May 2024

Updates and Announcements

📚 Updated time! Our last DELT (District Equity Leadership Team) meeting is May 16th from 1-3pm at the District Office. We are looking forward to planning for the 2024-2025 school year! 

📚 The last Equity Unleashed (DEI Network) meeting is happening in-person on May 21st! Come out to connect and collaborate with other South Cook ISC members! Register: HERE

📚 The Special Olympics coaches have been holding weekly practices to prepare our athletes for our Special Olympics Culminating Event! This district-wide event will take place on May 28th at Central Middle School. Parents and Guardians of the athletes are welcome to attend! You'll see athletes wearing bright green shirts on this day, so please congratulate the athletes for participating in Special Olympics if you see them! 

📚 We have a few more weeks left of teaching the Neurodiversity lessons. We have had such amazing feedback; thank you for letting us in your classrooms and engaging with the students! 

📚 Teacher Appreciation Week is May 6-10th! Your dedication, patience, and passion for teaching makes a world of a difference every day. Wishing you a joyful Teacher Appreciation Week! 🤗

Asian, Asian American, Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islander Heritage Month

🌀 Here are the May 2024 Celebration Slides: Celebration Slides! Use these slides to celebrate May's significant days with your students.


🌀 Click on the following resources to teach and learn about Asian history, culture, and lives:
Teachers Guide: background information about API Month
NEA Resources: lesson plans that include API culture
 We Are Here: access the learning lab to learn about influential people and bias
 Asian Art Museum: virtual tours
 Reading List: recommend titles (picture books, middle grade, and young adult)
WWII Internment: k-2, 3-5, 6-8 lessons about World War II internment camps

🌀 Want to learn more about Asian and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America's history and are instrumental in its future success? Explore this virtual room! 

🌀 Cinco de Mayo is May 5th! Check out the Cinco de Mayo Virtual Room to learn more about why this is celebrated. 

🎉 Free Resources 🎉

Achievery 

Looking for a resource to help you build a culture of belonging for your students? Check out Achievery! Achievery offers free videos from popular movies and television shows and lesson plans around cultivating conversations around social awareness, relationship building and empathy. 

Check out the Scoob Unit and ask the questions: Can this shared experience bring them closer together as friends? How so? Have you experienced a similar situation with a friend?

You can also check out The LEGO Batman Movie and ask: What's problematic about actively avoiding our feelings? Why can 'going it alone' be a difficult or unfulfilling path?




Thinking Routines Toolbox

Want instructional strategies with little to no prep required? Check out Project Zero's Thinking Routine Toolbox. A thinking routine is a set of questions or a brief sequence of steps used to scaffold and support student thinking. PZ researchers designed thinking routines to deepen students’ thinking and to help make that thinking “visible.” Thinking routines help to reveal students’ thinking to the teacher and also help students themselves to notice and name particular “thinking moves,” making those moves more available and useful to them in other contexts.

Developing Learning Agility

Here are 2 resources you can use to teach students soft skills/life skills.

Staff Shout-Outs!

Let's celebrate all the hard work our staff does to provide an equitable and inclusive education for our students👏🏼

Thank you Mrs. Gibbons for organizing the Central Middle School Career Fair on April 26th! It was such a great event for students to explore different career options!


  

Shout out to all 5 schools for participating in Neurodiversity Week! It was a fun-filled week with Movement Monday, Tie Dye Tuesday, Wear Your Passion Wednesday, Thinking Cap Thursday, and Friendship Friday!