The April KJ Family Connection was sent out to our KJ families on Wednesday, April 5th. 

Our Spring Benchmark Assessment deadline is April 4/28. By this date, you will have administered, scored, and documented in EduClimber your scores. Please communicate with your LBS1s any names of students who scored red in the chart on Google Classroom that you recommend need a diagnostic. All resources can be found in Google Classroom (hv3buze) and on the Shared Drive. I'm happy to help score, discuss next steps with this data, or anything else you may find helpful to you and your writers. 

Sincerely,

Janel  

We are in uncharted paper waters where not only do we have more colored paper on hand than white paper, colored paper is also less expensive than white paper. As such, we are asking that you pleae use colored paper whenever possible for the next few weeks. Thanks in advance for helping us stretch our remaining resources!

Take a look at the  April Instuctional Technology Update. In addition, don't forget that you have access to Go Guardian for the remainder of the semester as well as Book Creator.  Amber sent out an email today outlining multiple resources regarding Book Creator. 

Here's a review for Go Guardian from our very own Jenny Starkey:

If you haven't tried Go Guardian, please give it a try. It's a really great platform that allows teachers to see student screens, shows a timeline of every minute of student use, allows you to get data on inactivity, gives a variety of reports that can be sent to parents, allows for screenshots, gives teachers the ability to chat directly with students, close tabs, send a website to a student, lock student screens and even create a list of websites that only lets students be on the sites that you choose. A new feature is the 'Check In' button that allows the students to click on an emoji so that you can take a quick pulse of your class without having to interrupt the class. 

Support the Unit 5 Educational Foundation by participating in the 2nd Annual Unit 5k presented by Commerce Bank. Choose to participate in the 5k or one mile walk/run. Sign up today and show your pride for Unit 5 schools!

Event Details:
Sunday, April 30 at Maxwell Park
One mile race begins at 2 pm
5k race begins at 2:30 pm

Race fees:
$10/participant
$20/participant with race t-shirt

T-shirt sizes are guaranteed to participants registered by April 13.

Sign up today! https://runsignup.com/Race/IL/Normal/Unit5k

Our final screening/testing week will be April 11 - 14, during which time all grade levels will do aMath, aReading, and writing screeners. In addition, 8th grade will be doing the Illinois Science Assessment. Here is the schoolwide planner for those teams that want to outline their plans prior to spring break. We will have makeup dates in the planner after the KJHS Assessment Team meets on March 21st. 

PTO is hosting a Gobena Coffee Fundraiser and a Barrel House Fundraiser (April 18th). Please check out the fliers for more information. 

Beginning on April 11, office-issued lunch detentions will be served on the stage of the cafeteria. There will be a lunchroom supervisor there to sign students in and monitor behavior. Students will not be allowed to go to the RESET room during lunch. 

Following spring break, we will no longer be assigning in-school suspensions to be served on Wednesdays so Mr. Thompson can fulfill his Tier 2 mentoring responsibilities. If a situation arises where a student has to be taken out of circulation and cannot be sent home, an administrator will monitor them in the RESET room. 

Hello, we are team 8-2 and we have decided that we want to run a coffee shop on our Monday advisory mornings. We are doing this because we would like to potentially raise enough money for a team celebration.

We will complete various tasks like delivery,  being a financial advisor, advertising, communications, and the practice of being a barista. All of these jobs will benefit and allow us to learn basic life skills like, balancing a budget, communication, team work, problem solving, and leadership.

 All jobs differ from each other, a financial advisory helps them manage money to be able to buy things with an appropriate budget. If you're in advertising you will make different flyers to help promote the coffee shop and get more customers. Communication helps remind and tell people to buy coffee so that we can raise money for our team celebration. Barista’s will be the ones to make the coffee and serve customers different flavors of Dunkin coffee like caramel, cinnamon roll, vanilla, oat milk, and sugar. Delivery people will deliver the coffee to different customers throughout the building.

 To decide what job we wanted to do, we completed a survey to figure out how we would like to participate in this event. From the results of the quiz,we were put with the job that best fits us while taking in account which one we were most interested in.

 This coffee shop will launch on March 13th, and run until May 15th. Coffee will only be available to the teachers in the building, selling for $3. 

Team 8-2 communications, 

Caroline and Ella.

Please do not forget that your mandated trainings need to be completed by May 1, 2023. 

Hello, 

As our schedules are going to be interrupted with IAR testing, student self-paced instructional models are a great way to keep students engaged with flexible scheduling. If you have not tried a Playlist inspired by Catlin Tucker, I encourage you to check it out. 

Here are a few I have tried: the 6 Word Memoir Playlist was a quick, creative way to give students an understanding of what a Playlist was and how it worked before we did a full unit (and honestly so I could get a feel for it). This Setting Playlist, was more in depth, while the Narrative Playlist was created after student feedback and teacher reflection. 

Reach out if you have any questions about my tasks. If this sounds like something you might want to try, Caitlin shares her insights in her blog. If you are interested in co-creating a Playlist for your instruction this spring, please reach out to me or Jenny Snyder.  

Thank you! Have a great weekend!

Sincerely, 

Janel Sebeny

Kingsley Junior High School

Team 7-2 Language Arts

Middle School LA District Chair

PBIS Tier 1 Coach

IRC Past President

Per Joe Adelman, Director of Operations:

Any field trip scheduled during the school day and submitted to Transportation through Trip Tracker must have a return time to the school site no later than 1:30 pm  This is necessary so that our drivers can begin the pm routes on time.  If you currently have a scheduled field trip that returns after 1:30 pm, Transportation or I will be reaching out to look at altering the return time to fit within the 1:30 pm return required or find alternatives.  

Please remind your students that all students should be scanning on and off the bus daily.  This also applies to students going on field trips and athletes traveling to competitions. This is imperative for the safety of students.

When writing referrals, please be sure that time on the referral is the time the incident happened and not the default time of when you wrote the referral. Accuracy in time of incident is important as it helps us track when students are having issues during the school day. This then allows us to implement interventions that have a better chance of supporting these students. 

Hearing things about ChatGPT? Here is an excellent resource created for educators by educators explaining this Open AI resource.

Students are not allowed to leave the cafeteria during the lunch hour unless they have a pass from a staff member. If you want a student to come to your room during the lunch hour, please give them a pass to show to lunchroom supervisors.