so … get on your way!” – Dr. Seuss

Coming soon to Arno…

August 30

Medical Plan Meetings 

Lunch Staff Meeting 9:00

August 31

Teacher Welcome Back

First Staff Meeting

Meet the Teacher 

Meet the Teacher (Schedule below)

• • Meet the Teacher Night will be an Open House on August 31 from 6:30-7:30pm.

  • Students are encouraged to attend Meet the Teacher Night with their family.

  • Meet the Teacher attendance will be staggered to help with parking  Please arrive and depart promptly according to the schedule below.

• Families will be divided into two groups by alphabet with 20 minute sessions (6:30-6:50 and 7:00-7:20)

• Last Names A-M — 6:30-6:50pm
• Last Names N-Z — 7:00-7:20pm
• If your family has multiple last names, please follow the schedule for your oldest child’s last name

Sept. 5

First Day of School

Sept. 7

First PTA Meeting 6:30

Sept. 8

Fire Drill 2:00

Sept. 14

ALICE Drill 10:00- Full Evac

Sept. 20

JR 5th Grade testing

Sept. 21

Tornado Drill 10:00

Sept. 22

PTA Fun Run!!

Sept. 27

JR 4th Grade testing

Fire Drill 12:50

Sept. 28 

JR 3rd Grade testing

ARNO MISSION

ARNO ELEMENTARY…INSPIRING STUDENTS TOWARD ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE.

ARNO VISION

ARNO ELEMENTARY PROVIDES A SUPPORTIVE HIGH QUALITY ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE TO INSPIRE ALL LEARNERS TO ACHIEVE THEIR PERSONAL BEST.

ARNO COLLECTIVE COMMITMENTS

• Academics are student-centered, which allow for various learning styles to showcase student achievement.

• We will develop and maintain a positive, respectful relationship with each student by using flexibility and adaptability to meet individual needs

• We will foster safe learning environments that allow students the opportunity to establish a growth mindset

• We will support each other as colleagues by collaborating as a team using a respectful dialogue when analyzing data to positively impact student achievement.

Welcome Back Arno Staff!!

Arno Staff 2023-2024

New Lunch Schedule

This year we are pleased to welcome Deak Swearingen to Life Skills, and Sarah Kaminski to our ECP program!  Welcome to Arno Deak and Sarah!

Deak Swearingen

Hello to all my new colleagues, I am excited to be joining Allen Park Public Schools! I am a downriver rink rat, who now enjoys sand volleyball and fishing in the summer, and hunting in the fall and winter. I have been in the adapted physical education field for more than 13 years at both the Elementary, Secondary, and Collegiate level. I enjoy immensely watching my daughter develop in Preschool here in Allen Park, and my wife is a former Jag alumni. I will be at multiple schools this year, but hope to meet and learn from everyone in Allen Park!

Sarah Kaminski

Hello, my name is Sarah Kaminski and I have worked in the Allen Park School District for 6 years. The majority of this time has been as a reading aide at Bennie Elementary. Currently, I live in Belleville with my fiancé, Dennis and our dog, Pecan. In my free time I enjoy doing puzzles and crafting. I am excited to start the fall as the new ECP teacher and work with the little ones! Can’t wait to make new friends and connections! Go Cougars!

New Committee

I have created a new committee that will have a lot of importance.  The committee will be a combo of communication and dealing with the absent/tardy problem that is plaguing schools.  The communication is resulting to not only the building surveys that show inconsistent home communication from teacher to teacher, but also at the district level as it will also be part of the new strategic plan this year.  I would encourage anyone who would like to pioneer this new group, to sign up.  In the meantime, this article came out recently on a national level for your reference:

A Stanford study reveals record-high chronic absenteeism after COVID lockdowns with over 25% of students missing 10% of their classes during the 2021-22 school year.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/6-5-million-students-chronically-absent-after-pandemic-new-study-shows

From the Parent Blog:

Important Attendance Information

Please read the attitude article on the importance of student attendance, which is mandatory by the laws of the State of Michigan.  Please be aware that we are required to follow up with families either verbally, in writing, or both when absences reach the 10 full day mark.

The attendance/tardy process:

• Ten full day absences- 1st attendance letter sent home

• 5 additional absences- 2nd attendance letter sent home

• Ongoing after 15 absences- referral to our liaison officer for truancy

TARDIES

• Students are considered tardy after 8:40am

• After 8:40 am, Parents will be required to walk their student into the office to sign them into the building

• If a student has accumulated 5 tardies in a row, the parent will need to sign an acknowledgement letter of the tardies

• After 15 tardies, a meeting will take place with the principal to discuss possible solutions.

Excessive tardy arrival/very early dismissal

• Student arrival after 9:30am will equal a half-day AM absence

• Student dismissal that takes place prior to 2:30pm with count for a half-day PM absence

• Picking up your student between 2:30 and 3:30 does not count for anything

RtP_Attendance

From the PTA

Hello Cougar Families! 

Your new 2023/2024 school year PTA Board is as follows:

President: Xina Bagger

Vice President: Meaghan Bachman

Treasurer: Kristy Varkoly

Secretary: Sarah Wald

The Parent Teacher Association (PTA) is an all-volunteer, parent-run, non-profit organization that works cooperatively with school administration and educators to provide opportunities for our students and families to socialize by providing fun family events and in-school opportunities. We have provided our students and families with school assemblies, Field Day, Family Fun Nights, the Daddy Daughter Dance, the Mother Son Night, Christmas events, playground and gym equipment, student technology, Staff Appreciation Week, Spirit Wear and so much more!

Meet the Teacher Night is Thursday August 31^st at 6:30pm. Please stop by our table by the main doors to meet your board members, learn about the PTA, how to become a member, and get a chance to win Detroit Tigers tickets!

Our 1st PTA Meeting will be held on Thursday September 7^th at 6:30 pm in the Arno Media Center (and every FIRST Thursday of the month thereafter). Childcare is always available, thanks to our National Junior Honor Society volunteers!  We might just have some cool giveaways, like Detroit Tiger Tickets!

A Membership Drive will run from September 6^th through October 7^th and our theme this year is “Membership is Sweet”.  The class that receives the most memberships will win an Ice Cream Social!  Forms will be sent home on the first week of school and a link will be posted on our Facebook page. You can find us on Facebook by searching @arnoelementarypta – be sure to like our page, we occasionally give away cool stuff like Detroit Tigers tickets – a member only perk! Check out the flyer below for more details on the PTA and scan the QR Code to link you directly to our Arno PTA membership page! Please consider joining – the cost is $7 for staff and your membership helps support so much.

We have a lot planned for the upcoming school year and are very excited to kick off the season with our annual Arno Fun Run, which will be held on Friday September 22^nd. This is our biggest and most important fundraiser of the year. More details to follow.

Please remember that your input/suggestions/concerns are both encouraged and appreciated so that we know how to better our events. So please reach out via email (arnopta@gmail.com) or attend our meetings! And remember, PTA members get early access to info, first dibs on volunteer events, a chance at our raffles, and can vote on events/funding/student advocacies! Please consider becoming a member this school year!  As always, we appreciate your support! Please consider volunteering or serving as a chairperson at one of our events. If we do not have a chairperson for an event, it is at risk of being cancelled. For more information or if you would like to volunteer, please email the PTA at arnopta@gmail.com.

Stay tuned for more exciting news/events/announcements/reminders from your PTA via email, memberhub and/or our Facebook page! We are so excited for the 2023/2024 school year and can’t wait to share these great experiences with our Caring Cougars!

Classroom assessment thoughts

As we head into the new school year- to some degree, this can be done at all levels…

As you're thinking about classroom assessments next year, remember that we grade against criteria for standards, outcomes, learning goals, i.e., evidence of learning, NOT the vehicle used to deliver that evidence. So, unless we're teaching the assessment format itself, whether or…

— Rick Wormeli (@rickwormeli2) July 5, 2023

Vocab Tool from Sarah

Pear Deck has a Flashcard Factory component that allows you to create flashcards with your students for vocab words! Then it will take the flashcards and turn them into a quizlet. Thought many of you may find this helpful to use, so take a look at the video below to learn more.

https://youtu.be/wlVKjTuoXko

Door Assignments 2023-24

*Please note we can also arrange for siblings to go to the same doors

Door Assignments

TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DATES

This year, the district calendar reflects 7 days of teacher PD.  Those half-day PD dates feature no school in the afternoon, 11:30 dismissal.  The dates for this school year are as follows:

8/31, 10/31 (ER), 11/7, 1/19, 2/9, 3/15, & 5/3 (ER)

REQUIRED PLC meetings (45 Minutes on September, October, December, April). Please remember to list your dates, and share agendas in the folder. 

PBIS BEGINNING OF THE YEAR STATIONS AND FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES

Thursday, September 7, 2023

There will be 10 minutes spent at each station which includes the discussion and travel time between stations.  You will rotate in sequential order.

Start Times and Stations

8:45a–Huntington (1), Talamonti (2), Johnson (3), Pushman (4), Watson (5)

9:35a–Warneck (1), Guyot (2), Kalis (3), Schultz (4), Martinchick (5)

10:25a–Garza (1), Zuke (2), Higgins (3), Cervantes (4), Amonette (5)

11:55a–Haskin (2), Harrison (3), Mercer (4), Roller (5)

**Presenters, please note that the 11:55a rotation are all littles.  Please shorten your presentation to short attention spans, highlighting the big ideas.  Thank you for making this accommodation!**

               1. Office Expectations

                Staff: Kim Dowd or Cathy Anderson

                Location: outside of office for space

2. Assembly and Bullying Expectations

               Staff: Andrea Alvarez

               Location:  gym or outside

3. Bus Expectations

               Staff: Steve Zielinski

               Location: bus located in parking area

4. Cafeteria Expectations

               Staff: ????

               Location: Cafeteria

5. Hallway Expectations

               Staff: Aly Kubik

               Location: hallway outside of Media Center/Computer Lab

Follow-Up Activities

~Posters for the hallway

~Individual positive messages

~Write about it in your journal

~Review classroom matrix and expectations

~Draw a picture of when you were kind/somebody was kind to you

~Allen Park Elementary PBIS website (brand new from Kendra Payette-Linn!)

~Watch a PBIS video clip

RESA PBIS website–“Videos” dropdown on the page

http://apps.mi.safeschools.com/login

Tech Time

Ten Tools for Gathering Real-time Feedback From Students

I’m taking the week off to do a bunch of fun things with my kids. While I’m away the most popular posts of the year so far will reappear.

Chat tools and polling services provide good ways to hear from all of the students in a classroom. These kinds of tools, often referred to as backchannel tools, allow shy students to ask questions and share comments. For your more outspoken students who want to comment on everything, a feedback mechanism provides a good outlet for them too. Over the years I’ve used a variety of feedback tools in my classroom. This is my updated list of backchannel and informal assessment tools for gathering real-time feedback from students.

Classroomscreen is a service that lets you create a homescreen on which you can place reusable countdown timers, stopwatches, polls, noise meters, random name selectors, and more helpful classroom management tools. With the polling tool in Classroomscreen you can display a question for your students and have them respond with a multiple choice selection or by choosing a smiley face. See my screenshot below for more details.

Yo Teach! lets you create online backchannel spaces to facilitate discussions. To get started on Yo Teach! simply go to the site and name your room. You can get started by just doing those two steps, but I would recommend taking a another minute to scroll down the Yo Teach! site to activate the admin function, the password function, and to select “avoid search.”  The “avoid search” option will hide your room from search results so that people cannot find it without being given its direct URL. The password function lets you set a password that must be entered before students can participate in the chat. The admin features of Yo Teach! let you mute or remove students from a discussion, delete your room, and view statistic about the usage of your room. The admin function that reveals statistics will show the names of participants and how active they have been in your Yo Teach! room. Here’s a video overview of Yo Teach!

ClassPoint. It’s a great little tool that you can use to build interactive quizzes and polls into your PowerPoint presentations. You can also use it to annotate slides, create whiteboards on the fly, and share your annotations with students. In this short video I provide a demonstration of how ClassPoint works. The video shows a teacher’s perspective and a student’s perspective of how ClassPoint can be used in your classroom.

Ziplet is a service for gathering feedback from your students in a variety of ways. The simplest way is to create an exit ticket by using one of the dozens of pre-written questions provided by Ziplet. Ziplet does not require students to have accounts to respond to exit ticket questions. Students can simply enter an exit ticket code that you give to them before they answer the question. What Ziplet offers that is somewhat unique is the option to respond directly to individual students even when they are responding to a group survey. The purpose of that feature is to make it easy to ask follow-up questions or to give encouragement to students based on their responses to a question posed to the whole group. Here’s a short video about how to use Ziplet.

Plickers is a great student response system for classrooms that aren’t 1:1 or for anyone who would rather not have to go through the trouble of trying to get all students onto the same webpage or chatroom at the beginning of a lesson. Plickers uses a teacher’s iPad or Android tablet in conjunction with a series of QR codes to create a student response system. Students are given a set of QR codes on large index cards. The codes are assigned to students. Each code card can be turned in four orientations. Each orientation provides a different answer. When the teacher is ready to collect data, he or she uses the Plickers mobile app to scan the cards to see a bar graph of responses. Click here for three ideas for using Plickers in your classroom.

Mentimeter is an audience response tool lets you create polls and quizzes for your audience to respond to during your presentations. Responses to open-ended poll questions can be displayed as a word cloud, but there isn’t a true chat function in Mentimeter. You can create and display polls and quizzes from the Mentimeter website or you can use their PowerPoint Add-in to display your polls and quizzes from your slideshow. Your audience members can respond from their phones, tablets, or laptops.

The Q&A function built into the presentation mode of Google Slides is a good option for gathering questions from students when they are viewing slides that you or their classmates present. Likewise, posting a simple question in Google Classroom is a good way to quickly get a sense of what your students know about a topic before you begin a lesson or what they think was important in a lesson that you just taught.

Poll Everywhere is a service that allows you to collect responses from an audience via text messaging. The free plan for K-12 educators provides selection of features and quantity of responses that is adequate for almost any classroom. One of the neat ways to display feedback gathered through Poll Everywhere is in word clouds.

I’ve been using Padlet since it was called WallWisher back in 2009. Padlet enables me to have students not only share exit responses as text, but to also share exit responses as hyperlinks. For example, if my students have been working on research projects I will ask them to share a link to something they found that day along with an explanation of how it is relevant to their research.

Formative provides you with a place to create online assignments that your students can respond to in class or out of class. Assignments can be as simple as one question exit tickets like “what did you learn today?” to complex quizzes that use a combination of multiple choice, short answer, and true/false questions. You can assign point values to questions or leave them as ungraded questions. The best feature of Formative is the option to create “show your work” questions. “Show your work” questions enables students to draw responses and or upload pictures as responses to your questions. When you use this question type students will see a blank canvas directly below the question. On that canvas they can draw and or type responses.

Lego Time 

Need LEGO Ideas? Take a Look at This!

Making things with LEGOs is one of my favorite indoor activities to do with my daughters. We’ve spent many rainy days building all kinds of things LEGOs. Often we follow the directions from a guidebook and sometimes we just make our own things. Every once in a while they ask for another LEGO guidebook.

 

I’m been happy to buy my daughters LEGO guidebooks even if they aren’t always patient as they wait for the Amazon delivery of those books. I recently, through Open Culture, learned of a remedy to that problem. Recently, I learned that the Internet Archive hosts more than 6,800 LEGO guidebooks.

In the Internet Archive’s collection of LEGO instruction books you’ll find directions for building everything from a birdhouse to an airplane to a tiger and much, much more.  The directions can be viewed online and or downloaded as colorful PDFs to print. The PDF of directions for building a tiger was an exact copy of what I would have found had I purchased the LEGO kit for building a tiger.

Applications for Education
If you have a big box of LEGOs in your classroom, bookmark this collection of LEGO instructions and perhaps print a few to place in that box.