Good Morning Memorial Families,
Happy December! Last week was the official end to trimester one and your child’s first report card of the year will be available at midday on Friday, December 9th. With our parent-teacher conferences falling so close to the reporting period for trimester one, you should not have any surprises, and much of what you see will reflect the conversations that you had with your child’s teacher in November. MURSD uses a standards based report card at the elementary level, and our teachers report out on the progress your child is making towards those end of year expectations in trimester one. That is important to remember, in particular if you are seeing a lot of “2s”. We do not expect your child to have mastered the standard yet, and so long as they are progressing towards that standard in a steady way, that is great news. The past several years have been difficult on students, families, and educators. Interruptions in learning because of illness, remote learning, and school closures early on have altered the typical development of many of our younger learners, While I think we have done an amazing job recovering, we continue to see the impact this year. One way that you can support your child is to do your best to ensure that he/she is in school for as many of the 180 days as possible this year. Of course, if your child is sick, we want him/her to stay home, but inconsistent attendance is a huge factor in student learning progress. On Friday, we will be sending home letters with any student who has missed seven or more days of school this year. This is something that warrants your attention and consideration as we move into the middle and later parts of the school year. Taking multiple vacations and trips outside of school vacation weeks will impact your child’s progress with grade level curriculum and it is difficult to make up that time. We cannot provide work ahead of time if you have a planned absence, and nothing replaces the instructional time with the classroom teacher. Please keep all of this in mind if you have upcoming trips planned.
Before Thankgiving we wrapped our our first WIN cycle of the year. WIN stands for “What I Need” and is a dedicated 30-40 minutes a day in each grade level where typical reading, writing, and math instruction is paused and we divide all children up into groups to receive extra practice, intervention, and enrichment in the subject area that we have chosen for that month. In our first cycle in October and November, we focused on English and Spanish Language Arts. Students were flexibly grouped between grade level classrooms and academic tutors, classroom teachers, title one tutors, and special educators all took smaller groups of students to work on differentiated reading and writing projects and activities. We tracked progress over the six weeks, and we are using that data to plan for the next ELA WIN cycle in January. In December, the learning in WIN is in math, and it is exciting to walk through the building and see students working with base ten blocks, digging into word problems, and extending their understanding of numbers and place value outside of the normal math instruction they are getting in class. This new endeavor this year is helping us to meet each child where they currently are and providing opportunities for students to work with different adults and different groups of students throughout the day.
I hope that you have a wonderful week! As a reminder, we have an early release day on Friday, December 9th so that our teachers can engage in professional development. Dismissal will begin at 12:10pm.
Warmly,
Wendy and Lauren
