Week of February 13th

UAI Staff News

Volume IV

Issue 22

Week of February 13th, 2017

This Week's Memories

 

February Family Friday. The 8th grade students shared their researched and well-crafted Capstone Projects with their proud parents.  Many thanks and kudos to Marsha and Kristina for making sure our students and families had such a great opportunity to share and celebrate learning.  Many more thanks to the 7th & 8th grade team for coming together to make sure the event was seamlessly executed!

 

10th Grade Field Trips.  The 10th/12th Grade team took the 10th graders out on one of their student-choice field trips this past Friday.  During these trips, teachers coordinate a variety of field trip options, allowing students to self-select into one of the options.  This Friday, the majority of the grade picked to go see the movie, Fences, or ice-skating in Prospect Park.  The movie goers were glued to the screen for over 2.5 hours while the skaters took risks and pushed themselves to try something outside of their strength zones!

  

12th Grade Trip to Skyzone.  The seniors kicked off their final term in high school with a raucous trip to Skyzone.  Martine, Danielle, and Doris chaperoned.  Upon return, both kids and adults had ginormous smiles and raved about the good times had by all.  Danielle even got to safely show Jada who was boss!

  Musical Reconstruction.  Ana Marinez demonstrated her mastery of the US History Topic of Reconstruction, by performing an original song (to the tune of "Sweet Home Alabama"!  In Brodie's words, [this was an] "awesome reminder of why we have the best job in the world". Thanks for the share Mr. Brodie!

 

InspirED Youth Leadership Lab.  Jen & Lauren took several of our students to join The inspirED Youth Leadership Lab.  This series was developed to further the goal of fostering a nationwide movement for emotional well-being in schools. At the event, our team worked with students, educators, administrators, social and emotional learning experts from across the country.  

 




6th Grade Interviews.  This weekend over 100 prospective students came to UAI on Saturday to be interviewed as potential matches next year's 6th grade class.  Many thanks to Ms. Val's hard work in this dramatic increase in enrollment numbers.  Last year, we only had about 70 students interview.  Thank you also to all of the teachers and staff who stepped up to support the seamless flow of over 100 students and their families (which totalled nearly 300 people) on Saturday!!

To Do's for this Week

[MONDAY, 13FEBB17] Full Staff PD - Unit Planning.  For the next few weeks, we will be visiting classroom to observe collaborative reasoning in action and in planning.  At this point, all staff have been trained in Collaborative Reasoning and text selection.  Here's Colleen's resources:  CLICK HERE.  Please reference these resources in planning for collaborative reasoning.  We will be there to support your work on Monday during PD!

[TUESDAY, 14FEB17] Lady Eagles Playoff Game.  Please join our Lady Eagles as they play against Frank Sinatra in the first playoff game of the this season.  It will be at home at 5PM on Tuesday.  Let's support our community by supporting our teams!  Looking forward to seeing you there on Tuesday!

[15FEB17] Winterfest.  Our annual celebration of After School activities and display of students arts and artistic talent will be on Wednesday, 15FEB17.  Please join us in celebrating our girls in the gym from 6-8PM.

[17FEB17] Black History Month Assembly.  We will be having our next full school assembly on Friday, Feb 17th.  This will be a slightly early assembly to accommodate a staggered rapid dismissal for the building (SLJ and AIL are dismissing early on Friday).  The Assembly will begin at 1:30 and we will rapidly dismiss at 2:15PM.

SEL Updates

This section of the blog has been largely dedicated to student SEL development.  For this week, prior to the vacation, I wanted to share some articles that spin that tables and allow us to consider our own contributions to the emotional equation of our classrooms and learning environments. 

Click Here for the full article:  Educator's Social Emotional Skills Vital to Learning

Here's an excerpt: 

Social and emotional competencies aren’t secondary to the mission of education, but are concrete factors in the success of teachers, students, and schools.

“I yelled at my students too much today.” “I thought I was going to lose it when Nick acted up in class again.” “I’m so stressed out that I don’t want to teach tomorrow.” Statements like these are all too familiar to educators. What teacher or administrator hasn’t felt stresses that make it difficult to focus on teaching and learning? Who hasn’t needed to call on a deep well of social and emotional resources to overcome those challenges? In the current national focus on teacher quality, the essential role of teachers’ social and emotional competencies is often overlooked. 

But ask educators when they need those competencies and they’ll likely respond “every day.” And ask students to describe the teachers who most influenced them and why, and their answers will likely include qualities in the social and emotional area — the ability to listen and empathize, pick up on a subtle social cue, find a student’s hidden strength, or model calm under stress. These educators and students know intuitively what research has shown: Social and emotional competencies influence everything from teacher-student relationships to classroom management to effective instruction to teacher burnout. 

Add this calendar to your own!  See that little "+" sign in the bottom right hand corner?  Click on it to have it show up in your personal google calendar!

Per Session Posting

No new postings this week.