October 31, 2009

By the time you read this, October will be pretty much over, which means in one more short month, the school year will be one-third complete.  It is such a pleasure for  me to be able to note the academic growth in our students even in the two months we've been in session.  Our dedicated and hard working teaching and support staff have high expectations for our students' academic, behavioral and social emotional growth and students rise to those expectations in a variety of ways that make it easy for the observer to see.

One of the ways our staff facilitates the growth in our students is by improving their own practice through professional development at the building level and by taking classes on their
own.  As you may already know, the District has asked all schools to focus on the teaching of writing this year.  Not unlike the majority of other schools in the District, Beverly Cleary's writing scores lag behind those in reading and math. To date, teachers have spent time individually and as grade level and content area teams developing curriculum maps, which lay out the teaching of writing for the year.  At our Monday staff meetings and at the Wednesday late openings, we will be looking at the maps within and across grade levels to facilitate a K-8 plan for how we teach writing at Beverly Cleary.  Teachers will be looking at commonalities in their maps across grade levels and aligning them with each other. Using the data from last winter's fourth and seventh grade Direct Writing Assessments, they have been analyzing data to determine a teaching focus for this year.  Similarly, they will be scoring papers and discussing student work using writing generated, to date and in the second and third trimesters.

I always look forward to visiting with parents and hope you will join me at our first trimester "Coffee Chat" on November 10th on the Hollyrood campus and November 18th on the Fernwood campus.  I will be talking about conferences and what you can expect from them.

As we approach what seems like the shortest month of the year, we find families taking vacations since there are so many days without school because of Veteran's Day, conferences and Thanksgiving.  In the last Family Newsletter, we talked about our policy regarding homework requests during or after illness. Although we see an increase in the number of absences due to vacations in November with a corresponding increase in requests for homework, irrespective of the time of the year our homework policy states that  teachers do not prepare homework for absences due to vacations.

Last week, we had an unfortunate incident of a student getting hurt on the playground after school.  As you have undoubtedly noted in our Parent and Student Handbook, students K-5 must be released to an adult and 6th, 7th and 8th grade students are expected to go directly home after dismissal.  The older students often think they can play first and then go home, but we expect them to go straight home since we have no supervision on the playground after school hours.  Please remind your 6th-8th grade students of this safety rule.

Many of you have heard me say I am an advocate for the arts and that I desire to support their integration into their curriculum.  Our third and fourth graders are currently learning songs for their musical productions that will be held in February and March.  Both of these programs reinforce third graders' study of the history or Portland, and fourth graders' study of Oregon history.  I can hardly wait to see them perform.  Our 6th, 7th and 8th graders will have the opportunity to try out for parts in "Ramona Quimby" in December. Rehearsals will be held beginning later in December and will continue through January and February with a performance in late February.  All three of these productions will require parent help, so I feel fortunate to have a parent community that will
help bring the productions to fruition.  If you have a student in these grades, I hope you will encourage him/her to try out for the play.  I would also like to make you aware that we are able to offer these opportunities as well as a number of others, which we will point out as the year goes along,  because of the success of our Run-For-The-Arts last spring.

Thank you for your ongoing support of the partnership we have with each other as we continue to relish in the wonderful experience your children are having at Beverly Cleary.

Enjoy Halloween.
 

Teri Geist
Principal