• Principal's Message 03/15/2024

    3/15/2024

    Dear Arleta Community,

    Happy Spring! What a wonderful difference the sunshine makes.

    Students are working hard and keeping us charmed as we work hard on their behalf. A few of our staff learning highlights this week were:

    • Our Instructional Leadership Team facilitated our staff meeting, leading us through a process to share student growth so far in “conventions” (capitalization, spelling, punctuation, grammar, handwriting) as we continue our process of encouraging students to improve in their fluency with the writing process, which will in turn help them communicate their wonderful ideas more easily and with more joy and confidence. This also helps their audience easily read and appreciate their ideas. We are seeing some exciting growth! One teacher was remarking how much giving their students immediate positive feedback on a sentence dictation was motivating students to try to improve. We’ll be displaying student work from each class at our Literacy & Art Night coming up Thursday 4/11.

    • Yesterday, many of our staff observed in the classrooms of four teachers who hosted 3-5 of their colleagues for “Learning Labs”. Our Instructional Coach, Ms. Horner organized a schedule and we prioritized some school funds for three guest teachers who covered the classrooms of teachers while they were observing. After the observations, we discussed all the ways we had observed the host teachers engaging their students in the cognitive work of the lesson, and thought about implications for our work with students in our own contexts. It was a generative experience that we plan to keep growing.

    A reminder that we’re hopeful for your perspectives in our process of selecting a new teaching tool for teaching Social Emotional Learning (SEL) starting next year. Please see the Remind message I sent yesterday evening, and/or last week’s Dolphin Digest article for more explanation of Social Emotional Learning including examples of SEL lessons.

    • open the form for details and links to the videos for each program.

    • Staff and guardian flier with information about each program.

    • (vendor presentation recording)

    • Wayfinder vendor presentation recording:

    • PPS TSEL is a good place to learn more about the programs.

    • of the website talks about the selection process.

    I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

    Lisa