ALiCE Training:
Thank you for your attention during our ALiCE training this week. Mrs. Tollison and I were so encouraged by the meaningful conversations that took place during the session. Please continue to think through "what if" scenarios and never be afraid to ask questions or discuss concerns with us. You are required to make time to appropriately discuss ALiCE with your students and detail emergency plans with them as well. Preparedness is the key. Students should know to listen carefully to your instructions/directions and act accordingly. We will have our ALiCE drill on Friday, October 9th. With that in mind, we did receive a few questions on our Parking Lot so here are our official responses to those questions:
1.) Will we send a letter home to parents about this?
Yes, later this month we will send home a letter explaining to parents what ALiCE is and also informing them of our drill on October 9th. You can still begin discussions with your students prior to the letter being sent to parents. Please do not notify parents and students of our drill until we send the letter home.
2.) We need a gate near the end of the 5th grade hallway. That playground is a fatal funnel.
I agree. I have sent Mr. Binnicker an email detailing this concern. I will keep you posted.
3.) Could we tell kids to wait until we get outside to run?
The reality of the situation if that if indeed we ever have an intruder event, it will be a very chaotic scene. We won't be lining our students up and exiting the building in the third block quietly. Students will need to run if that means ensuring their safety. For our drill, we want to be as careful as possible while getting through to our students that this is important and meaningful practice in the event that we ever (God forbid) have to endure such an event. We don't want students intentionally making the drill more difficult by behaving in an intentionally silly or harmful way, but they need to have a sense of urgency to exit quickly. You know your students so I will let you be the judge of how quickly they need to walk/run to exit the building (if this is the right move).
4.) How do we let someone know where we are and what we are doing? Call 911? Text?
This is a very good question. Your first duty is to the students and to yourself. Calling 911 is never a terrible idea, but keep in mind that this will have more than likely already taken place in an event such as this. If you eventually evacuate the building, your goal is to eventually make it to the reunification point. At that point, we will work on locating missing individuals, contacting families, etc. If you are still on lockdown, you would want to wait for emergency or school personnel to notify you that it is okay to leave the room. If there is time, if it is safe, and if it is appropriate, you can text/call school administration and/or fellow teachers to give them information. My school cell phone number is 864-634-4767.
5.) During fire drills we need a way to make sure all students are accounted for.
This is very true and we have thought about this. The first thought is to provide a green and red piece of paper for each classroom. These can be placed with the class roll and parent contact information you should take with you for any drills (or the real thing). Teachers would hold up the green paper if they have everyone accounted for and the red card if someone is missing. Give us an opportunity to sort out the details and we will report back with our official procedure.
*Please make sure your doors are locked. Please use our lock strips.
iPad Reminders:
As we discussed in our meeting, please use the form Mrs. Fowler shared with you in the event that an iPad needs to be worked on. Do not send students with their iPads to the media center. Simply drop the form off in the container on Mrs. Fowler's circulation desk and the first available person who can address the issue will do so.
Also, please make sure students download apps from the PVES App Catalog only and not the regular App Store. If an app needs to be added to our white list because it does not appear in the current white list, please email the name of that app to Mrs. Fowler so she can make this happen.
We will turn on our compliance policy on Monday, September 14th at 8:00 A.M. Students who have apps that are not on our approved white list will be emailed a warning. I will also receive an email. Please make sure your students are aware of this and encourage them to delete those apps that are not on the white list. You can also let them know that if they do not do so, their iPad will be locked beginning Tuesday, September 15th.
Finally, please make sure you have devoted some class time to cover digital citizenship and proper use of the iPad. In a previous blog, I provided the link where these materials can be accessed. Watch this video for one example of the WRONG way to use an iPad. Click Here for Video.
More to Celebrate!
*Congratulations to Ms. Wilkie! One of her Donors Choose projects was fully funded. Mrs. Putnam had a project funded last year. Mrs. Kallin has submitted a project as well. This is a great way to receive materials for your classroom. Check with one of these ladies if you are interested in submitting a project to be funded by outside donors.
*We have more teachers blogging about the great things happening in their classrooms! Check out Mrs. Ashmore's Third Grade Thoughts and Mrs. Thomas's Times. These are awesome!
*We are blowing up Twitter! Thanks to the MANY of you who post pictures and thoughts on your class Twitter feeds. This is an excellent way connect with our school community and beyond. Our twitter feed has already caught the attention of the district office and school board! Mrs. Kallin has a class facebook page that looks wonderful. I am proud that we are at a place that we can engage our school community, near and far, through social media. Just think, a few short years ago Twitter was blocked in ASD1.
*We are about to kickstart Mentor Anderson in our building. Ms. Lee emailed everyone about our next training and breakfast to be held at our school at 7:30 A.M. on Monday, September 21st. We need more mentors so please let us know if you know of anyone that you can recommend. Speaking of Ms. Lee, we are so thankful for her hard work. She is everywhere in our building, from morning duty to afternoon duty, and is committed to helping our children who need that extra care and concern during the day.
*Mrs. Freeman, Mrs. Merritt, and Mrs. Redmon have huge caseloads this year. Mrs. Freeman, for example, has given herself a 15 minute lunch break this year. Mrs. Redmon is working with students at all three schools in our area. Still, they are doing such a fabulous job serving our students!
Moore's Musings:
MAP testing continues this week. Please make sure you have signed up for additional testing sessions. We have to have all students tested by October 3rd and most of you will want the data well before that date for your SLOs. Fourth and fifth grade teachers, consider splitting this responsibility with your partner teacher so that the ELA teacher signs up for a session and the Math teacher signs up for a session. Help Mrs. Young with signing students in and out of MAP when they visit the lab for related arts.
Speaking of SLOs, we will be sending out information about our next steps with SLOs. Basically, we will be meeting several times in the next 3 weeks to get everyone where they need to be in order to turn in the necessary documents in October.
The AdvancED accreditation process will begin sooner than later with some of you already assigned to district committees. I will go ahead and tell everyone now that this process is involved and will require time and effort from everyone to successfully complete. This process is vital to the direction of our school and district. Stay tuned...
Thanks for reading to our students during arrival each morning. I can think of way to spend those few minutes than engaged in reading!
Speaking of arrival time, don't forget that we have specific teachers on duty each morning who serve as a "tutor" in the cafeteria. Students can be pulled to work on homework, study math facts, etc. This is a great resource and part of the intervention we offer at PVES.
Mark Your Calendar (MYC):
Be sure to check our shared calendar daily as you are responsible for being aware of the information posted on it.
- ESOL Meetings during planning on Thursday, September 10th.
- International Reading Day on Friday, September 11th.
- AirWatch Compliance Policy turned on Monday, September 14th at 8:00 A.M.
- Digital Playground (not required) on Tuesday, September 15th at 3:15 P.M. in PD Room.
- 3rd grade and Marino fall pictures on Wednesday, September 16th (morning).
- 4th/5th grade fall pictures on Thursday, September 17th (morning).
- F&P Leveling due to Martin on Friday, September 18th.
- Mentor Anderson Training at 7:30 A.M. on Monday, September 21st.
- Science "techbook" training for grade 3 on Monday, September 21st from 8:15-11:15 A.M. (lunch provided)
- Science "techbook" training for grades 4 and 5 on Monday, September 21st from 11:30-2:30 P.M. (lunch provided)
- Faculty meeting on September 22nd - Major Topic: Guidance "Training"
And if you have read his entire blog, then I am sure Friday feels like ...
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