Friday, September 04, 2020

A huge thank you to everyone in getting the school year off the ground and having completed our first virtual month of school. Your tireless efforts and the grace in which you meet every challenge to support students growth and learning is truly appreciated! 

Upcoming Week at a Glance:

Day	Event
September 7	Spirit week begins (all week) Virtual Book Fair (all week)
September 8	ES Parent Coffee  9:30 a.m. Zoom link Passcode: coffee
September 9	ES Faculty Meeting 3:45 p.m. Zoom link
September 10
September 11

 

ES Faculty Meeting 

This week our faculty meeting will have two parts. One part will focus on Conferring Online and the other part will focus on our virtual daily planners. Please have some paper or sticky notes and something to write with for the meeting. This meeting is for all ES faculty.

 

Morning Meeting Specialist Rotation

Specialists will begin a new morning meeting rotation. You will find the schedule here along with the link to the morning meeting times for each class. 

Classroom Teachers - Weekly Schedules

Can you please share your weekly small group and 1:1 schedule with Dave and me. As you and your students get more comfortable with small groups, we’d like to join some of your sessions. 

 

Students Enrolled in Two Schools

We know that a few of our students are enrolled in two schools (AISC and a school in their home country). If you have a student who is enrolled in two schools and has not been engaging in asynchronous work, please email me. 

 

Tech Tips

Below you will find two school subscriptions. If you need any assistance in setting these up please contact Priya in IT.

 

Kahoot 

username: itmanager@aischennai.org

password: Ais2021chennai

 

Padlet

 

Raz Kids - If you need a training one on one please contact Priya or Alex

 

Assigning Running Records

Reviewing Student Running Records

 

Tutoring

For students in your class who you are recommending for tutoring, please complete this form before tutoring can be approved. This will help document who and why students are being referred for tutoring. Once the form has been submitted, Dave will review the form and then reach out to the homeroom teacher.

 

Virtual Book Fair

Scholastic and the AISC Libraries are bringing a virtual book fair directly to you! Please click on the link here to browse through a wide variety of books available for purchase for students, families, and teachers in EY-8. Once books are chosen, please use the following login information to proceed with the purchase:

 

Login ID: bbarbara@aischennai.org

Password: aisc234

 

The books will be delivered to your address in Chennai, but if you aren't there, they could also be sent to a family member or friend here in India. 

 

The virtual book fair will be held from August 31st-September 11th. Please contact Babs on bbarbara@aischennai.org if you have questions and happy shopping!

 

Morning Meeting/RC Corner 

Unbelievably, we are entering the 5th full week of school. So many great practices are happening across our school in Morning Meetings! Greeting momentum and flow is picking up and students are becoming more proficient at the routines and expectations. Academics are being woven into activities and students are engaged and learning. If you feel that students could use even more practice with routines, take the time now. If students need to maintain being muted, make it a goal for the meeting. Time upfront now on establishing any virtual class procedure is time well spent.

 

• Student Choice Idea - Leadership opportunities and student choice can be few and far between sometimes in our virtual environment. One easy way to begin at least giving small opportunities is to allow students to choose the morning greeting. Once you have done a few, create a list of the greetings from class. Nominate, one student to choose the greeting (and maybe lead it, if you think the class is ready). Ideally, the choice will happen before the Morning Meeting greeting time to avoid slowing down momentum. Pick a child’s name and tell them a day before that they will pick tomorrow’s greeting. Maybe check in on Hangouts or have them email a choice. This opportunity could happen once or twice a week until everyone has had a chance. If you feel this is too early right now, keep it in your back pocket for after the first 6 weeks! 

 

Coaching Corner

 

We appreciate each and all of you! 

- Hilary, Alex, Elliot, and Mary Kelly

  

Spirit Week

We, from the High School Student Council want to inform you about the upcoming all school SPIRIT WEEK!  Spirit week is taking place between the 7th of September and the 11th of September (next week!). Here is a summary of all the spirit days.

 

• 7th of September, Monday: Bring an Animal Day - Have any pets or stuffed animals at your house? Bring them to your virtual school meetings!

 

• 8th of September, Tuesday: Covid Theme Day - Design and customise your own personal N-95 mask and then wear it, or wear your best, favorite, or craziest mask to school!

 

• 9th of September, Wednesday: Crazy Day - Mess around with the virtual backgrounds option on Zoom and attend your classes with a brand new look! But the fun doesn't stop there! Spruce up your hair in a crazy manner, and throw on a wacky outfit to accompany that background!

 

• 10th of September, Thursday: Multiples Day - Dress up like your favourite character, or friend, or twin with your profile picture.

 

• 11th of September, Friday: Sports Day - Flaunt your AISC spirit by donning the School's Colours (Blue, Mango and White).

 

Show us your daily School Spirit next week by dropping your photos to this UPLOAD LINK.

 

Have a wonderful weekend!

Lynn, Dave, and Elliot

Friday, August 28, 2020

We want to thank all of you for your preparation to make the back to school events successful. We had a lot of parents in attendance (as well as students) and the specialists’ videos have been viewed many times. 

As one teacher put it...

 

Upcoming Week at a Glance:

Day	Event
August 31
September 1	EY Parent Coffee (feel free to join if you are available) 9:30 a.m. Zoom Link passcode: coffee
September 2	All Faculty Meeting, SMART Goals
September 3
September 4	Teacher Appreciation Breakfast

 

Professional Growth & Evaluation (PG & E) Conversations
Please begin thinking about your Professional Growth and Evaluation goals for this year. If you are on the Professional Growth Pathway, goals are due September 25. If you are on the Self Assessment Pathway, the last day to submit your SAP-Standards document is October 9th. If you are on the PG Pathway, please coordinate a time to meet with your supervisor before the October break. SAP teachers and new teachers will complete this following the break. All editable documents can be accessed from the Raptors' Way Blog.

 

Informal Running Records Assessments

Informal running records will be done virtually this year. The data you collect from informal running records will help inform your instruction in small groups and 1:1 sessions with your students. Since F & Ps were not administered at the end of the school year, teachers may use the March data as a starting point for this year. Raz Kids, Teacher’s College, and F & Ps are the three resources you may use for running records. Please decide on one resource to use and stick with that for all students. Running records may be done by homeroom and EAL teachers.

**Kindergarten will be using the concepts of print assessment. 

 

Assessment window: Monday, August 31st - Friday, September 25th

 

Alex will work with teams on how best to administer running records virtually.

 

Ending Dates for Each Quarter

1st quarter - October 9th

2nd quarter - December 18th

3rd quarter - March 12th

4th quarter- June 3rd 

 

 

From the Counselors

Morning Meeting/RC Corner 

Thank you for continuing to make Morning Meeting an exciting and engaging time of the day where students are able to be seen and known while learning about one another! This week, we look again at:

• Part 1 - Big MO - How to keep momentum strong throughout the Morning Meeting.  

Here’s one idea around greetings to increase speed: Make a slide with each child’s name. Children simply greet the person before and after their name starting with the first name on the slide. This is very much like having a circle greeting. Kids don’t have to choose who to greet and with a couple of days of practice, this can get pretty fast. It can even be a game to see how fast you can get around the circle in a week. Big shout out to Vanessa for modeling this idea! (Super shout out to anyone who can guess what the 4FK stands for in the slide - hint - it is connected to the names on the slide)

Example Slide:

• Part 2 - The Power of Our Words - 

In the book, Opening Minds, Peter Johnson launches his writing with a quote - “Children seldom misquote you. They usually repeat word for word what you shouldn’t have said.” As we continue to launch the year in this first 6 weeks of school, consider how you are developing positive mindsets and modeling routines and procedures. Say what you mean and only model what you want your students to do, avoiding introducing ways that they shouldn’t be doing things..

Behavior example: When modeling how to greet, you may say, “Make sure you are sitting up, your camera is on and you’re speaking loudly.” (Here we avoid bringing attention to the undesired behavior)

Mindset example: When talking about your own mindset about a subject, highlight what you want kids to think: Math is a subject that everyone, no matter who you are, can be successful at with effort and practice. (Here we avoid bringing attention to the undesired ideas about math)  

Coaching Corner

Woo hoo! Bridges and the Math Learning Center have responded big time to the challenges of virtual teaching. They have released Tech Enhanced Activities (TEA) that support some sessions in each module of our units. They will continue to release more for upcoming units. These TEA’s are super helpful for asynchronous and synchronous learning. Please reach out to Elliot if you’d like to partner around how to implement this great new resource on the Bridges website! 

 

From the Library:

 

Virtual Book Fair

Scholastic and the AISC Libraries are bringing a virtual book fair directly to you! Please click on the link here to browse through a wide variety of books available for purchase for students, families, and teachers in EY-8. Once books are chosen, please use the following login information to proceed with the purchase:

 

Login ID: bbarbara@aischennai.org

Password: aisc234

 

The books will be delivered to your address in Chennai, but if you aren't there, they could also be sent to a family member or friend here in India. 

 

The virtual book fair will be held from August 31st-September 11th. Please contact Babs on bbarbara@aischennai.org if you have questions and happy shopping!

Destiny Discover Login Change

You might have noticed a change when logging into Destiny Discover this week - we now have Google authentication! Faculty and staff still have the option to use the username and password, but now you also have the ability to log in with one click in order to access digital resources and check on your own library accounts.

 

 

ES/MS LibGuide Update

The ES/MS LibGuide is being continuously updated, so don't forget about this one-stop shop if you need to know anything related to the library. You will find video tutorials, digital resource access, password information, links to Destiny Discover, Sora, and Epic, an updated citation guide for students, middle school course LibGuides, subscription access, and much more! 

New Digital Newspapers

We have two new digital newspapers available for the AISC community - The Economic Times and The Times of India. To access these resources, please go to the ES/MS LibGuide and click on 'digital newspapers.' Parents and families are welcome to use these new resources! 

And a little Friday afternoon humor:

Have a wonderful weekend!

Lynn, Dave, and Elliot

Friday, August 21, 2020

Dave, Elliot, and I were so excited to visit morning meetings this week. I was also able to get into a few specialist classes and will continue to stop by more next week. We heard from so many of you how energizing it was to work with students in small groups and 1:1 this week. They are our “Why.” 

Our back to school events are the highlights of the upcoming week. Let us know if you need any support with hosting your event. 

Upcoming Week at a Glance:

Day	Event
August 24
August 25	Back to School Events Aug. 25: Grades 3-5 11:30 a.m. grades 3 & 4 11:50 a.m. grade 5
August 26	KG-2 11:30 a.m. KG & grade 1 11:50 a.m. grade 2 All Faculty Meeting hosted by Andrew
August 27	EY 12:15 p.m.
August 28

Back to School Zoom Thoughts

Things to consider:

1. Making the chat only visible to the host so questions can be filtered. This idea won’t work if you plan to make your presentation interactive in any way. 

2. Disabling the waiting room for this event - parents may be coming and going and this alleviates the need for the host to monitor the waiting room during the presentation.

3. Asking parents to remain on mute. The host has the ability to mute anyone who unmutes themselves (feel free to use this feature as background noise can be very distracting.

4. Spreading out the tech roles on the team - one person screen shares and the host monitors the chat.

5. Playing music as parents enter is calming and alleviates the awkwardness of everyone staring at each other waiting for the presentation to begin.

 

Student Engagement - Specialists Checking In on Students

When specialists notice that a student isn’t engaging in work for a couple of weeks, we have asked the specialists to contact the homeroom teacher to check in about the student before contacting the parents. 

 

Notes from the Faculty Meeting

As your your team reflects on the new daily plan/virtual classroom from the student’s perspective, here are some questions to consider:

• Is everything in one place? Do the students go to one spot to find everything without having to go between email, Seesaw, and a slidedeck? Basically, what’s your main method of communication? 

• Do students have access to the weekly planner? 

• Do parents need to access something for their child or can students access everything they need?

• How many clicks did it take to get to a task?

• Is everything linked and are the links working? Link it all and check the links!

• How many apps and docs are students toggling between in one day?

• Are the directions crystal clear? If students don’t have to post anything, is that explicitly stated?

• Are there due dates? 

• Is the slide visually appealing and easy to read?

• Is there a clear, simple, written checklist students can use to let them know what to do each day and to keep track of what they completed? 

Feel free to revise and edit your daily plan template as needed to ensure students can concentrate on the content and tasks and not on the navigation of the workflow. 

 

Tech Integration from Priya

 

• Raz Kids

This tutorial will show you how to assign students reading assignments. This is a mandatory skill you all need to know. Click this link here to learn more. If you need one on one training please feel free to schedule a time with Priya Venugopal.

 

• More tips and tricks about Seesaw

As you start creating content on Seesaw it is important that you start creating folders. This will help the students label their work and it will help you when student-led conferences come. Use folders for organization

 

From the Counselors

Morning Meeting/RC Corner 

Our second full week of classes is complete and classes continue to build community and set forth class routines and procedures. As an ES, we are being intentional with clear instructions to students including expectations around muting, participation and sharing! Hopefully, everyone had a chance to read some of the Responsive Classroom released first 10 days of school resource. If not, here is the place to find it - RC Covid 19 Released Resources 

• Next up - Sharing! 

• In the days ahead, think around how to introduce sharing as a procedure. How can students sign up to share something from their daily lives? How will you model questions and comments? Please reach out if you have wonderings around this process.  

• RC Videos - If you have an itch to watch some RC videos around introducing goals or rules creation, here is the place to find 2 videos with examples from lower and upper elementary school - RC Videos.  

Coaching Corner

• Co-Planning and Anecdotal Notes

As we develop new ways to collaborate and gather student data, co-teaching teams are creating ways to plan and gather information.  This example shows how you might use Google Sheets in various ways.  Have you created a helpful tool? Please share! We’d love to add it to the Coaching Corner.  Reach out to Mary Kelly to chat more.

• Conferring Tips and Ideas

Are you looking for new conferring tips and strategies? Would you like to see conferring in action?  Jennifer Serravallo's new book Reading Conferences K-8 is full of fresh and exciting ways to leverage the power of conferring to engage our young readers and writers. Although we are not on campus to access this resource, you are able to add this resource to your Heinemann account. Simply use the code CEREADCON to register this new resource. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact Alex. 

Teacher Appreciation Day (Friday, September 4)

As we continue to celebrate cherished traditions despite being apart, we’re pleased to announce a virtual celebration of Teacher Appreciation Day on Friday, September 4, 7:45 a.m. Stay tuned for Zoom details as we honor this tradition with the Board. 

But what is Teacher Appreciation Day without that amazing breakfast spread? On September 4, faculty, teaching assistants and staff in Chennai will receive a scrumptious breakfast delivery from our partners at ITC between 6:45–7:45 a.m. And while we regret being unable to extend the same gastronomic gesture to our out-of-India faculty, we have a special delivery planned for you too!

Watch this space for more details closer to September 4!

Enjoy your weekend!

Lynn, Dave, and Elliot