Good Morning Memorial Families,
Heading into the final full week of school before vacation, there is definitely a lot of excitement in the air, as well as a lot of tired children! We will do our best to keep your children focused on the school routines and learning this week and next, and we appreciate your efforts to get your children to school on time and ready to learn. We certainly know how many challenges and changes to routine the holiday season brings for many families.
On Friday, your children had a half day of school to allow our teachers to continue to engage in ongoing professional development around instructional practices. Many of the classroom teachers visited neighboring districts to observe literacy instruction and to bring back new ideas to their own classrooms. We were able to spend time observing educators teaching, and then there was time to debrief on what we saw and ask questions. This type of professional learning is something that MURSD does well- both hosting surrounding districts as well as being visitors to other schools. When we collaborate around best practices in education, your children directly benefit. Our Spanish Immersion teachers also have had opportunities to visit the Millis Public Schools to collaborate with their Immersion program teachers and learn more about curricular alignment from grade to grade. On Friday, those educators remained at Memorial to work on the vertical alignment of language acquisition here in MURSD. This work will guide instruction in each grade moving forward and will be a key resource in future years.
We continue to see a severe shortage of substitute teachers at Memorial, and of course illness continues to abound. If you have ever thought about working in education, substitute teaching is a great place to start, just to see if it is the right working environment for you. Please reach out to Angelina Adams if you are interested in doing some subbing in the building.
Additionally, we are actively searching for a licensed early childhood/special educator to allow us to expand our three year old preschool program in January. If you are interested, or you know someone who might be, please reach out to Wendy at wbell@mursd.org. This is not a temporary position. We intend to have two preschool classrooms at Memorial next year.
I hope that you have a wonderful week!
Warmly,
Wendy and Lauren
