ISY Elementary School Faculty Blog

A Good Week

Mike Simpson

March 18, 2022

It has been a good week. Even sitting here in New Zealand I can feel what makes ISY special returning. Different classes and grade levels are getting together to share what they have been learning, older students leading younger students in our first Wellness in Action afternoon, students getting together to make Earth Hour commitments, and Elementary Students getting involved in Chinthe Roar are all examples of connections to our bigger purpose that are difficult to make online. This bodes well for a positive and purposeful last quarter. It certainly won’t be the same drag to the end like the previous two years and I am very, very happy about that!

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 & Conferences

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.

Friday, April 29: Conferences (online)

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.

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.

      Q4 Interdisciplinary Units

      Scope and Sequences

      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.

      Homeroom teachers – please finalize your Enduring Understanding and Essential Questions for this unit.

      Please enter your Enduring Understanding and Essential Questions into the Scope and Sequence Document by the end of the day on Friday.

      This will allow specialist teachers to connect to it from the beginning of the quarter.  

      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.

      Q3 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 ourQ3 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 thisQ3 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 theseGrade 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 2/3
      • SAS Building End of Field / A Building Playground: Grades 4/5

      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:

      • Monday: Laura
      • Tuesday: Rosita
      • Wednesday: May Khine
      • Thursday: Ian
      • Friday: Isabel

      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!