Weekly Update

Here is to a week of dis-discombobulation.  Hopefully, all of our lives are back to normal, or close to it.  Next week, we have Carol Tolman visiting our building on the 8th and 9th.  She will be visiting some of our specialists' classes to observe and provide feedback.  We are fortunate to have such a valuable resource assisting us in our literacy improvement efforts.

March 9th is our early release day.  We'll be working on NECAP analysis and reading fluency skills and practice.  Link for info (http://www.readingrockets.org/sharing/widgets).

Wednesday and Friday of next week will be 3rd and 5th grade data teams respectively.

On Sunday, 3/14, we will spring our clocks ahead for Daylight Savings Time.

Perhaps best of all, Baseball's Spring Training has begun and my beloved Red Sox are on the field and working out.  Hooray for spring!

PS--I thought you might enjoy this video.  It seems like it may be apt after our last few weeks.

Weekly Update

This week at HMS:
Friendship week was a great success, though members of the Universal Team heard mixed reviews of its effect on the students.  A survey will be distributed to obtain a full assessment of the festivities.

Math SINI at HMS

Today, Nancy Gerzon facilitated our February Math SINI meeting.  Members of the expanded math team attended, Jen Fremeau, Andrea Coulon, Deridre Brotherson, Ellie Stetson, Mel Jodoin, Annie Rehm, Tina Overmyer, Carol Olkonen, Drew Bairstow, and Carol Soucy.  Scaffolding learning and formative assessments were the major topics of the meeting.

Here is a youtube video that teaches lattice multiplication and partial quotients for your reference.


Enjoy!

Parent Teacher Conference Day

Thank you all for your hard work and devotion to the students and parents of Hooksett.  We were so pleased to see the professional relaxed atmosphere that was HMS.  The feedback we received was so positive and encouraging.  Keep up the great work!

Drew and Carol

PowerSchool, oh, PowerSchool! We're updated and refined to a new system that virtually corrects itself. It is called Oracle, and it is the newest programming that identifies bugs in individual places, creates a plan for a solution, solves it and fixes it. It does this all for individual cases as opposed to the "old fashioned kind."  They would wait for a plethora of problems to arise, fix all of the problems at once, and then send out a mass update to everyone at the same time.  Does this sound familiar to what we're doing in the educational world?  We're all changing our practices based on the data collection techniques being developed.

How Far We've Come

Yesterday's SINI meeting was a great success.  The expanded team, which included a memeber from each data team, helped generate rich conversation about our progress in the mathematics portion of our SINI action plan.
Perhaps the best conversation of all involved looking back at our progress from the inception of the SINI team.  The conversation then focused primarily on the school's culture and climate and "how are we ever going to be able to do this!"  Now, we are having data based conversations that are fine tuning our instruction to address the needs of all our students in the classroom.
We still have improvements to make and areas we can continue to develop, but we are getting there.  Regardless of how difficult it feels some days, your efforts are improving the lives of the children we teach exponentially.  For that, one has to be proud!