Welcome Back From Break!

Greetings Parents and Community Members! We were so excited to welcome ALL of our Morris Brandon students back to school Monday. Everyone seemed super relaxed, excited to return (for the most part), and well rested from the week off. I loved hearing about all of the awesome places our students went, events they attended, or even the book they read on the sofa or by the fire on a rainy winter break day. While you and your children were spending the week NOT at school, your teachers and staff were busy planning out the final three months of school and participating in some meaningful professional development at the school level.To give you an idea of what happened while you were out….

• All teachers spent half a day planning together as a team. Teachers took this time to look ahead in our math and ELA curriculum for the best ways to teach our children. They planned out lessons, looked at standards that will be addressed, identified curriculum compacting (shortening the instruction for students who may not need to spend as much time on a concept) and intervention strategies to meet the needs of each child.
• All teachers spent half a day learning the ins and outs of MyLexia. As you know by now, every student in our building has a MyLexia account to help with remediation and acceleration of learning. This can be done in or outside of school. We learned from a certified MyLexia consultant on the best way to navigate the platform, deliver mini lessons, and tailor instruction for each individual student.
• All teachers newer to Brandon spent the entire day working with IB Coordinator Sam DeCarlo, deconstructing learning standards and looking for transdisciplinary themes, an important aspect of the IB Primary Years Programme.
• While the work was being done at Brandon for our core content teachers, our awesome Specialists spent each day attending district-wide professional development. Our French teachers got to work with the French team from Sarah Smith (cluster planning at its finest), our PE teachers worked with all of APS physical education, and our music and art team went to sessions at North Atlanta HS to learn about apps and tools to foster 21st century learning for our children. So cool!

While our teachers’ week may have been over Tuesday, our Admin team spent the rest of the week making new hires, building out our schedule for the 19/20 school year and, of course, PLANNING! We hit the ground running our first week back too. Monday marked the start of Jump Rope for Heart and Read Across America Week, culminating in Dr. Seuss’s birthday this Friday. There are always fun, exciting and engaging activities happening at Brandon!

Also, please remember that we still need one parent to join our GO Team for next year.  Please help our school in declaring by 2/28 at www.apsstrongschools.com.

Until next week!
j