Coming soon to Arno…
Oct. 2
JR testing 2nd grade
Oct. 4
Walk (Or Bike ride) to School Day!
JR testing 1st grade
Oct. 5
Picture Day
Staff meeting 7:45
PTA Meeting 6:30
Oct. 6
Fire Drill 10:30 am
Oct. 11
PBIS Meeting 8:00
Oct. 17
Culver Scholarship Fundraising Night 5:00-8:00 pm
Oct. 18
Teacher Data Day per schedule
SIP meeting 8:00 am
Oct. 23
District MTSS meeting 9:15 am
Oct. 25
Reading Committee meeting 8:00
Oct. 26
SEL Committee meeting 8:00
Oct. 27
Math Committee meeting 8:00
October. 31
Halloween Parade 10:00 am
Early Release 11:30 am/Teacher PD pm
Looking Ahead
Nov. 2
Cougar Cash Lunch
Cookie Dough Fundraiser Kickoff
PTA Meeting 6:30 pm
Nov. 4
Holiday Fever
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
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ACADEMICS ARE STUDENT-CENTERED, WHICH ALLOW FOR VARIOUS LEARNING STYLES TO SHOWCASE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT.
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WE WILL DEVELOP AND MAINTAIN A POSITIVE, RESPECTFUL RELATIONSHIP WITH EACH STUDENT BY USING FLEXIBILITY AND ADAPTABILITY TO MEET INDIVIDUAL NEEDS
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WE WILL FOSTER SAFE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS THAT ALLOW STUDENTS THE OPPORTUNITY TO ESTABLISH A GROWTH MINDSET
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WE WILL SUPPORT EACH OTHER AS COLLEAGUES BY COLLABORATING AS A TEAM USING A RESPECTFUL DIALOGUE WHEN ANALYZING DATA TO POSITIVELY IMPACT STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT.
DATA DIVE
Our first teacher data dive is coming up the link to sign up is below for October 18. At our first meeting, we will also be joined by Beth and Erin Jackson to help support our discussions. Our time will be spent looking at the NWEA results, quadrant charts, FAST, and BAS/JR. I look forward to our initial conversations!
Sign Up October 18
COMMITTEE WORK
PBIS
At this month’s meeting, we organized the monthly rewards, subcommittees, holiday cash, Smencils, and Super Cougars. We discussed Tier 2, mentors and RESA training availability. The November meeting was canceled due to scheduling conflicts.
MATH
- A video demonstration of Number Talks was shared with the group and discussed
- A resource book on Number Talks was also shared with examples of how to use it in lessons
READING
- Present: Beth, Renee, Rachel, Nina, Nicole, Megan J*Discuss the strategies we used last year for M-STEP prep – we decided to continue all*Discuss possible focus for this year -grammar
-writing
-stamina
*Discuss problems with Edmentum
-doesn’t sink with new scores throughout the year
-so far this year it is not individualized, just grade level content
-can’t start the trophies because the content is not correct – waiting for it to be fixed
*Chair meeting October 17 to review MSTEP and NWEA data from last year
SEL
- Monthly newsletter and resources will continue
HTTPS://TINYURL.COM/SELCHOOSE
SIP
At this month’s meeting, we discussed different ways to highlight areas of our improvement plan. Mr. Zielinski and co-chairs will meet to discuss this further in October. We want to continue our great increase of scores. We are glad that the magnets and flags around the building were well received by parents. We also would like to build camaraderie by continuing with our monthly gatherings. Please sign up for those you are able to plan or attend. https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0D4EAAAC2EA4F94-third1#/
Communication/Attendance
- Team had initial meeting
- A survey was created to gauge the communication to home in order to make future recommendations
REFLEX PD
If you are you interested, there is PD available through the link and Sarah Kalis is available for any question son the math program
https://www.reflexmath.com/support/professional-development
Scholastic Small Group
The resource page for the new digital platform connected to our Scholastic Book room has a lot of great articles when thinking about small group instruction. I will include some of these in future blogs, as the link will be here if you want to see a full list of titles in the new bookroom. Please remember that this was a sizeable investment for the district in small group reading, and the expectation is that teachers will use the books that are directly correlated to their reading testing for best practice results.
Guided Reading & Leveled Texts
Scholastic Guided Reading programs contain texts leveled A to Z according to various criteria—book and print features, page count, word and sentence length, print size, genre, vocabulary and language use, themes, content, literary elements, and so on. Your Leveled Bookroom comprises several programs, so it allows you to maximize your students’ exposure to a range of rich literature and nonfiction readings, adapting to the demands of your curriculum and your specific group of learners.
Scholastic Guided Reading programs offer materials across a range of genres, text types, subjects, styles, and levels of difficulty.
- Genre is the ”kind” of text—for example, realistic fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, biography, informational text.
- Text Type is the format or presentation of a text—for example, picture book, chapter book, magazine article.
Scholastic’s Leveled Bookroom comprises books—at each level, A to Z, 40 fiction and nonfiction selections—that can be grouped by subject, level, skills, and other criteria to help you customize reading sets for your class.
Selecting from a broad range of leveled text allows students to access both content-area nonfiction texts and literature in various genres and text types, and provides selections at a level that challenges students.
Small-group instruction focuses on developing important comprehension skills. It also focuses on developing foundational skills and phonics and word-solving strategies. Through activities based on each text, skills and strategies are practiced and reinforced.
Speaking and active listening are key elements of each lesson. During instruction in the small group, each student’s input is important. In addition to discussing the text, each lesson offers an additional prompt for oral language and conversation that ask students to elaborate on key ideas from the text.
Along with the book choices are five Guided Reading Short Reads fiction and nonfiction texts at each level. These texts may be used to develop the close reading and deep comprehension of sufficiently complex short texts. Their engaging content makes them the perfect asset to support the purposeful repeated readings of text and learning across the curriculum.
A balanced reading “diet” includes various genres and a variety of text types within them. Take into account the interests as well as the abilities of your students in order to address a range of topics and themes in your book choices.
Use the Leveled Bookroom Accelerator to gather and group books with related themes to address similar interests at various levels. With LBA, you can coordinate books that rotate through whole-class read-alouds, small-group guided reading, and reading centers.
Scholastic Book Room Inventory: Master-Title-List
Building to Kindergarten Coming Soon!
Registration Link: Building to Kindergarten
Halloween Parade
I know you have counted down the days- Oct. 31 at 10:00 for our annual Halloween Parade. Our route will take us out of the 5th grade doors that morning, making a loop on the inside perimeter of the playground. Parents may join us around the outside perimeter of the playground to watch. It is a district PD day with an 11:30 dismissal that morning.
Tech Time
One Good Way to Record a Video in Gmail
Sometimes it is easier to reply to an email with a video than it is to write out a reply. For example, when a colleague asks me for help with Google Classroom I could write step-by-step directions or I could record a short screencast that would accomplish the same thing. Loom’s Chrome extension makes it easy to do that.
With Loom’s Chrome extension Gmail users can reply to email by simply clicking the Loom icon and recording a video. The video is then instantly uploaded to your Loom account and inserted into the body of your email. In this short video I demonstrate how to record a video right from your Gmail inbox.
Five Tools for Creating Automatically Scored Formative Assessments
This morning I answered an email from a reader who was asked to teach additional classes this fall. She reached out to me for suggestions on tools to create self-grading formative assessments to save her time this fall. I’d bet that there are many other teachers in the same situation and wondering the same thing. Here are some of my suggestions for creating automatically scored formative assessments.
Formative
Formative, which was recently acquired by Newsela, is a great tool for creating formative assessments that can be automatically scored. I’ve been using it for the last half-dozen years to create formative assessments that include labeling diagrams, handwriting and drawing, and multiple choice questions. Formative recently added an AI component that can be helpful in creating assessments. You can see a demo of that feature here and a demo of some of Formative’s other great features here.
Plickers
Plickers is another formative assessment platform that I’ve been using for years. It’s a great option for conducting formative assessment activities when not all of your students have laptops or you would simply prefer an assessment activity that doesn’t require them to use their laptops, tablets, or phones. My most recent blog post about using Plickers can be read here. A demo of how to get started using the Plickers platform is included in the video that is embedded below.
TeacherMade
TeacherMade is a tool that you can use to turn your existing documents (Word, PDF, or Google Doc) into online, self-grading assignments. You can also create activities from scratch in TeacherMade. But perhaps my favorite way to use TeacherMade is to grab a Canva template and turn that into an online, self-grading assignment. How to use Canva templates in TeacherMade is demonstrated in this short video.
Google Forms
Google Forms is the tool that I’ve used for more years than anything else to create self-grading assessments. In fact, I was using it for that purpose back when you had to write a spreadsheet script to have Forms responses automatically graded. Fortunately, today it is is very easy to use Google Forms to create automatically graded assessments. Watch this video to learn how to get started and then head here for dozens of more Google Forms tutorials.
Microsoft Forms
Microsoft Forms is every bit as good as Google Forms is for creating self-grading assessments. In fact, there are some features of Microsoft Forms that I wish Google Forms had. One of those is the new live presentation mode in Microsoft Forms. Learn more about that feature in this video and then head here for a dozen more Microsoft Forms tutorials.
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