Some of you might remember that this time last year I shared with you all about TeachWriteober. I have been writing off and on for many years with a group called Teach Write, a group of educators who know that to be a better teacher of writing, you need to write yourself. During the month of October, we challenge ourselves to write for 31 days in a row. I plan on taking the challenge again. I know some of you did it with me last year. If you are looking for some motivation and an accountability group to help you write, join us! Check out this page to read more about it. You can sign up here and they will send you more information, add you to the accountability tracker, etc. I love the theme this year: Write to play! The idea is that we are encouraged to spend the month playing with our writing. Wouldn't it be great if we could use that same mantra with our students...help them see that they can play with their writing too?! Even if you don't join me for TeachWriteober, I do hope you will continue to think of yourself as writers. Writing, noticing, practicing, editing, scribbling out, thinking, staring at a blank page, jotting down...these are all things we want our students to be doing this year so we should be experiencing the joys and struggles of writing alongside them this year. We will become better teachers and they will become better writers if we do. (I am excited that the Oct. 6 PD afternoon will be focused on writing. Sorry I can't be with you, but I look forward to hearing all about it when I return.) Now stop reading this and start writing! A friend of mine sent me a special picture book that I definitely hope to share with some of your classes. The book is called Beneath and it is a beautiful book that celebrates that there is always more under the surface that we can't see. I am also reading a book that probably wasn't the best timing on my part since it is about a child who loses a parent. But maybe it will be cathartic for me. The book is called The Probability of Everything. I had a chance to participate in a free webinar with the author through Bookelicious and it was interesting to hear her talk about how she wrote the book. I am also hoping to dive into a book I got at the end of last year called Feeling Seen: Reconnecting in a Disconnected World. It's by Dr. Jody Carrington who I have read before and who was a keynote speaker at the Elevate Your Classroom Conference this summer.
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From Dr. Cohen's post: Elementary teachers all across the district will soon be conducting early literacy universal screening for students in grades K-3, and communicating the results with parents. Although MURSD has been using the same universal screener for years, new regulations from DESE require that, similar to vision screening, each young student participate in this screening to assist in the detection of possible reading difficulties. Universal screening will only be conducted by elementary educators, but it impacts everyone who has or supports early readers. Leah Hagen and Brianna Zalusky presented at the last School Committee meeting and their presentation which includes DESE resources can be accessed here. Last week, Maria and Brianna came to many of your grade level team meetings to talk about the early literacy screenings. Sorry 3rd grade...I wasn't able to get to meet with you on Thursday. But Maria and Brianna can update you. While DESE's new guidelines went into effect this summer, the good news is we were already doing a lot of what the guidelines suggest. We will continue to use DIBELs and will begin those assessments in the next few weeks. Brianna has offered to give some tutorials on administering the DIBELs. While tutors will also be available to administer the DIBELs, it's important for teachers to have an understanding of this screening tool and to know what it is telling you about your readers. Especially because a change that is coming from the guidelines is that every parent will be notified as to the results of their child's early literacy screening. We will be talking more about what those conversations look like with parents and supporting you to have those discussions either during parent conferences or over the phone. A big thank you to Brianna, Maria, and Leah for the work they did this summer organizing resources and planning! They will be our go to people for all things early literacy screening. I have had a hard time focusing on anything at the moment, so I haven't really been able to read. But a good friend shared this quote with me from an author that I love. And reading it has been helping me.
The foundation of a house is the part that is built below the ground and is the load-bearing portion of the structure. The foundation is responsible for three important things: supporting the structure above, keeping out groundwater, and acting as a barrier to water and soil vapor. And we all know what can happen if a house doesn't have a strong foundation. I have always felt like the families we work with help us as educators and serve as part of our foundation. If we want a strong foundation, then we need to make sure we build a strong foundation from the start. We have already begun that work this year. Actually, we started even before school started. Many of you sent out letters to students introducing yourselves. That was the beginning of building that foundation. We had playground events and kindergarten meet and greets. More foundation building for our families. For some of our friends, we even arranged for them to meet you and see the class before school started. For our new families, we hosted a new family welcome. Our 4th grade leaders did a great job of telling them all about Clough! We were able to host a Welcome Back Picnic for our families to attend and simply visit and connect with each other. More foundation building for our families. We started our staff collaboration time with a table discussion about how you had already started or what you were planning to do to connect with the families in your class or on your caseload. I heard people talking about phone calls they had made or surveys they had sent to families. I heard people talking about sending emails to caregivers. Many great ideas were shared. I challenge you to make sure that you make that connection, strengthen that foundation during this first month of school. There will come a time when you might have to make a difficult phone call home. Those calls are so much easier when you have started the year with a strong connection to the family. I want to share the different ways that my own kids' teachers have begun to build a foundation at their school. My son's teacher sent out an email to all of the families introducing herself and then had us fill out a survey. I shared in the survey that for him I like to be able to have a phone conversation to start the year because there is a lot to update the teacher about in regards to him. Before school even started, we had a great phone chat and I felt really good about the start of the year. My daughter's teacher mailed a letter to her and we read it together and she even gave the kids a mini quiz to see what they might already know about her. She didn't have us fill out a survey. After the first week of school, she sent me an a personal email asking how I thought Emerson's start to third grade had been going. She shared some positives from her first week. She also said she was excited to see me in person at the curriculum night that is happening this week. I was impressed with her approach of a short personal email checking in with me about my thoughts on the first week. Two very different approaches, but both made me feel connected to my kids' teachers. Together, we have begun to build a strong foundation for this school year. How will you build your family foundation for this year? Take the time now to make those personal connections with each parent/caregiver on your class list or on. your caseload. I guarantee it will pay off in the long run. I started reading a book that I saw many people recommending on Twitter. It's called The Probability of Everything. The main character is an 11-year-old girl named Kemi who loves statistics and numbers. I just started it so I will let you know how it is once I finish it. I am in two writing courses this semester. One of them is all about writing about family. I am reading a book called Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family. Definitely interesting to think about how family members react to memoirs. I posted my new ID badge and tagged the author of This is a Story and guess what?! He is sending us 10 copies of his book! We could definitely construct some stories about the first week of school! And I felt connected to several people...although having a common positive test result for COVID was not exactly the connection I was looking to start with this year. I have had many interesting first weeks of school, but last week might have been one for the record books! For a split second, as I was gathering my things, putting a mask on and sending an email to all of you, I thought...how is this going to work today? When everyone in the main office was being sent home, preschool parents were starting to arrive for open house, it was the first day for our kindergarteners, and we had dealt with some leaking ceilings and collapsed ceiling tiles the day before...to name just a few things going through my quickly fogging mind. But I knew the Clough Crew would come through! Little did I know that things were just starting to "heat up." I drove home, climbed into the bed in my guest bedroom, and drifted off to sleep knowing that you all had everything under control. Nothing like being woken up to a phone call from your superintendent where the first thing you hear is: "I don't want you to worry but..." I was quarantined with my Barbie Dream Medicine Cabinet, feeling extra helpless and weak. It seemed like there was nothing I could do but watch my phone, waiting for updates. But then something awesome started to happen. I started to get Voxer notifications. The Clough Crew was communicating with each other, working together, making decisions, sharing information, keeping our kids and each other safe. Even though we just started diving into our theme of constructing stories, building connections...you knew that we already had begun building that foundation last year. You shared how important communication was for all of you, and we made sure to start putting things in place so that your ability to communicate, even in a crazy 2nd day of school emergency, was established. Thank you Tara and Evan for stepping in and helping lead the building. Thank you all of you for helping to keep kids calm through the whole situation. Thank you to Maureen, Colleen and Kim for coming over from Central Office to help Clough. I was upset that I couldn't be there for you all, but I was super proud that you used the tools in your tool belts and Nailed It once again. The Clough Crew came through! We certainly have started the year off constructing some memorable stories and building connections! My unexpected "time off" gave me plenty of time to do some reading! In between popping Tylenol, taking naps, and drinking lots of water, I read several books this weekend. One was just published and was written by a friend of mine. She is a teacher I got to know several years ago through some teacher writing groups I was part of. It was pretty cool to watch her be working on this book in some of our sessions and then now have it be published. It's an upper elementary novel told in verse about a main character who is the only Jewish kid in his school and someone does anti-semitic graffiti on the walls of the school. The main character is pretty brave and works with other friends to more The Do More Club to help spread kindness instead of hate. After I finished reading it, I was pleasantly surprised to read my name in the acknowledgments section, Dana thanked many of us that were part of her original teacher writing group. I bet I could get her to do a virtual chat with a class if anyone ends up reading this with their class! I also was approved to get an advanced digital copy of Coyote Lost and Found, the sequel to my favorite book The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise. The sequel is just as amazing and heart-wrenching and beautiful as the first book! Unfortunately, we have to wait until February for it to be available. |