Week Ahead: Aug. 17-21

Starting the school year is always an adventure … starting it with new procedures, 100+ more students school wide than last year, colleagues and students all over the world, means it was an even more exciting adventure! And it was amazing! Thank you so much for every extra thing done by faculty, extra assist, extra help, extra thought, extra kindness.

Here is what’s up next week:

Monday, Aug. 17
Day 1, ABCD
1:30-3 Sr. Admin Mtg (Molly attends)

Tuesday, Aug. 18
Day 2, EFGH
3:15-4:30 MS Leadership Team Mtg (Agenda)

Wednesday, Aug. 19
Day 3, BCDA
*Happy Birthday Alis Gorcea!
3:15-4:30 Divisional Mtg (Library) – Topics: PSLearning, Dragon Days
3:15-4:45 Vietnamese Class starts

Thursday, Aug. 20
Day 4, FGHE
9:30-11:00 Admin Mtg (Molly attends)

Friday, Aug. 21
Day 5, CDAB

Upcoming (on the radar)

• Aug. 27  6-8:30pm MS Curriculum Night (format to be determined)
• Oct. 28 PSAT for G8-11

Adjusting to New Bell Schedule:  As we adjust to the new bell schedule, we are going to find glitchy areas. We found a few Friday … and I know we’ll find a few on Monday and throughout the week. Please make sure you are sharing those glitches with your team lead, me or Roxanne. We will work to get things sorted out as fast as possible

New Entry Procedures:  As we evaluated the entry and exit process for the school, we noted a few areas that needed to be improved. Many are all school issues. However there is one that impacts MS directly. Dealing with traffic flow in the AM means that we need to open the gates to students prior to 7:45. So we will start allowing students in at 7:30. From 7:30-7:45 middle school students will sit in the cafeteria (masks on). At 7:45, they will be released to go to their lockers and to class. Teachers are expected to be ready to welcome their students right at 7:45 with hand sanitizer in hand 🙂 As we see how this goes, we may make further adjustments. All suggestions welcome!

New Students: One area that I neglected was to really highlight last week was assisting our new students. I saw so many of you step up to assist and made sure their first days were successful. As we head into the first full week – and we have rotating blocks – please make sure that new students in the block before lunch/recess have a lunch buddy. This is a high stress time for students. It would also be great to have a buddy take them to their next class whenever possible.

Remote Students Update: It appears that we have 6 remote students. 4 are remote out of country and 2 are remote in country. Of the 4 that are out of country, 2 are in S Korea, and 2 in the USA. 3 are new to SSIS, and 3 are returning students. We will be setting up remote student tutorial groups that will start this week. We are also getting new students individual tech tutorial times with David Rynne. We are hoping that we will have all remote learners connecting with advisors, teachers, and engaging in learning activities by Tuesday.

DEAR Update: Here is a suggested schedule for next week’s DEAR Time: 
Monday: 

• All Advisories-introduce DEAR and show library orientation video included in presentation. Here is a script. 

Tuesday: 

• Review DEAR expectations/answer questions?
• All students-complete library survey (will be emailed out to students)
  
• All students-After/if time: log in to Sora and explore (found by going to Google waffle and scrolling down)

Wednesday: 

• 7th and 8th-students will place a book on hold after viewing this video
• 6th-Enjoy more Sora and/or read books if they’ve already been to library

Thursday: 

• All-begin creating reading challenge tracking poster (supplies and examples will be provided by me)

Friday

• All-finish creating reading challenge tracking poster
• Read! Everyone should have a physical book and/or something on Sora by this time

Schedule Helper Coming Soon: Big thanks to Evan Weinberg who has created a script to automatically enter your teaching schedule into your Google Calendar. He is working out the final details and will be sharing this with us soon. What this means, is that you can enter a bit of information, run the script, and your classes will pop into your calendar at the correct times. This is a big help when we are looking for times to meet that work for all.

Vietnamese Classes: Our Vietnamese national students are required to take Vietnamese class at a minimum of 90 min per week. This course covers literature, language, history and geography. This class will run on Wednesdays from 3:15-4:45. We anticipate that we will need 6 classrooms for Vietnamese Studies. We will be using A201, A203, A205, A207, A302 and A304. Thank you to those teachers who will be sharing their rooms on Wednesdays.