All members of the Canaan Elementary School staff will be working on an Evacuation & Tabletop Exercise with Canaan Police and Fire Departments.

All members of the Enfield Village School staff will be working on Active Shooter Training with Enfield Police Department.

All members of the Indian River School staff will be working on their Cybersecurity Plan.

All members of the Mascoma High School staff will be working on NEASC Curriculum Work.

Teachers from all the schools will meet at the high school for a PD Choice Day. Teachers will get to choose which sessions they attend. Sessions include:

• Youth Mental Health First Aid
• Trauma-Informed Mental Health & De-escalation
• Executive Functioning & Classroom Strategies
• Interactive Flatboard Panels (IFPs)
• Aimsweb (PreK-8)
• Databases
• Google Tips & Tricks
• Neurodiversity in the Regular Ed. Classroom
• Team Building 501: Beyond Ice-Breakers and Interactive Games
• Regulated Classroom (K-5)
• CPR training

Other

• Measurable Annual Goals (SpEd Case Managers)
• Vertical Alignment (5-12)
• (PreK-4) Grade-level Team Meetings, WIN Block and Social Studies alignment
• Frontline Help Sessions

Registrations for this day have been sent out. Please reach out to me (aguinness@mvrsd.org) if you did not receive it.

The NHED and Discovery Education launched the first 42 lessons in a new series of engaging, New Hampshire-specific digital resources bolstering civics education for K-12 students across the state. Educators seeking access to the free resources are invited to visit the NH Partnership Resource page.

Webinars for educators will be held to provide more details on the lessons:

Mondays noon to 12:45 (March 3 to April 14)

Wednesdays 3:00 to 3:45 (March 5 to April 16)

Thursdays 4:00 to 4:45 (March 6 to April 17)

Wow, I cannot believe it's already March! Before you know it we will be into the thick of assessment season. Spring NWEAs begin in May and end in the beginning of June. Aimsweb Progress Monitoring is a continuous process that happens approximately every 2 weeks. While Aimsweb Benchmarking will occur in May.

New Hampshire Statewide Assessment System (NHSAS) testing window opens April 1st and ends May 30th. This is slightly earlier than years past. NHSAS tests students in grades 3-8 on English Language Arts and Mathematics. Students in grades 5, 8 & 11 are also tested in Science (*indicates 5th & 8th grade science testing). Testing Dates are as follows:

• IRS - Week of April 28th*, May 5th, May 12th*, May 19th
• MHS 11th grade Science - April 24th

• CES - May 5th-9th
• EVS - May 12th-16th

SAT and PSAT testing will happen at MHS on April 8th. Freshmen will take the PSAT9. Sophomores will take the PSAT10 and Juniors will take the SAT. The SAT is New Hampshire's State Test for high schools.

Rounding out our assessment schedule are the Advanced Placement (AP) Exams. AP exams are subject specific standardized tests that measure how well students have mastered course content.

Students will be taking the following AP Exams:

• Biology on May 5, 2025 at 8 am
• European History on May 5, 2025 at 12 pm
• English Lit and Comp on May 7, 2025 at 8 am
• Statistics on May 8, 2025 at 8 am
• Calculus AB/BC on May 12, 2025 at 8 am
• Precalculus on May 13, 2025 at 8 am

Tutor.com is a free resource available to New Hampshire students in grades 4-12, providing one-on-one academic support. This platform connects students with tutors who assist with homework, test preparation, and varies subjects. It's also a valuable tool for preparing for SAT and AP exams. Students can easily access Tutor.com through their Chromebooks by clicking on the waffle icon in the top right corner of the page. More details about Tutor.com can be found below.

The instructions on how to log in. Students will need to be logged into their MVRSD Google Account.

Planning to use a website, web app, or educational software for your next lesson or project? Make sure it's approved before you start! All resources must go through the App Vetting Process to ensure compliance and accessibility.

Here's how it works:

1. Submit a request: Complete the Google Form to begin,

2. Principal Review: Your building principal reviews and approves (or denies) the request.

3. CIA and IT Review: Our Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Director along with the IT Director conduct the next round of reviews.

4. SDPC Approval: If the app isn't pre-approved by the Student Data Privacy Consortium (SDPC), additional steps may be required. This can take months, so plan ahead.

5. Denied by SDPC? Unfortunately, the app cannot be used.

❗❗Reminder: This process takes time, so submit your requests early to avoid delays. For more details, check out the mandatory training video. ❗❗

As the end of the school year approaches, it's crucial for anyone up for recertification to ensure they have enough hours logged in Frontline. Even if recertification isn't on your radar this year, keeping your records updated is essential. Taking a few minutes now to update your hours will save time later and ensure your hard work is accurately reflected.

Log into your Frontline account and check on the status of your PD activities under your Learning Plan. Do you have outstanding activities waiting for approval? Have you submitted the appropriate documentation? Did you remember to mark it as complete?

It's also important to sign up for professional development activities when they are available. Activities do not stay in the catalog forever, and we are unable to reopen them if you didn't sign up for them before they closed.

As always if you need help with Frontline, attend your school's after-school help sessions for support! Check with your PD building reps for more information. Remember, your PD reps are happy to assist, but please be mindful of their time and attend designated help sessions.

• NH CIVICS has partnered with NHED to share resources with educators via NHED’s Canvas platform. Using the public NH Civics course on Canvas, educators can stay updated on upcoming professional development, public events, in-class programs for students, the NH Civic Learning Coalition and more.
• Keene State College, Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies: We believe that Holocaust and Genocide Education has much to contribute to civics education. Although this is difficult and traumatic material, we teach to ensure consistent engagement with the pressing questions of individual and group responsibility towards the other. By exploring values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and critical understanding of these complex issues and forces, we enable responsible civic engagement. As we remember, we seek to prevent genocide and crimes of mass atrocity by finding points of leverage, intervention, and empowerment.

• “Moose on the Loose” is a social studies curriculum for the State of New Hampshire. Created by the New Hampshire Historical Society, it explores the Granite State’s history, economics, geography, and civic life, introducing students to the state’s rich cultural heritage. The site was designed for kids in the upper elementary grades (Grades 3-6), but much of the material is adaptable for students in other grades. "Moose on the Loose" provides many ways for kids to connect what they learn about the past to current, statewide issues. It also provides a foundation for lifelong learning about New Hampshire, America, and the democratic traditions that unite us all. So dive in and find out more about the state we all love!
• Civics Fundamentals takes the one hundred questions asked by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on the naturalization test for U.S. citizenship and explores the “WHY?” to help the student discover their meaning and importance. We have created a two-minute video for each of the one hundred questions that can be turnkey lessons in civics education classes nationwide. Our goal is to move beyond the rote memorization of facts that dominates the current civics curriculum toward “inquiry-based instruction” that engages learners and is becoming more prevalent in education today. This video based product is available – at no cost to any educator or student – via online streaming.

This video shows how the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) may be used as a formative assessment — to determine students’ understanding of a concept or their knowledge of a topic. Educators can use the QFT to assess their students at the beginning of a unit, as seen in this video, in the middle of the unit, and toward the end of the unit.

There are other creative ways to use the QFT, including as a summative assessment (see: “Making Questions Flow” to read more about how to use student questions).

In this video, Lucy Canotas, a fourth-grade teacher in Manchester, New Hampshire, uses the QFT for formative assessment purposes. “I’m interested to see what they can bring as questions to make me understand where they’re still stuck or what they still don’t know,” she explains. To elicit students’ questions about fractions, she designed a visual Question Focus (QFocus). She found that using the students’ questions and work helped her better understand what they knew about this mathematical concept. This video shows each step of the QFT in an elementary-school classroom, and it shows how Canotas uses the QFT to collect information that helps her fine-tune lessons.

Math Running Record videos - There is an introduction video and then one for each operation where I interview students and explain how I coded the running record. Teachers can download the recording sheets from the site www.mathrunningrecords.com for free and practice while watching the videos.

Daily Routine Videos - There are separate videos for Kinder through 4th grade. All links to the daily routines shared are on my padlet: https://tinyurl.com/RecordElementaryMath

Teachable Courses - Teachers will go to the link and click in the upper right hand side of the site where it says "All products". They will then see all the courses I currently offer on the Teachable site- Cuisenaire Rods, Problem Solving K2, Fraction Essentials, and Place Value.

Please see the Mascoma Curriculum Google Classroom for the code.

• 🖍️ Kindergarten
• 📏 First Grade
• 🎲 Second Grade
• ⏲️ Third Grade
• 🧮 Fourth Grade
• ✏️ Fifth Grade
• 📐Sixth Grade
• 📊 Seventh Grade
• 📉 Eighth Grade

IM Professional Development slides by Jess Jacques

Working with Jess Jacques, the Merrimack Valley School District Math Coach, we have developed pacing guides based on Mascoma I Can Statements laying out the quarter by quarter plan for teaching the IM curriculum. Each document includes helpful suggestions and links.

Check out our Mascoma Curriculum, Instruction & Assessment Google Classroom for professional development materials, Grit materials & new videos, K-8 math pacing guides, scope and sequence documents, and more. 📚 📏 📖

Course Code: cshmptt