Week of September 11

Heyllo, everyone.

I have to laugh at myself when I think that it's my goal to put up a posting here every week. I hope that you'll forgive me for dropping back to every other week occasionally. This is one of those times. I can't tell you how busy everything's been!

Well, I'll try. In addition to teaching your lovely children (and meeting many of them for the first time!) I am setting up mobile carts, four of them, each with DVD player, Internet-connecting laptop, and new LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) projector. Here's a picture of one of them:

Each of these will "live" in a classroom--one on the first floor, one on the Kindergarten Lower Level, and two on the 2nd floor in 4th grade classrooms. Any teacher on any floor who feels the need may borrow the cart to demonstrate or share Internet activities in the classroom or on an atrium screen or to share a video resource, be it digital file or DVD, in the classroom. YAY, I say! They'll be deployed to their classrooms the day after the 3rd and 4th grades' Parents Night, Thursday night September 21, and I'lll be demonstrating their use to the teachers as needed until every teacher feels empowered with video in the classroom.

I'm also knee-deep in transfering every one of the 50 Lower School Curriculum Guides to a new template format that will make it much less work for the grade-level teams to revise in an ongoing manner. It's a cut-and-paste fest, if that means anything to you, and each grade level is taking me a day or two in between classes to get finished. Once these are finally proofed and approved, we'll send out a new notice via email to remind you how to find them!

On to teaching and learning. Check out this video if you are the parent of a Kindergarten or 1st Grade child:

Launch in external player

Very fun! We're utilizing the great "UpToTen Premium @ School" website at uptoten.com to introduce and practice basic computer skills, many of which we grown-ups forget are learned ones. Ask your child to take you to the site, and if they need help getting there, it's easy! Just go to usn.org, click "Academics," then "Lower School," then "Lower School Webliographer." Let your child take it from there!

2nd Graders are working on very basic typing skills by exploring the wonderful little introductory software "Type to Learn, Jr." and their friends in 3rd and 4th Grades are warming up their own typing skills with that program's older brother, "Type to Learn 3." More on that later!

Cheers,
Scott