It is hard to believe it is the end of September already. Our students and staff have been getting into a nice routine. We have had a lot of great opportunities already such as our Back-to-School dance, Watch D.O.G.S parent kick-off event, 6
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Grade Fun Night, and a collaborative 7
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grade project with students from the Ohio State University. We are looking forward to a wonderful end to the first 9 weeks.
I do want to remind everyone of some building initiatives this school year. First, we are continuing our effort and citizenship report card. Our teachers will utilize a rubric to assess each students' level of effort and citizenship. This score will be on the back of their report card with the rubric to help explain what each score means.
Secondly, we started an intense writing program, called TIQAs (Topic, Introduce, Quote, Analyze), to help improve our students analytical writing. We have scaled it back from its original plan. Now, each core class and electives will have a TIQA every third week. For instance, this week might be math for everyone's core class and then the music classes would also have one. The following week would then be a new core class and a new elective class. I hope this helps ease the burden of so many TIQA prompts but still helps us meet our goal of improving our students ability to write with purpose.
Finally, we are going to begin to change our ACE Block, the 30 minutes each day that every student has. Beginning the week of October 17
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, students will be redistributed to classrooms and teachers based on their area of academic need. Then each day students will spend at least 15 minutes getting extra assistance in that area. For example, if I struggle in science, I would get placed with my team's science teacher for ACE Block. Then every day for at least the first 15 minutes of ACE Block, my science teacher would provide additional science assistance to all the students in the room. This could be quiz review, vocabulary front-loading or review, re-teaching difficult topics, etc.
I hope this information helps you finish out this first 9 weeks.
Mr. Ryan Brown
Principal, Watkins Middle School
