Week 19: 01/04/16 – 01/08/16 |

Happy New Year and Welcome Back! I hope you enjoyed a restful, relaxing break–time to disconnect from work thoughts, time to enjoy family and friends and to just enjoy time to relax. It is amazing how refreshing the holiday break can be to come back to start an amazing 2016!

If you’re feeling any trepidation about getting up early for the first day in 11 days, I completely understand! It’s hard for adults and kids to get back into the swing of things after such a long break. This is a great time to re-connect with students and let them do so with their classmates by giving them time to talk about what they did over break! Keep in mind, it’s a great time to review classroom management basics as we embark upon a new calendar year at Kennedy, where our students are blessed to receive quality instruction on a daily basis in safe and orderly classrooms. Here is an article from Responsive Classroom that might be helpful to revisit this week, as behavior expectations and classroom routines are revisited. I appreciate your efforts with reinforcing behavior expectations. Here’s a great post on this topic: Ideas for Working with the January Slump.

Below From Venspired:
The best part about a New Year is that it always feels like a fresh start. No matter what. We turn the page, finish one calendar and start another. We try to start remembering to put the right year when we write the date (I’m sure most of us will be writing 2015/2016 tomorrow on our boards!).

2015 was a year full of memorable moments—may your 2016 be a year of “new”….
new ideas, new connections, new challenges, new gratitude, new perspectives.

As we embark on the second half of the school year, I encourage everyone to take some time and reflect on your performance since the beginning of the school year. The KEEP, STOP, and DO activity always helps me reflect on my practices; both professional & personal. What do I want to keep doing? What do I want to stop doing? What do I want to start doing?

Here’s our week at a glance:

Monday, January 4th
School Resumes
MAP makeups this week
*2nd, Multiage & 3rd Grade Teachers: Please be sure to enter your Winter MAP data into the Google Doc & schedule a Winter MAP Data meeting with me by the end of the week.
Aimsweb Winter Benchmarking Begins

Tuesday, January 5th
PATS Field Trip to Museum of Science & Industry
Dr. Seuss Committee Meeting @ 2:30pm (Room 110)
Yearbook Committee @ 2:35pm

Wednesday, January 6th
Happy Birthday Mayra Tellez 🙂
Happy Birthday Callie Biasco 🙂
Curriculum Pacing/Planning Common Plan Time

Thursday, January 7th
SLT Meeting @ 3:00pm

Friday, January 8th
5 By Friday !

Below are some New Years Ideas from Pinterest: