Parent Newsletter

Thanks for a great first nine weeks and start to the school year. It's hard to believe we are already 1/4 of the way through the school year. We will work this week to focus the newsletter on information to help support our students to have a great start to the second nine weeks. Below are a few topics we will talk about:

- A look at the events for the week

- Tools for Success

- Understanding Canvas Tools (Announcements, Gradebook, and Calendar)

- Tools for the 21st century learner

- October Counselor Corner Theme

Thanks for all that you do to support Jefferson Middle School! We hope you have a great week.

Phil Cox, Principal

Chris Layton, Vice Principal

Check out the link for more information

Below are links to the newly revised bus routes for Oak Ridge Schools. The new routes will take effect on Tuesday, October 24, 2017. Times are approximate. Students should be prepared to board the bus ten minutes before the scheduled time. All routes are dependent on regular ridership and may be altered or suspended at any time. Oak Ridge High students will ride to school in the mornings with middle school students. Please check the middle school routes for morning bus information. In the afternoons, high school students will ride ORHS buses.

Bus Routes for October 2017-2018

• Glenwood Morning
• Glenwood Afternoon
• Jefferson Morning
• Jefferson Afternoon
• Linden Morning
• Linden Afternoon
• Oak Ridge High School Afternoon
• Robertsville Morning
• Robertsville Afternoon
• Willow Brook Morning
• Willow Brook Afternoon
• Woodland Morning
• Woodland Afternoon

Monday 23- B Day

Tuesday 24 - A Day

7th grade to JPAC 1st period

7th grade to Wesley Woods

Fall Band Concert – ORHS, 6:30, Doors open at 6

Wednesday 25- B Day

Wilderness Connections leave at 1:00

5th-6th grade student council party after school 1-3

Thursday 26 - A Day

Wilderness Connections

Fire Assembly(5th grade), JPAC, 1-2

Friday 27 - B Day

Youth for Christ JPAC 7:00 A.M.

Wilderness Connections return 3:30

Saturday 28

Orchestra Jr. Clinic try-outs, Webb School

Last week, Mr. Cox and Mr. Layton were honored to be able to present at the TN LEAD conference. They presented to an audience of teachers, administrators, superintendents etc. from all around the state and discussed the journey of Jefferson Middle School to develop a STEM culture to support 21st century learners. Through the many topics discussed the presentation centered around the amazing efforts by the staff at JMS to work to help facilitate learning opportunities for ALL learners. In addition, the presentation concentrated on designing and promoting a blended learning model including how to utilize both digital and non digital tools to help reach out to students and families to support learning as a lifelong process.

The presentation was well attended and had many follow up questions, conversations and collaboration. As a result, Mr. Cox and Mr. Layton were able to connect to other building level and district level leaders from across the state to discuss ideas, strategies and resources to help students. It was a great opportunity share, learn and grow thanks to the many efforts by our amazing students, staff, and families who have embraced the concepts of blended learning and the tools we work to help promote to help students.

November 1st - Parent/Teacher conferences

November 22nd - 24th - Thanksgiving Holiday (No School)

Winter Break - Early dismissal Tuesday Dec. 19th

Winter Break - December 20th - Jan. 2nd (No School)

Jan. 3rd, 2018 - Students return for 2nd semester

Student Council party for 5th and 6th graders

Wednesday, October 25th after school 1pm-3pm.

JMS gym

$3.00 entrance fee

Concessions Available.

Child must be picked up by 3:00 pm

Ms. Hardy's students have taken on the task of spreading kindness. If you are familiar with the Oak Ridge Rocks on social media, you would know that throughout the city of Oak Ridge people have left decorated rocks filled with uplifting and positive messages. Check out the pictures of the amazing work Ms. Hardy's students did to create rocks to support kindness.

We have spent a lot of time this year in our newsletter focusing on tools to help support your student. One tool we have utilized and discussed a lot is Canvas, our learning management system. It is a great tool to promote Blended Learning. Over the past few weeks a lot of great questions have been asked about Canvas, Blended Learning and 21st century tools. This week, we will focus and highlight some of the tools our amazing teachers use as a part of our Blended Learning plan.

Learn more below about the following:

- Announcements and the Canvas Calendar

- TenMarks for Math and Prodigy

- MyOn and MobyMax

- Discovery Education Social Studies and Science Techbooks

These resources do a great job of helping students and parents have a better idea of the content being learned and discussed in class. These tools are great for students and parents to use at home to review, learn, relearn and discuss.

If you want more information on what’s happening at JMS, you can hear the daily announcements that are read to the students each morning. Simply go to the JMS webpage under the News+Dates tab and select “Daily Announcements” Works best in Chrome browser.

JMS will be hosting a book fair on Monday, October 30th - Friday, November 3rd. We need volunteers to help. If you are able to do so, please click on the link below and sign up. Thank you for your help and support of JMS!

Book Fair Link: http://signup.com/go/Skpgfav

The Scholastic Book Fair is also available online for extended shopping opportunities. The JMS Online fair is available from Oct 23 – November 10. Shopping online benefits our school just like the in house book fair. There is a broad selection of books at every level available online. Use this link to shop:

http://www.scholastic.com/bf/jeffersonmiddleschool25

If you have questions, you can email Mrs. Haverkamp ewhaverkamp@ortn.edu or call 865-425-9301.

Getting Organized: The Canvas 10 Challenge

Spend 10 minutes each week with your student and do the following:

1. Ask them to log on to their Canvas Account

2. Check the Canvas Calendar to see what assignments they have upcoming

3. Check their grades in the Canvas grade book

4. Check the announcements for each class in Canvas

What is a Learning Management System? How does it work?

Canvas is a one stop shop for students to check their grades, assignments, announcements and any resources posted by a teacher. The goal for Canvas is to help create a Blended Learning resource for teachers to help students beyond school dismissal. Canvas is accessible to students when they have online access. Whether they have online access through a phone, video game system or the school issued laptop. If they have access to the internet, they will have access to Canvas.

For a student, parent or tutor, Canvas allows you to see weekly announcements, assignments, and grades that have been posted in Canvas. Below you will see some tutorials for using Canvas and also some examples of the tools on Canvas including Announcements, Assignments and Calendar.

The Techbook is an amazing tool for differentiation. There are so many tools, strategies, and resources produced within the techbook that help to make the tech book a valuable tool to help ALL students.

1. The actual tech book reading pages highlight multiple features to help learners. Including a lexile level changer that allows students to lower the reading level if needed to help assist them as they read for content knowledge.

2. The tech book also has a "read aloud" function that allows students to have the text read to them. This has been a great tool for students who need help with their reading skills. I have also encountered a parent who said, "I struggle to read as well, but sometimes at home, I use the read aloud function, so I can help my son when he gets home from school."

3. Highlight and create digital notes. This tool allows for students to organize their thoughts and ideas in a manner that makes sense to them. It allows them to highlight and create post it notes for materials they have read.

4. Se Habla Espanol? The tech book can convert into Spanish for English Language Learners. It also allows for reading aloud in Spanish as well.

5. The interactive search categories and reference guide. You have access to search the entire tech book and upon your search you can filter it to your needs. Within seconds, you have access to any video, video segment, article, tech book reading pages, images, interactive activities etc. that are found on the Discovery Education network.

Parents and students do you know about MyOn Reader? It is an excellent program to help students increase and improve their reading skills. The program offers many resources that help to enhance reading and comprehension. The benefits of this program are greatly beneficial for students to use at home and for parents to work with their students on reading skills.

myON is an award-winning personalized literacy environment that incorporates:

• A state-of-the art learning platform
• Enhanced digital reading content
• The Lexile® Framework
• Cutting-edge literacy tools
• Embedded metrics to monitor activity and growth

Robust professional development ensures that educators have the support needed to effectively implement myON. Together, these components power a Literacy Ecosystem that is built upon five pillars: Personalization, Unparalleled Content, Unlimited Access, Collaboration and Success.

Students can use TenMarks by logging on to the Jefferson Webpage and accessing it through the TenMarks icon on the Jefferson Homepage. Below is a short video that helps explain TenMarks. The goal of using TenMarks is to help students with a digital tool that is designed to scaffold student peformance. According to the TenMarks site, "Whether your instructional model is direct to whole class, blended, or small group, TenMarks Math is customizable to meet your needs. Our curriculum can be tailored to your scope and sequence and is designed to help you reach every student on his or her unique learning pathway."

According to the MobyMax site, "MobyMax finds and fixes learning gaps with the power of personalized learning. MobyMax’s adaptive curriculum creates an individualized education plan for each student, allowing gifted students to progress as quickly as they like while simultaneously ensuring that remedial students get the extra instruction they need. You’ve never experienced differentiation like this in the classroom."

Prodigy is a free, online, math-based, curriculum aligned, role playing game.

Join 250,000 teachers and over 5 million students in using the game that will revolutionize the way you approach math instruction!

Featuring over 50,000 questions spanning Grades 1 - 8 in 4 different curricula, players will get to watch their very own wizard grow stronger, learn new spells and acquire new equipment while facing ever more powerful opponents, all by answering math questions!

What makes it even better is that it will adapt by itself to ensure that your student/child is receiving the right material at the right time.

The game is self-paced, so while you might have a classroom of students all working at different levels within the curriculum, they'll still get to experience the same rich and exciting world, while each one is working on the content that is right for them.

Our goal is to make every child absolutely love doing math! With Prodigy, you won't have to force them or bribe them, in fact, they'll ask you to let them!

Registration is always free and gives you access to all of our educational content and teacher tools including assignment creation and comprehensive reports.

Good evening, JMS Parents. We first want to thank all of our 8th graders and their parents for the hard work, and great efforts that they put into the ASPIRE Test on Wednesday and Thursday. The testing period went well, and they will be shipped out on Monday.

To continue with our theme of bullying this month, we have included some links about how to talk your kids about bullying. Please check these out and watch them with your students. Have a conversation about what bullying is, and what some reasons are that makes bullying dangerous in and out of our schools. Next week, we will discuss different kinds of bullying, and what makes bullying, bullying.

Have a great week!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTeIWf9TX40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLzCpAfzSu4

http://kidshealth.org/en/parents/bullies.html