December Newsletter

Happy winter break! I am blown away at how quickly the time has passed and that we are halfway through the school year! The second half of November and the month of December have been extremely busy finalizing all the visual & performing arts auditions, analyzing CogAT & IOWA screening reports, reviewing and meeting with teachers to discuss new primary talent pool referrals, special considerations referrals for students who are twice exceptional and so much more! Currently, we have more than 134 gifted & talented and primary talent pool students at Maxwell Elementary that are provided services by our entire staff, which I might say does an INCREDIBLE job supporting, loving, and teaching our students. Thank you to all of our families for entrusting us with your children! We are so grateful for the amazing Maxwell community!

Starting in January, I will begin to provide appropriate resource instruction and co-teaching instruction to our primary talent pool students in grades K-2nd! I miss my youngest students, and I am excited to get to know them better with the support of some amazing teammates and volunteers who specialize in the arts:) Not to worry, their classroom teachers have already been hard at work meeting their needs everyday in the classroom through differentiation, but I'm excited to get some time with primary friends again!

I hope that you and your family enjoy the winter break and it brings you peace, joy, and rest!

Visual and Performing Arts

During the month of November & December, all 3rd-5th grade students had an opportunity to audition for dance, drama, vocal, instrumental, and visual arts. Maxwell Elementary had over 50 students audition in the visual & performing arts areas! We are excited to share these audition portfolios with the district panel of judges who specialize in the arts and hopefully seek out additional gifted & talented students in the arts:)

CogAT & IOWA Testing

All third grade students and students in 4th & 5th grade being referred for gifted & talented took the CogAT & IOWA assessments and those results will be shared with families on Friday, December 20th. Here is a breakdown of the number of students we were able to discover as eligible for gifted & talented identifications as a result of this screening process:

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

All my best,

Rachel Matthews

Maxwell Elementary

Gifted & Talented Specialist