ISY Elementary School Faculty Blog

Quarter 4: Reconnecting to our Mission

Mike Simpson

March 4, 2022

With only 18 students online today and with some of those set to return to in-person classes on Monday, I feel that we have turned a massive corner. By the time Quarter 4 starts on March 28, our goal is to close the online program for all students except those who are overseas.

Over the last two years, we needed to narrow our focus and adapt our practices to ensure that key academic skills were covered online. I cannot be prouder of how we did this. It takes an incredible amount of energy and professionalism to become an expert at something you don’t really want to be doing! 

While our compassionate Mission and Vision has underpinned so many of the decisions we have made over the last two years for our students, the distance between us and our narrow academic focus has made it very difficult for us to immerse our students in our Mission. Many of our students have stepped onto our campus for the very first time in the last month and our Mission is still unfamiliar to them. 

When Quarter 4 begins on March 28, many of the obstacles that have made it difficult for us to integrate our Mission into the curriculum will have been removed. Our Mission is our purpose and it is very important that we reconnect with that purpose in Quarter 4.

We live our Mission by integrating into our curriculum our strategic themes of service learning, culture and diversity, environmental consciousness, inclusion, and technology integration. This will be our primary focus in Quarter 4 and I know it will be a reinvigorating one.

This Thursday before school, we will meet online to discuss how we will do this. In the meantime, consider how what was covered in our Compassion Conference might help us.

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!

Quarter 3 Reports

Please click here for the Q3 Progress Report Organization & Timeline. This is exactly the same as what we did for Quarter 1 Progress Reports.

Below are some key dates to be aware of:

Friday, March 18: Report Subject Comments Due.

Friday, March 25: Homeroom Teachers: ISY Learner Attributes Comments Due.

Tuesday, March 29: All reports in Powerschool. Specialist Teachers – you will add 1 (or 2 max) sentence to your subject comment for each child. 

Friday, April 1: Reports go live on Powerschool.

Air Quality

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.

This makes supervising students hard to organize as we have no available big indoor spaces. As grade level teams, you might want to convert a spare room into a breakout room so the students have another room to have a bit of space. Teachers within the team can take turns to supervise rather than having one teacher per class. Please check in with Sandy if you would like to do this. Such rooms could also be used as breakout rooms during classes.

KEY COVID CONSIDERATIONS

  • All information regarding COVID cases should go through the clinic.  If a parent or students reports a case to you, please ask them to email the clinic and the clinic will follow up.
  • Everyone on campus (all students and teachers) must wear a mask at all times
  • Students are to wipe their desks with a disinfectant wipe when they leave the room (e.g. leaving a specialist class, on the way to lunch, end of the day)
  • Class doors and windows to be open while teaching with air conditioners turned on (unless air quality is an issue – you will be notified by email).
  • Everyone encouraged to wash hands at every opportunity.
Covid Update (from last Thursday’s email to faculty from Dr. Hedger)
You might have noticed from the Thursday Notices email that we are making some changes to our health and Safety Guidelines regarding Covid.  These are largely following the latest CDC guidelines updated in the last couple of weeks.
The key changes are the following.
  • If you come into close contact with a suspected case (i.e. a partner, your child or household member) we want you to stay home for at least 5 days, monitor for symptoms and test using the rapid test kits.  The only exception to this rule is if you have recovered from a case of Covid in the last 90 days yourself.  Then you can come to school but should  be monitoring for symptoms carefully.
  • If you test positive then you should be at home for a minimum of 5 days.  If after 5 days you have no symptoms and test negative you can return to school on Day 6.  
  • The maximum time away should be 10 days.  Sometimes you can still get a positive result after 10 days but the research tells us that people are not contagious at this point.
These are the main points for now but may change as the situation changes.  

ZOOM LINKS (Semester 2)

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

Semester 2 Teaching Teams

Here is the link to the ES Semester 2 Teaching Teams document which is also available on the Elementary School Faculty Pages.

When thinking about these teaching teams, we just need to bear in mind that we might all need to cover for or assist colleagues who are unable to work from school. 

On this document (at the top) you will see links to Grade Level (PK-KG, G1, G2/3, and G4/5) Organization Summaries – as things pop up, please add them to the bottom of the document so we can address them.

ISY Annual Compassion Conference

Friday, March 4

Thank you for your participation in this conference. I hope you enjoyed it and took some ideas away from it.

This is the ISY Compassion Conference 2022 Google Site for your reference. I will post this to Faculty Pages next week for future reference.

We have decided to hold our own ISY teacher workshops for a separate event to be held later in the year. This event will be organized around our ISY Inclusive Practices.

      Wellness In Action Series Starts This FRIDAY!

      Please click HERE for the full explanation and organization – including schedules, timings, and responsibilities.

      Next FRIDAY is the first day of a 3 day event focusing on wellness and mental health.   This student organized series of events features a set of highly interactive activities that students from grades 1 to 12 will engage in.  The ideas for the activities came from ISY students and secondary students will be running the activities.

      Structure

      • Once a month on these dates: (March 18, Apr 29, May 20)
      • 4 activities per date will be run by members of the Peer Support Group 
        • Each activity should take no more than about 7 to 8 minutes for a group of students to engage in.
        • Teachers will escort their students to the appropriate station throughout the period.
        • Each activity will have 2 high school students running the activity. The HS student will explain and give instructions for how to engage in the activity.
        • There will be a corresponding online version for each activity which will be run by the counselors. 

      Interdisciplinary Units

      Curriculum Maps and Scope and Sequences

      Here is where you can find our Curriculum Maps These are updated up to Quarter 2 using our Subject Blurbs from Semester 1 reports.

      Here is where you can find our Q3 Scope and Sequence. 

      To fill out this year’s Q3 Scope and Sequence, you might want to refer to the skills you focused on this time last year in this Q3 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 3. Please make sure there is an ‘x’ in the second column of any standard you will cover in these Grade Level Standards Checklists.

      SEMESTER 2 SCHEDULE

      Here is the link to the ES Semester 2 Schedule which is also available on the Elementary School Faculty Pages.

      Note: The schedule has no transition times between periods. Please make sure that students are ready to start their next class on time and start recess and lunch on time.

       

      SUPERVISION SCHEDULE

      Here is the Supervision Schedule that we will use for Semester 2.

      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

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

      People on duty this week:

      • Monday: Samia
      • Tuesday: Sandy M.
      • Wednesday: John
      • Thursday: Dan
      • Friday: Kristi

      From our TIFs

      Both Ian and Lindsey have new teaching responsibilities for Semester 2. This might mean one of the another are unavailable to immediately help with an issue. 

      If you have a technology issue that is not urgent, email tifs@isyedu.org. 

      If you have an urgent technology issue, the best thing to do is send a Google Hangout message to Lindsey, Ian, and Anshu. That way you have 3 chances that someone is available when you need them. 

      – – – –

      Here are a curated list of helpful links for students and families as we begin the year. These videos can be helpful as you share information with them. 

      Previous Elementary School Posts

      Elementary School Faculty Blog – October 23, 2020

      Elementary School Faculty Blog – October 23, 2020

      Oct 23, 2020 |

      In case you are wondering why you are tired, we went online 219 days ago. This is the first chance we have had to rest for a very long time. Your work up until this point has set us up for the rest of the year and the rest of the year can wait for week!