ISY Elementary School Faculty Blog

Spring Break!

Mike Simpson

April 8, 2022

Thank you for the time and effort you put into Spirit Week to help our students focus on what makes ISY special. 

The ISY Learner Attributes were a strong focus and if you came up with any ideas to help explain or celebrate these, please add them to this ISY Learner Attributes Activities Menu.

After the break, the ISY Learner Attributes will remain a strong focus inside and outside the classroom.

Happy Thingyan and Happy Easter. I hope you all have a relaxing break. It will be a busy end to the school year but the work we have done up to this point has us in a great position to finish the year strongly.

    We all know we are doing our best…. even when we are not at our best!

    Check in. How am I? What do I need? How are they? What do they need from me?

    Ask for help and be helpful.

    Be present and patient. Take time to fully understand others and allow time for others to understand you. Pausing, Paraphrasing and Posing Questions promotes our common understanding.

    Share your ideas and be open to the ideas of others. Once shared, they become our ideas and anything could happen!

    UWS Fundraiser – Faculty Volunteers

    The elementary and secondary UWS groups are holding a fundraiser to support our partner school in Wan Kaung village, Shan State.

    • Family Sports Day

    • Date: Saturday 23 April

    • Time: 8.30-10.30am  

    • Donation: MMK 5,000 per person or MMK 15,000 for a family ticket

    • Purpose: A whole-school community event which will raise funds for the Wan Kaung village school (UWS)

    • Open to all students – elementary, middle and high

    • Parents are of course encouraged to come and hang out

    • Venue: ISY gym (and maybe the shaded areas in the elementary play area)

    • A range of games/sports will be available at different locations

    We will be asking for faculty volunteers to help us make the event a success.

    Here’s a link to the faculty sign-up sheet

    Thanks very much for supporting the UWS project.

    Charlie, Nick and Patty (faculty supervisors of the ISY UWS groups)

    What are our Students’ Critical Needs?

    After a very long period of disrupted learning, we need to figure out exactly what our students’ needs are in math, reading, and writing and how we are going to address them next year and beyond.

    We will do this with Focus on Learning Collaborations which we had introduced before Covid hit. The idea is to identify our students’ Critical Learner Needs which then become our ‘Problems of Practice.’ This language comes from WASC and ties in with how we will review all curriculum areas.

    A Problem of Practice isn’t a shortcoming on the part of teachers – it just recognizes the fact that teachers are the ones who cause learning and meeting student learning needs is our problem to solve.

    Here is an ES Focus on Learning Collaboration folder with grade level documents plus a folder of MAP reports that will be useful in identifying Critical Learner Needs. There is also a folder of what we did in 2019-2020 as a reference bearing in mind our students have changed a lot.

    We will meet in grade level teams in the week after the Thingyan holiday. I will send out calendar invites for these meetings during planning times. In the meantime, feel free to record any thoughts in the grade level documents that you will find in the folder linked above.

    SUPERVISION SCHEDULE

    Here is the Q4 Supervision Schedule that we will use for Quarter 4 beginning this Monday, March 28.

    We now have a security guard scheduled to supervise the Front Steps playground during recess. This gives us more support as students get used to playing together again. Teachers will be on duty on the field or the A Building Playground. Please tell your students that they can go to a security if they need anything. 

    This week:

    10:00 – 10:20 Grade 2-5 Recess Locations

    • Front Steps End of Field / Front Steps Playground: Grades 4/5
    • SAS Building End of Field / A Building Playground: Grades 2/3

    8:00 – 8:20 Before School Play Duty

    Update: Students are allowed on campus before 8am but before school duty will still begin at 8am.

    Here is the Before School Play Duty Schedule that we will use for Semester 2.

    People on duty this week (week after Thingyan Break):

    • Monday: NO SCHOOL
    • Tuesday: Kristi
    • Wednesday: Laura
    • Thursday: Rosita
    • Friday: May Khine

    Conferences

    Quarter 3 Progress Reports will act as conversation starters for conferences on Friday, April 29. There will be no classes on this day and conferences will be online.

    We will share MAP reports with families during these conferences. If a parent would like their child’s MAP report before conferences, please email me and I will provide that for them. The goal is for parents to see MAP data as one data point in developing a fair and accurate picture of. a child’s academic achievement and growth.

    Q4 Interdisciplinary Units

    Scope and Sequences

    We now have confirmed Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions for our Quarter 4 units. Please refer to the Q4 Scope and Sequence and update it as necessary.

    Specialist teachers, please strive to connect to the Enduring Understanding and/or Essential Questions.

    Everyone, please strive to integrate our Mission and Vision, Attributes and the SDGs (which inevitably hit our strategic themes) into this last quarter.

    Consider how what was covered in our Compassion Conference might help us integrate Service and Action.

    —————

    Here is where you can find our Q4 Scope and Sequence 2021-2022 Scope & Sequence. 

    To fill out this year’s Q4 Scope and Sequence, you might want to refer to the skills you focused on this time last year in this Q4 Scope and Sequence 2020-2021.

    Please link your planning to the Scope and Sequence as you did for our Q2 Scope and Sequence. We want to give you some autonomy as to how you organize your planning and resources but your planning needs to be in an ISY Shared Drive. 

    Please also check off the standards that you intend to cover in your subject in Quarter 4. Please make sure there is an ‘x’ in the second column of any standard you will cover in these Grade Level Standards Checklists.

    AMENDED QUARTER 4 SCHEDULE

    Here is the link to the ES Quarter 4 Schedule which is also available on the Elementary School Faculty Pages.

    The schedule has been amended very slightly re: 4/5L PE on Wednesday and 4/5O Art on Friday. No other changes have been made.

    Indoor Lunch/Recess

    Poor Air Quality & Rainy Days

    An air quality reading will be taken at 9:50am so you can be confident that an A Q sign in the window of the B Building at 9:55 means that the air quality is not good enough for outdoor recess. Hopefully this doesn’t happen very often.

    Rainy days will be more common soon so this will also require a plan for indoor lunch / recess.

    Homeroom Teaching Teams – if you haven’t already, please reach out to Sandy with how you will plan for indoor lunch/recess so we can communicate to those people on duty.

    To avoid confusion on rainy days, an email from the Elementary Office will be sent to all Elementary Teachers and Assistants 5 minutes before a lunch/recess to confirm it will be indoors because it is wet. If there is no email, lunch/recess is outside as usual.

    ZOOM LINKS (Semester 2)

    Here is a link to the Zoom Links that we will use for Semester 2.

    ISY Annual Compassion Conference

    This is the ISY Compassion Conference 2022 Google Site for your reference.

        Previous Elementary School Posts

        Elementary School Faculty Blog – February 19, 2021

        Elementary School Faculty Blog – February 19, 2021

        Feb 19, 2021 |

        To my Myanmar colleagues, on behalf of all my international colleagues, thank you for the support that you continue to give us as we work together for our students in these most challenging of times. We want you to know that we support you and can adapt the way that we work to allow you to deal with whatever you need to deal with outside of school.