• After School Plan (Link): Filling out this short digital form helps us keep your child safe as they transition home or to after school programming. A hard copy will also come home in the next few days. Only people that you have listed on your form will be allowed to pick up your child. If you need to make a change to the pick-up plan, please notify Sara Soloman in the office using the contact information in the column to the right.

• Fill Out the Photo Survey (Link): Please fill out this quick survey to let me know if it's okay to occasionally post photos on this website that include your child.

Yes it can, and to every student's benefit! 

As far as brain research goes, we've thankfully come a looooong way from the one-room school house (and outhouse) days, and our ever growing understanding of how people of all ages learn allows us to meet students' academic and social-emotional needs in a mixed age setting. However, our response to that knowledge has not adapted to the research. In a persistently stagnant fashion, districts, and their schools, still try to squeeze all learners into one-size-fits-all packaged literacy and math programs, insisting every student be taught the same thing in the same way in the same time frame as every other student in that same grade. It is no surprise when year after year the outcomes are the same, and the achievement gap remains, possibly wavering ever so slightly one way or the other but always, predictably, there. 

Even though the oldest student in one grade may have a birthday only a day or two apart from the youngest child in the grade above, putting them together in the same class becomes challenging only because the materials are not designed to meet students where they are but instead to move students through a uniform set of tasks prescribed for their grade level.

So the 4th/5th Grade Team is going to step out of the box and build instruction using tools and strategies that meet the needs of every student every day.  

A super streamlined snapshot of how "outside the canned curriculum" instruction looks:

• We (the 4/5 team) refamiliarized ourselves with the standards across grades so that we know what the progression of learning looks like up to 4th and 5th grade levels and beyond.

• We aligned 4th and 5th grade standards for all subject areas so that we can design instruction efficiently for students in each grade as well as across grades.

The Teaching/Learning Cycle:

• In preparing for daily instruction, we unpack all of the subskills that need to be learned to gain competence with the larger goal of each set of aligned standards as well as prerequisite skills as needed. 

• We build an assessment that checks for those subskills as well as a solid understanding of the larger goal. 

• From that, we learn what students know, don't know and have misconceptions about.

• With the target goals in sight, we design whole group, small group and individual instruction around what we've learned from the assessments, using the highest leverage tools and strategies for the particular work. 

• Each day, we gather more information from each student's work and adjust our instructional plans accordingly. 

• As a team, we look at patterns of mistakes or misconceptions that show up in student work and seek the tools and strategies that will best leverage growth.

We share the process with students, who become active participants in their learning and build understanding of what works best for them and what doesn't. They reflect and become strong self-advocates.

Off and Away Policy