Happy Wednesday!
Greetings Parents and Community Members! We are in the full swing of our holiday season and with that comes all the events and excitement associated with the end of a calendar year. We’ve had a fantastic first semester too! We saw the hiring of several new teachers including Music and Special Ed. We rolled our DLI program up to the main campus (3rd grade) and even hired two new DLI teachers to go along with what is already a wonderful program. We adjusted the schedule so that all grades have uninterrupted lunch and recess time, created common planning for all grades 5 days a week, moved our French program outside of specials and beefed up the minutes they serve exponentially!
We also created our very own learning labs to support our students at both campuses. We had an extremely successful BeeFund campaign which, paired with generous grants from our Morris Brandon Foundation, helped us continue our focus on multi sensory learning with our cohort of 20+ teachers finishing up their 30hr Orton Gillingham course and moved into our second year of implementation with our new ELA curriculum Wit and Wisdom. We’re even the subject of a documentary about the program and the success we’ve had with it at Brandon- coming out soon! This year we created our IB Kindergarten playspace, developed a 45m intervention block seen within the classroom every other day and continued to focus on the whole child through social emotional learning activities from Kindergarten all the way through 5th grade. Phew! And to think we still have another half a year to continue to improve on what is already a fantastic school!
This past week was no exception as we welcomed the ABC’s of nutrition. The students in grades K-2 were able to taste food from every letter of the alphabet- from apples and orchids to udon noodles and zucchini, it was truly a sight to see! Our kids loved every minute of it and so did I! We capped the week off with our December GoTeam meeting where we continued to review school-wide data, tweaked our strategic plan and even learned a little about each other’s strengths as I had each member take the Gallup Strengthsfinder survey and present to the group. This will come in handy as we approach budget season. I hope you can make my final Principal Coffee Talk of 2019this Friday, 10am at the Primary Center. While the focus will be around our most recent CCRPI data and the work behind the scenes with our GoTeam and planning committees, the conversation is always open to any and all topics you’d like to discuss about our neighborhood school.
As always, continue to have a great week and until next time!
j