Welcome Back

This is my 21st year to be involved with public education and in my 21 years, this is the best start to a school year that I have had.  A lot of hard work was put in by the teachers over the summer to review our curriculum and our alignment to the state objectives. We have made changes to instruction and our practices regarding assessment. 

Our instruction is better aligned to our assessments.  Or in everyday terms, what we see as important for the kids to learn is what we are teaching and what we are testing. 

We also will start a new practice this year.  Students who do not do well on their unit tests will have an opportunity for reteaching and an opportunity to test again.  Any child who scores below a 70% will be required to retest.  Any child who feels that can do better has the option to retest. 

Our goal in doing this is to make the learning our primary concern in our school.  If students are not learning than we need to try again so that they have another opportunity to master the concepts. 

School goes pretty fast and when children fall short of learning expectations, it often begins a spiraling ride of failure when the students cannot keep up.  We want to address this and to provide our students more opportunities to succeed. 

The reteaching/retesting procedure will be used in 5th Grade Science and Math.  We will use the same procedure in 6th Grade Communication Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies.  (We are continuing to work on expanding this procedure to other subject areas.)

I also want to say that our students are great.  I have enjoyed visiting the classrooms and seeing all the activities that are taking place and all the comments that our students are saying. 

As the year progress, we look for exciting progress from our students.  Stay tuned to our blog for more information.