ESOL Update #2

Dear Homeroom Teachers,                                                                                     Aug. 31, 2015

Here are few updates and guidelines from the ESOL department.

1. BTSN - Back to School Night

Please make sure to include the ESOL teacher in your class presentation. The ESOL teacher should have a few minutes to give an overview of the type of support and if possible offer time to answer questions. Please be flexible with the timing as Kaoru, Kasumi and Brent have four classes to attend to. 

2. Running Records

The ESOL Dept. would like to support homeroom teachers (HRTs). Here are the guidelines:

a) HRTs should do each of the running records. 

b) The ESOL teacher can supervise the class while homeroom teachers does the testing.

      i) Mini-lesson: The ESOL teacher can do the mini-lesson if the ESOL teacher is familiar with the workshop. The homeroom teacher should have the lesson plan ready.

      ii) Conferring: The ESOL teacher will confer mainly with ESOL students and supervise the class.

      iii) Reflection: The ESOL teacher can do a mid-class teaching point and/or the reflection at the end of the lesson
c) Throughout the year, the ESOL teacher can do targeted running records for ESOL students on an as needs basis.
d) Running record information should be shared with the ESOL teachers and analysed to support students. ESOL teacher will be taking notes from the running records to help inform support along with their conferring data so as to have a discussion about the students. 

3. Feedback

The ESOL Dept. will have an admin meeting next Wednesday. Please let Trevor know any Stars or Wishes so we can serve both you and students better.

Good luck with BTSN preparations.

Ice Skating Field Trips

Ice Skating KB - Gr 5
Venue: Port Island ice rink
- Popular field trip amongst schools during the winter months
- Skates can be rented at the ice rink
- Youngest students are encouraged to go together with a buddy class from upper elementary grades

Logistics:
- Port Island ice rink opens on November 1
- Registration opens September 14
- First come first serve - principle
- The rink can accommodate 100 skaters at once (can be very crowded)
- Given the high cost of transportation, CA has decided not to cover the transportation expenses
- Cost 1000 - 1400 Yen/ student, depending on the class size (including entrance fee and transportation)
- The ice rink is not open for public on November 8, 27, 28, 29, February 20, or March 20, 21
- Teacher collects money from the students, brings the bus money to the accounts office and pays the entrance and skate rental fees at the ice rink.

Weekly Update, Monday 31 August

Dear colleagues,

Thank you for your dedication, commitment, and hard work during the first full week. The start of the year is always very busy and can be stressful at times. We appreciate your smiles, patience and positive attitude in ensuring that our students will have the best possible learning environment from the day one onwards. This week will bring us the following:

Monday will be day 2 in the ES Schedule

Supervision

	12:15-12:40	12:25-12:55	12:25-12:55	12:15-12:35
Week	Cafeteria Tables	Playground	Playground	Cafeteria Line

8/31/2015

Aimee

Kasumi

Karin

Toyoko

Clubs 1st Season
Tuesday, September 1

MAP testing meeting

Grade 3 - 5 teachers are invited to meet on Tuesday at 8.00-8.25am with Heikki and Stephen Taylor.

On the agenda, we will have the following:

The purpose of MAP testing

How to best prepare students for testing

Testing Schedule

Preparation time for Back to School Night, Wed 2 September

We have reserved the Wednesday afternoon meeting time for fine tuning and finalizing the preparations needed for the Back to School Night.

Back to School Night, Thu 3 September

Starts at 6.00pm
BTSN Schedule

School Photos Schedule

Please be aware that there may be changes to the School Photo Schedule announced earlier. We will keep you posted and provide a detailed schedule early this week.

Leadership Team Meetings

- School-wide Leadership Team meets usually on Friday mornings

- ES Leadership Team meets usually on Friday afternoons and Tuesday mornings.

Collab Meetings
- All grade levels will meet at their regular time as per the ES Team Planning Meeting schedule.
       - Our focus is to continue planning the units and work on/review rubrics.
- This week's schedule for specialists:
     - ESOL Mon. 14:30-15:30
     - Japanese Dept. Tues. 11:10-11:40
     - Library & ICT Thurs. 13:00-13:40

Literacy Planning Meetings
 - All grade levels will meet at their regular time as per the ES Team Planning Meeting schedule.

Future dates:

14-16 Sep	MAP testing Gr 3-5
17-18 Sep	MAP catch-up dates
23 Sep	Parent Coffee
12-13 Oct	Sports Day
16 Oct	Running Record Data (K-5)
16-17 Oct	ES Drama Production
19-20 Oct	Progress Reports

Back to School Night

Purpose of the Back to School Night

Back to school night is upon us next week. We will have our school building full of curious and happy parents willing to hear about all the amazing learning opportunities CA Elementary School has to offer daily basis. It is a wonderful opportunity for us to demonstrate the core values of the school and the IB PYP. The time is limited, so we have to think about our audience, their background and expectations for our event. Hence, we have consulted a number of faculty members to collate the current guidelines and suggestions for your perusal:

Agenda for the teachers' presentation should include at least the following:

- Introduction of the teacher(s) and assistants in the grade level
- Overview of the daily routines for learning, school's policy on homework, classroom expectations
- General and practical information about, UoI, language and math programs
- Suggestions/ideas on how to best support their child at home
- How to find information, classroom pages, CA website, Student Handbook
- When/how do the parents hear about their child's progress, ES reporting cycle

Presentation guidelines:
General guidelines:
- Collaborative planning to ensure a common message (Time is given on Wednesday 2 September to finalize the plans)
- Classroom teachers decide how much time is spent together and how much separately
- It is important to give parents the opportunity to spend time in their child's classroom. Even if it was only a few minutes in the end.
- Consider, whether the students would write/draw a message to their parents
- Heikki will announce when the BTSN are over via PA system
Suggestions for effective presentations:
- Interactive, positive, avoid lecturing
- If you use slide shows avoid text-heavy slides
- Prefer demonstrations and/or games over lengthy explanations
- Consider having a brief slideshow of the students/teachers in the grade level
- Use exit cards or similar activity to gauge Q&A
- Encourage and offer separate appointment times for individual parent questions/concerns
- If you want your parents to know more about certain areas of learning, consider providing home readings

Schedule for the night
Please find the schedule here.

Support
Signs will be posted in hallways
Kae, Yoshiko will help parents to navigate between the different places

Student Allergies

FYI
Health Office is in charge of communicating with the parents when we have allergic students. As soon as we have the information of the allergies and class-lists the Health Office will send a letter informing parents in respective classrooms about the conditions and practices needed to ensure safety and well-being of all students.

In case teacher receives information about new allergies or new information about currently known allergies in the classroom, please inform the Health Office immediately.

For any further information or help dealing with allergies, please consult with the Health Office.

CA Tutoring Guidelines

Dear colleagues,

Please read carefully the CA Tutoring Guidelines below.

Tutoring of CA Students

Student Referrals

Each year a number of CA parents are interested in organising tutoring for their children in the Elementary or Secondary School. In order to ensure student needs are being met in the most effective way, tutoring requests will be coordinated through the relevant Student Support Team and Principal. 

All Pre-K - G8 tutor requests, whether from parents or teachers, must be referred to the weekly student support meeting.  At these meetings, the team will consult teachers as to a student's needs, and make decisions. Teachers may not take on a tutoring job without permission from the school. 

All G9-12 tutor requests (from student, teacher, parent) are dealt with through the counselor. Students are encouraged to seek assistance from the subject teacher first. Teacher referrals are brought to the grade level SST for discussion. The counselors assist with matching the tutor and student, arranging place, time and rate of payment for MS/ES.  HS students can organise their own logistics.

Teacher Guidelines

It is inappropriate for teachers to tutor any of their own students for a fee. Tutoring of other students for a fee should not begin until the work day is concluded at 4:00 p.m., and should not interfere with any other school obligations. All tutoring must be approved by the relevant Principal (ES, SS).

To avoid the appearance of a conflict and to ensure the tutoring is meeting the needs of the student in the most effective way, teachers tutoring CA students need to discuss this in advance with their Principal.

25 August, Nuts and Bolts meeting notes

Thank you for taking time on Tuesday morning to briefly delve into supervision perceptions and practices. Also, a big thank you to Karin for the Smart Start of the morning.

You can find the slide show of the morning here.

Below you can see the results of the quick assessment for learning activity at the very end.

We can see that we are sharing perceptions and practices in many areas. We seem to be very clear on positive language and inclusive play which means that recess is an important learning opportunity for all students. The other observation is that we have enough of uncertainty for further clarification of some perceptions and practices. In the near future, Heikki will draft a document that will attempt to address the issues for your feedback and perusal.

	Statements	YES	NO	Don't know
1	Students can bring water from the tabs to the sandbox.	45.00%	10.00%	45.00%
2	Students are guided not to climb up the slides.	70.00%	0.00%	30.00%
3	We all have the same expectations for safe play during recess.	20.00%	35.00%	45.00%
4	In order to ensure effective supervision, we have to walk around in the playground	95.00%	0.00%	5.00%
5	Adults use positive language to prevent accidents and conflicts.	100.00%	0.00%	0.00%
6	We promote inclusive play.	100.00%	0.00%	0.00%
7	Students are allowed to bring food outside to the lunch recess.	0.00%	65.00%	35.00%
8	Student playtime is protected and promoted. Snack time is taken out of lesson time.	25.00%	10.00%	65.00%
9	We have sufficient amount of adults during outside recess.	40.00%	10.00%	50.00%

ESOL Support Update #1

As we settle into the beginning of the year, it's time to begin fully integrating the support of the ESOL team. Here are a few important points to note about ESOL support for this year. 

Push-in Support

G1-5: ESOL teachers should push-in for either RW or WW for a full unit of study and then switch when the unit of study ends. This will give the students the best continuity in their support. This will also help the ESOL teacher to plan for and understand the unit of study, as well as allow consistency in the conferring from week-to-week during the unit. In addition, this will help with reporting as ESOL teachers must report on both reading and writing.

PK3-KB: Support will continue following the current model and we will review it later this year. 

Team-Teaching Models

Last year, Jenny Shirota did a PD session on team teaching and presented several different models. Here is the team teaching handout as a reminder and guide to the ways to work with our ESOL Team. 

ESOL Coordinator

In addition to coordinating the ESOL Dept, Trevor will be providing additional ESOL support for new students and students who need additional support beyond the general class needs. I have been to all grade one to five classrooms and have set up support for several students. Currently I will be working with students in grades one, three and five. Please work with your ESOL teacher to determine which students might need extra support and this will be discussed in the ESOL Dept. meetings. This will be reviewed regularly and I will switch to students in other grades as the year progresses.

If you have any feedback or ideas, please contact Trevor.

Trevor is not at school today

Trevor is out sick today.

Resources to begin your Reading and Writing Units of Study

As we begin to launch Reading and Writing units of Study, I would like to draw your attention to the following common resources (both internal to CA and external) we use across the grades:

Planning:
Main document (internal to CA): (1)UOI alignment, 2)planner addendum/overview (to be created this year) and 3)meeting notes which link to all planning documents

Units (external) **also have full books for many writing units

Common Core Standards (external)

Assessing:

Writing continuum/progressions (external)
Reading continuum/progressions (internal)

Elementary School Weekly Update 24 August

Dear colleagues,

We hope you had a wonderful weekend. The weather was just beautiful! This weekly update will be usually published on Fridays (towards the end of the day, afternoon or evening).

It seemed to work truly well to have two days of school before a weekend at the beginning. This week will be pretty much full on with teaching and learning in the class and meetings with team members, coordinators and Principal. We would like to remind you that Tuesday morning meetings will continue to be optional. On Wednesday, the Professional Learning will focus on student health and emergency procedures. We wish you many happy teachable moments in class!

Recess and Lunch Supervision:

	12:15-12:40	12:25-12:55	12:25-12:55	12:15-12:35
Week	Cafeteria Tables	Playground	Playground	Cafeteria Line

8/24/2015

Rose

Kaoru

Brent

Yoshiko

Monday 24 August
10.30-11.00am Literacy Planning KB

Tuesday 25 August
8.00-8.20 am Brief ES faculty planning ELAC MPR
9.25-10.05 am UoI Planning Gr 4
10.25-11.25 am UoI Planning KB
1.00-1.30 pm Elementary School Assembly - Theatre Seating plan
2.00-2.40 pm UoI Planning Gr 3
2.45-3.35 pm UoI Planning Gr 2

Wednesday 26 August
10.15-10.50 pm Literacy Planning Gr 1

2:35-4:30 pm Professional Learning: First Aid Training (AED, Epipen, choking, CPR...)

Health Office Visit: Allergies protocols, in the ELAC MPR

Thursday 27 August
8.40-9.20 am UoI Planning Gr 5
9.25-10.05 am Literacy Planning Gr 4 & 5
2.00-2.40 pm Literacy Planning Gr 2
2.45-3.25 pm Literacy Planning Gr 3
*Art and PE planning times regarding the UoI will be confirmed this week.

Friday 28 August
On Friday will we follow the same plan for listening conferences. ie. recess end at 12:50, specialist pick up at 12:55. New for this week, homeroom teachers please be available at the 3:25 drop off time in case specialists have a quick question from a student while dismissing them. Please see the Listening Conference doc for schedules and other details.

Upcoming dates: 
1st of September: Clubs begin
3rd of September: Back to School Night
8th of September: School Photo
14-16th September: MAP testing Gr 3-5

Tuesday, 25 August

On Tuesday morning at 8:00-8:20 in the ELAC Multi Purpose Room we will have a brief Nuts and Bolts meeting.
On the agenda, we have the following:
- Lunch and recess supervision
- Grows and Glows from Listening Conferences

Tuesday afternoon at 1.00pm we have Elementary School Assembly in the Theatre. It will be a short introduction and tone setting to the year, faculty and general expectations. Seating plan can be found on the blog on Monday.
Have a great weekend!

Listening Conference Transition from Recess to Activities

To ensure a smooth transition from recess to listening conferences, please follow the next procedure:

- Recess will finish at 12.50pm 

- Teachers are asked to pick up their students from outside at 12.50pm

- Specialist teachers will meet the students in the classrooms at 12.55pm to escort them to the activity

- Listening conferences start at 1.00pm

Listening conference schedule

Supervision today and tomorrow

Supervision:

	12:15-12:40	12:25-12:55	12:25-12:55	12:15-12:35
Week	Cafeteria Tables	Playground	Playground	Cafeteria Line
17-Aug *	Trevor	Kim	Kae	Celia

Thank you!

Thank you for setting up such a warm welcome to both the new and returning families. It was evident to the parents that they are bringing children to a school filled with caring and well-prepared teachers and assistants. We saw many happy and excited students and parents today. Well done everyone!

Class Lists as of today - Please check!

Please find the class lists here.

Listening Conference Schedule

Please find the Listening Conference Protocol and Schedule here. You may collect the sign-up sheets from Yuko-san who has them readily printed out in her office. Signing up will take place in the classroom during the Open House. If you have any questions please contact Heikki.

Planning meetings w/ Coordinators

Trevor and Kim have scheduled in collaborative planning time with each team.  Please refer to the attached schedule to view the time allocated for your grade level. Although a weekly time is set, we can decide together how often we wish to meet.  At this time, please reserve this time in your own schedules.

ESOL teachers and specialists are welcome to attend any of these team meetings they find relevant.

link to schedule

Beginning of the year meeting slideshow

Please find the slideshow from this morning here.

ES Tech Orientation

Tue 18 Aug at 12:45-14:45
Venue: ELAC Multipurpose Room
On the agenda we will have:
- Class website (homeroom page) expectations, Heikki
- Tech orientation for creating class website, Kae
- Gr 3 - 5 tech orientation on class website blogs, Kae

Student Files

Student files are in Kim and Trevor's office. Please, study the files of both the returning and new students before school starts. Particularly, pay attention to students with ESOL and Learning Support needs so that you are prepared to scaffold for them from the first day onwards.

Welcome to the Elementary School Communication Blog!

This blog will function as a channel for general communication and storing of important information provided by the Elementary School Leadership Team: Kim, Trevor and Heikki.
The blog will guide you to the following:
- Reminders and times of meetings, events and important milestones during the school year
- Links to meeting agendas and minutes
- Duties, and duty rosters, schedules and calendar
- Sharing of important decisions and protocols
- Access to curriculum documents
- Balanced Literacy
- Professional development opportunities
- Resources
- Links to CA Sites, etc.
We hope you will find this tool helpful for ensuring effective communication in the Elementary School.