Friday, February 7, 2020

Great Things I Noticed this Week:
*Students working together in partners to create what they thought were the 5 most important questions they should be able to answer correctly for their chapter. They were very engaged in reviewing their notes and vocab to come up with challenging questions.
*Students excitedly looking for the traits of drosophila under a microscope (fruit flies) and then setting up their cross experiment to see how traits are passed down.
*The power of relationships--one of our high school student athletes is a mentor for a middle school student. When the high school student was sad about something, her middle school mentee saw her and sought her out to encourage her...this was finally the moment for the younger student to give back!
*We started a Student Spotlight on our district facebook page and I hope to have more recommendations come my way!! You don't even have to have a picture---if you just share with me the student and why you're nominating them, I'll take the picture and make a fancy graphic for Facebook.  Check out the awesome first student spotlight post:

Upcoming Events:
CTSO week at HS
Wednesday - HS Faculty Meeting (topic-upcoming March 3 plans)
Thursday - P/T Conferences 4:00-7:30 in the MS/HS Gym
6:30-7:30 Incoming Freshman night in the multi-purpose room

*My trip to Thailand has been postponed until the world figures out the coronavirus, so I'll be here for all of February now. ;)


"Nuts & Bolts" Notes:
*Please hold firm on student cell phones. MS students should NOT have them. Period.  HS Students
need to put them in the pocket chart and if they're out in class, they are removed.  Think of it--if just one class lets students have their phones out, if that was 20 students, those 20 students now think in their 8 other class periods that they can try to pull them out again, because they got to somewhere else. That's 160 possible student opportunities to push the cell phone boundary in a day. We can hold firm together with this expectation!


Tech Tip of the Week:
Apple Classroom on your Mac. A reminder that Apple Classroom is on your Mac and works similar to when you use it on your iPad, but sometimes you may be using your iPad for instruction. Here is a user guide with directions on how to use some of the tools within Classroom.

Blogs, Quotes & Tweets:
*How to Keep Kids Engaged in Class