Week Ahead: March 13-17

Happy Spring Breeze!  I hope the long weekend was relaxing and gave you a respite from your school load.  As we wrap up Quarter 3, there are a few extra things to keep track of:  SLCs, CTPs, and the Advisory service learning unit.  It’s a lot and it will take all of us working together to smooth out any rough edges and bring all of these things to a successful conclusion.  Reach out for help – and ask all the questions.

Here is what’s up this week:

Monday, Mar. 13

• Holiday!

Tuesday, Mar. 14

• Day 5: CDAB
• 1:05-1:40 House League Activity, MS Gym (take attendance 1st, then come ASAP)

Wednesday, Mar. 15

• Day 6: GHEF
• *Happy Birthday Juan Jose Sanz del Alamo!
• 11-12:00 SST

Thursday, Mar. 16

• Day 7: DABC
• 6-7:30pm HS Musical

Friday, Mar. 17

• Day 8: HEFG
• *SLC Due: Students selected artifact from your class
• 8:15 SEASAC Parade of Athletes
• 4pm MS Happy Hour, Malt South (trivia begins at 5pm)
• 6-7:30pm HS Musical

Saturday, Mar. 18

• 2-3:30pm HS Musical

Upcoming (on the radar)

• March 23-25 – EARCOS Teacher Conference
• March 25 – PTA International Celebration Day
• March 26-April 1 – Molly visiting new school in S. Korea
• March 27 – comments completed and peer reviewed (in Q3 bin) and grades completed by 3:00; verification reports printed at 3:45
• March 28 – verification report reviewed, signed (can be digital) and returned to office by 3:00
• March 29 – End of Q3; comment only reports printed for Student Led Conferences
• March 30 – SLCs from 4-8pm; special schedule see below
• March 31 – SLCs from 8am-1pm; report cards emailed to parents (after 3pm)
• April 10 – Author Visit, Minh Lê; grade level assemblies planned

SLCs This Week:

This week students are to select artifacts from each of their classes.  This is due by Friday.

Role of Teacher:  In all your classes, you will lead an intentional discussion helping students identify an artifact that they want to include in their SLC.  Please remember that this is entirely student choice.  Your role is to ensure they have considered ideas – and have linked their artifact to their SLC doc.  As they are linking the artifact to the doc, remind them to also indicate which type of artifact it is (this will help ensure they meet the diversity requirement).

Role of Advisor:

• You need to share out the individual student SLC Planning docs.  Please see your team lead and/or Daniel M if you have questions about how to do this.
• On Thursday and Friday, you will check your advisee docs to see that they have indeed linked the artifacts to their doc.  You will also check to make sure they have included a diversity of artifacts with not more than 2 of any type.  You will also make sure they have selected at least one hands on activity / demonstration.

SEASAC Parade of Athletes:

Reading Intervention:  

We are starting a reading intervention this week with a group of students in grades 6-8.  This is being led by the ELA and Support Services departments.  This week, students will start the intervention on Thursday and Friday during DEAR and Dragon Time.  For the following 6 weeks, these students will be in intervention on Tuesday and Thursday during Dragon Time and DEAR.  These students will go straight to their intervention on those days and attendance will be taken there.

Schedule for March 30:

After receiving feedback from all teams, we have opted to have an A-H style schedule on March 30th to balance out class time for all blocks.  We have created two times where we will meet in advisory groups, one at the start of the day and one at the end.  This has allowed us to free up some advisory time and Dragon Time in coming weeks by moving important topics to this day.

The time in the morning will be for rehearsing SLCs and finalizing preparations.  The time in the afternoon will be for installation of the CTP browser and do the introduction session for CTP.  Daniel M will be sending detailed information to advisors so that they can guide their students through this.  The introduction session is a slide show including a video explanation of why we do CTP.  The introduction session concludes with each advisor leading their students through the practice test for both ELA and Math.  Please review this prior to the CTP training session that is scheduled for Wednesday, March 29.

Author Visit – Heads Up:

We are so excited to have the opportunity to have author Minh Lê visit SSIS.  On April 10, we will have grade level assemblies (still working out which block for each grade) where Mr. Lê will share his work, career, and life story with our students.

Minh Lê is the author of the picture books Lift (Eisner Award nominee) and Drawn Together (winner of the 2019 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature) illustrated by Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat, Let Me Finish! (named an NPR Best Book of 2016) illustrated by Isabel Roxas, and The Perfect Seat illustrated by Gus Gordon (all published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers). He also wrote Green Lantern: Legacy, a middle grade graphic novel (illustrated by Andie Tong) for DC Comics. In addition to writing books, he serves on the Board of We Need Diverse Books, is on the faculty of the Hamline MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, and has written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, The Horn Book, NPR, and HuffPost.