Congratulations!

I have a lot for you today so please read through it all. Monday will be the start of our final announcements schedule (for now at least). You'll be able to access the Zoom announcements from your calendar Monday through Thursday. The kids have been very excited to lead the announcements. They appreciate both compliments and ideas to improve. 

Columbia Fund for Academic Excellence Nominees
Congratulations to this year's nominees:

• Outstanding First Year Educator: Jake Floyd
• Outstanding Educator, K-2: Jen McIntyre
• Outstanding Educator, 3-5: Julia Hickcox
• Outstanding Educator in a Specialized Area: Matt Villasana

Please consider writing letters of support for our nominees. I will need them by March 2. You can email them to me or bring a hard copy with your signature. Also consider having your students write letters for teachers they work with now or had in the past. I will send out a Seesaw request to families as well. 

Technology Share and Needs Session
After doing some reflection, I think that it'd be helpful to start discussing technology integration tools once again. Thanks to Jen and her student teachers for the nudge. So Tuesday the 15th after school will be our first meeting. I'm envisioning 30 minutes of simple conversations about what's happening in your room that you've found to be successful and questions about what you'd like to learn. Then based on that information, I can set up times to work with teams or individuals with targeted PD. The 15th, 3:45-4:15ish. 

February Fishbowl Activities
I have two activities to choose from. I imagine these will spill over into March since we are hitting the second wave of "no school February".

• Pop-up cards - students will create a pop up card to share with a friend or family. I thought it'd be a nice tie in to our Cardinal Cool Tools. I anticipate this activity to take about 45 minutes. Good for K-5.
• Ski Jumping - students will build a ski jumper to take on Mount Villasana using craft sticks, foil, and tape. They'll send their jumper down the ramp and see how far he or she can travel before crashing in a spectacular fashion. I anticipate this activity to take about 45 minutes as well. Good for K-5, but for the K-1 classes it'd be best if you could bring along a college helper if you have one.

I have quite a few items on my calendar already. If you'd like to do both, we'll start by scheduling one and then see how quickly things fill up. 

What's Happening?
Here's a look at some past and upcoming events that might interest you:

• We completed a Mystery Zoom in Ms. Tierney's class and Ms. Long's class recently. On Tuesday, Ms. Ziegler's class will be participating in their first Mystery Zoom.
• Breakout fever: Kindergarten is participating in Breakout Boxes, Valentines Day Edition. Ms. Kinkead and I are continuing our teamwork initiative in her class with a two-step team breakout on Monday. Finally, I'll be putting together a space themed breakout for Ms. Hickcox in the coming weeks. 
• Third grade is starting a PLTW activity with simple machines. I'll be in their rooms over the next several weeks helping students building simple machines and then designing and building a compound machine to rescue a tiger.

Media Center Programming
Read Aloud - Next week will feature the book "Meet Miss Fancy", another of the Show Me Award nominees. We'll continue to feature books by or about African Americans and point students towards our display of Black History Month selections.
These Books Need Some Lovin' - It's been fun seeing students choosing books that have never been checked out. We'll continue throughout February.
Wordle - We will definitely continue with the Wordle. It's been a lot of fun. I think Lori is enjoying it more than the kids.
Saturn V LEGO - I purchased a ginormous LEGO for students to build. If you have a student who deserves some build time, let me know and we'll get it scheduled. I'll make sure they take a space book before they leave.

CREdX Planning
Our CREdX event is back in the works after a two year hiatus. This event is modeled after TED talks and was a huge success our first year. I'm forming the planning committee now and we'll start our meetings next week. We will have a theme picked and start looking for speakers around the first of March. Here is one of the 2019 CREdX talks so you can see what it looked like. The rest of the videos are linked on the CRE home page. 

100 Cup Staff Challenge
Congratulations to the 5th grade for participating in the 100 Cup Staff Challenge on Wednesday. You have each won $100 for our upcoming book fair.

I hope you have a great weekend