The 2017-2018 school year is off to a fast and furious start and I have had no time to sit and put together a blog post so rather than radio silence, I decided to just share some artifacts of our first few weeks. Here goes!!!!

Lesley and I were asked by Kaley Coffield, a former EE teacher, to do a presentation on Sketchnoting at the Business Meets Creative Conference this last weekend. 

Mrs. Tinney noticed that a lot of her students were naturally attracted to drawing when trying to put their ideas on paper, so she invited Lesley and me to bring our Sketchnoting presentation to her Second Graders.

It is amazing to me that this year is almost over and if you have been on this campus for the last few weeks, you would never know that things were winding down. Our teachers have been filling each day with meaningful activities and in this post, I have tried to cover as many of those activities as I could. Enjoy! Happy Summer!

Ms. Higby sent me this copy of the poem project that her class has been working on. She used Keynote and the presentation itself is very well done, but the thing that impressed me most was the critical thinking and depth of knowledge that created these poems. During the writing process, students wrote to express their ideas and feelings about the piece of art they chose from the artist. Students were expected to write poems that convey sensory details using the conventions of poetry (e.g., rhyme, meter, patterns of verse, figurative language, etc..).All of the 3rd Graders participated in this project and I am including the link to Mrs. Ryan's newsletter that features poems from each of the classrooms. Way to go Third Graders!

Mrs. Ryan's Newsletter

Last Wednesday, our campus used part of our PLC time to set up, with our teams, our new MacBook Airs. We had two roughly one hour sessions that afternoon, but the prep work started long before that. Celina and Nikki, well known faces on this campus from the Tech Services staff, showed up first thing in the morning to offer support and they stayed for the day. When the first session began, Nikki and Celina were joined by our Instructional Partner, Kelly VanMeter, our two Counselors, Michelle Corbett and Staci Hubbard, Tim Yenca, Ed Tech Director, and Chris Miller, Assistant Director of Technology Services. How could it not be successful when we had so many experts available to help us out?  A big thanks goes out to these folks for giving up their time to help us and to the EE staff, who were patient and positive through it all! 

Thanks to our amazing PTO, Kelly Van Meter and I were able to take two teachers to a national conference last week. Grace Alrtuz and Caroline Kimble had the chance to attend the first of what I hope will be many national conferences for them and the experience had a huge, positive impact on all of us.

Below are my Conference Notes done in the Paper 53 app.