001okay so we are live and i think we'll see i hope that people will join us otherwise i'll just be you and i julio we are live welcome people we've been live for 18 seconds okay we are a little early oh yes do i sound with an echo or something no do i no you don't have an echo do i have an echo i'm on my finger good lights are bothering me though all right oh we've got somebody here hey put your name in the chat we'd love to know who's here with us joining us i can see the comments i also talk to myself a lot so do a lot of self verbalization okay all right wow it was a beautiful day everybody got outside today ate lunch outside so that was really lovely
002trying to come up with some creative ways to keep kids outside eating outside even during the winter right we'll have to get some more of those like buckets for kids to sit on it's gonna i know we'll be weather dependent i'm super excited we got more people joining us yay we'll give some more i know it's bedtime i probably should have made this a little earlier wait you know what we're we're gonna figure it out we'll figure it out try and get as many families joining us this is good all right all two people are here that's awesome i wonder i think there's a way i wonder if i can see the chat hold on [Music] hey [Music] i see that we have two viewers yeah hey just went up to three that's right wow
003this is it see we only got we only go it up julio we go enough there's only one way to go that's right we gotta start somewhere we're gonna be a youtube sensation the dynamic duo strikes again we're gonna be rock stars people i know clearly we are artistic we tried we did try we put in good effort and that's what matters we had a growth mindset julio we didn't give up with all that paint was there we're just like i don't know i don't know we did it we were like the energizer body we keep on going and going and going we know right that is so true it was fun riding bus 10 everybody was so excited to see me that all the kids were excited to see me this morning i'm like
004wow you all stayed seated i made a promise promise is a promise so it was good to be there we have awesome kids in that bus business oh my gosh i know right we really do they're just so happy i'm happy well we'll give everybody a few more minutes it's only two minutes after seven takes time people are probably just finishing up dinner getting cleaned up [Music] there's always things going on [Music] super exciting and then you'll join the two old boring administrators are talking to us through a youtube show what actually we rock this thing i know right i think yeah it'll be good it'll be good this will you know we'll we'll do this once a month and more people will keep joining us because they'll be like whoa we don't want to
005miss out on that that fun we'll have to do music next time julio music that's the key um yeah do you sing are you a singer um sadly no but we can try it yeah right all right maybe we can invite heather next year next time and she can lead us in a little like sing along that would be fun i used to play play the guitar for many years really yeah but i don't know i went to college and i was just like i don't know so i haven't played it very well that when i was a kid i tried to learn how to play the guitar i went to classes for almost two years and i learned nothing that artistic part it's hiya yumi how are you oh yay i'm so excited you're
006here oh it's posting well we we are up to five this is amazing like people are just joining us left and right julia they're like who who are these people and what are they about we can't learn wait to learn all about them [Music] thank you for joining us in a way thank you for allowing us to be at your home at this moment i know yes if you're opening your doors to us at seven with a weekday oh my gosh i love zika hi carla how are you [Music] yay all right well we are up to five people all right i say julio we just get started because hi jennifer hi jennifer ellie it feels so weird because it's like the tammy julio show and we're like yeah but we're sick people we're really
007excited ask for your thug and we're playing we're gonna play do it all right i'm going to share my screen um i i'd like to be organized and have a plan because i think like have a plan and not use it is one thing but to have no plan then i'm like and i could just talk i think julie and i could just talk for the next couple hours and be like i don't know what i said what did you say i don't know that's not maybe a little organization would help us okay see how this works all right oh i gotta share my screen woohoo all right doing it here we go and i'm gonna present all right but this is not where i wanted to start so here we go so this is
008we choose amore welcome to our fort river community channel julio and i are the school collaborators and leaders this year and i mean i can't speak for you julio but i know i'm super thrilled to be continue to be part of the fort river community um but also be in this capacity this year what do you think i'm really excited i'm coming back to the fort it's like coming back home um people i start my career here in the district at four river so when this opportunity came i was like wow i'm gonna be working with tammy i've worked with dummy and she's awesome so i dived into it it was like okay let's do it yes and you know i feel like we go way back julio and then we see our kids like
009playing lacrosse and um we meet up on games like it was just meant to be just completely meant to be all right so what we're going to do now is our agenda for tonight is we're going to do some introductions julio's going to tell you a little bit about himself i'm going to tell you a little bit about myself we are going to review some of the school expectations uh and look at some student work and then upcoming events and then if there's time and you want to put a comment or a question in the chat and we will try and answer as many as we can alright here we go your fort river administration team wow look at that guy who is that handsome guy my journey into this position this year it's been
010a long one it's been an interesting journey um when i went to college i was hopeful that i was going to be a doctor and interestingly when you're afraid of needles like to see blood that's something that will not work so i went into the second thing that i liked the most i i finished my bachelor's degree and i went into law school yes i've been a lawyer for the past 20 years please don't do the math i'm still in my 20s early 20s and 5 years ago i felt like i needed a change and we moved here to amherst and i started working in the district by that time i was also i started my master's degree in education in special education and everything pan out i was part of the amherst future program
011and it was probably the best move the most fulfilling professional move that i've done in my life working with the kids coming back to the fort i it's very special um we have in our building the best t-shirts that you can find we have the best teachers in our district and we have the best tools so coming to the fort it's been like a highlight um of my career believe it or not um i'm a husband i have three boys three teenagers at times it can be really difficult tommy knows that tommy has four teenagers so it's a it can it can get hectic um i have a senior i have a junior and i have an eighth grader um [Music] and basically every day you encounter something different so i have a pet i
012have by dog ginger and i can tell you that yourself in the fort when you have kids you can you have to be prepared for the other practices going to you all right thank you all right so um i'm tammy i have um been at fort river for many many years and i've really loved and continue to love and choose fort river to be my community to be where i work uh because i just i i love the people i love the students i love the families it it's it's just a true calling for me so i started um in education way back when i attended a college that is now part of boston university and i got my master's degree from umass amherst uh i'm advanced certified in orton gillingham i've done extensive training
013in different reading programs uh to in order to work with students who have dyslexia and reading disabilities i've done a lot of work in teaching mathematics and understanding some the underpinnings of how to work with students who struggle in the area of of math literacy executive function and currently i've been working really hard on really expanding my repertoire of working with students who are multilingual learners and um and understanding the the foundation of when someone comes to my when someone comes to fort river and speaks more than one language and how can how can that be addressed so that way we're meeting the needs of the whole student um in in terms of in terms of linguistically and academically uh so currently both julio and i are in the same bilingual dual language program and
014we are in our final class kind of exciting um and i'm also a lecturer in at mount holyoke college in the masters of arts program and i teach a course about the science of reading which is really great because i love working with pre-service teachers so one of the things i love to do with my students is have fun i think that increases engagement wants them to come back and learn and do some really hard things um nobody likes to do anything hard right so what i found is reduce the cognitive load increase engagement and then begin to build that capacity uh i also love to be creative and make games that are engaging as well and on a personal level i do like to try new things i'm not always good at it but
015i i get better and you can see this picture of i decided i could paint rocks one day i was like i think i can do this so i found that picture on the on the bottom there and then you can see what i did so i'm still working on my visual spatial skills that's okay because next time i try that rock painting i bet it'll look a little closer to that one um and as julio mentioned i do have four kids i have a 21 year old and i have an 18 year old that goes to mass maritime and then i have two 16 year olds that are currently learning to drive and if anybody's been in a car with somebody that hasn't driven before you know what i'm talking about right you know
016that's like the scariest thing all right so did you know fort river we have over 350 students there are more than 10 languages spoken or understood and teachers respond to an average of 30 male 30 emails weekly collaborate daily with other staff members and continue their own pd okay so one of the things i thought julio and i were thinking would be really important is to fill you in on how we shape our day how we shape our school culture what are the structures and the routines that we build into the into the school and into the building and into our classrooms and so here's a little look of what we expect students to do in all settings so um treat others the way they want to be treated include others use appropriate names and
017pronouns be flexible be kind with your words and actions to everyone around you and be aware of other people's space this this is especially important right now while we're still in coven we really want to maintain the three feet um but then also outside at recess right like did you just want to have fun but we just have to keep uh impressing upon them the importance of social distancing all right we want we want our kids to have fun in a safe way i know where that we have kids and that they need to be in a space that they feel comfortable and that they feel safe but also i we understand that they need to do fun stuff so that's the balance that we're trying to maintain to keep and maintain when we're working
018with our kids so in the classroom these are the the things that our school team came up with that we want all students to do while in their classroom try your best be kind to everyone around you help and include others and we're lucky we have such amazing teachers they work on these things and review these items every single day talk to our students about it and come up with some really meaningful insightful lessons all right so we wanted to i know it's been tricky to have parents come into the building and families come into the building but k3 shared some images of work that they've been doing um they've been learning about different life cycles including trees pumpkins owls and turkeys i know right i know that poor turkeys i feel like i shouldn't
019say that too loud um we learned they learned some new science vocabulary did some really great exploration and look at these owls wow we have awesome artists at their schools they're off the charts they're like i know how we could sell these all right so here are some students so proudly sharing their artwork really proud of their cutting like think about the fine motor skills that went into this um all the multi-steps that students had to do to know what to do to put these uh owls together so what looks like a really cute art project is actually filled with lots of skills that students have to be able to do um sequencing fine motor skills um ordering uh working in collaboration with one another so this is great here's some students working on pulling
020out some pumpkin guts that's always great all right so we also i don't know julio if you want to introduce this um are our during the month of november and december we're gonna be focused on the importance of a great forehead and we're gonna be using two books um where one book in spanish and english maybe something beautiful i think they gave us a couple different books but these are the two that we have here so ask your ask your students about they haven't read them yet but um these will be books that will be shared all right so wow we're onto our third thing already we've got a coat drive coming up that the pgo will be organizing don't forget december 8th we have an early release day and our winter break starts on
021december 24th now today and now yeah we have our family meetups from 4 to 4 30. the next one we have the first we had the first one today it was wonderful excellent a lot of parents and thank you for having us on your community and on december 2nd we're going to be at rolling greens december 9th at mill valley and in december 16th we're going to be at home we're going to be at ford river [Music] all right i'm going to stop sharing and this is time for you to ask us some questions yes we want questions from our parents anything that you want to ask us we're here gonna go for it yeah we'll try okay that's all right we were really thorough i bet all right well i loved that we got
022to go to colonial village today there were a lot of parents and even more kids what was really amazing was how they were a bunch of teachers that joined us and they just got right into having playing really like different games with the kids read like green light some mr fox game i hadn't even heard of um it was amazing and lanny right was there she was able to get some books from the kids from when we were in remote it was great it's i i'm gonna be sincere with all of you i'm surprised how our kids can keep that energy even after school they're they're like little energizer bodies they keep on going and going but for our teachers to be engaged and being playing those games it was it was wow mind-blowing i
023have to be sinful with all of you it was mind-blowing how they had that energy to be with the kids so it was good it was really good and it was so fantastic to be able to look just spend some time talking to parents about hey like what's going well for your kiddo at school what's something you'd like to see what are your own goals like what are you you know how are you thinking about this and i was really inspired by by just being able to like relax and hang out um and just just talk oh you have a question um all right i'm wondering how children now being able to get the covid vaccine may change the environment at the school perhaps it's too early to know the impact and oh i think
024there's a way to show this okay i'm i'm learning just did this i knew it all right so i think that's a really good question and i'm an educator i'm not a doctor or a nurse um although sometimes i think having four kids i feel like i could almost be a nurse right but um you know i think that um our role really is to mitigate and to reduce the number of closed contacts i think that having the covid vaccine certainly helps um but we know that there's breakthrough viruses so i think you know we still have to remain optically optically optimistically cautious yes at this moment i think that the best thing is um weights and follow the guidelines that they're gonna give us some right yeah no i i i we're gonna keep
025our parents in form of any information that we get when we you know we really want to keep kids outside as often as possible i know we have some benches coming that haven't come in yet uh driven by the school you've seen the tents up i mean even in winter you know those really nice days we want kids outside eating lunch um [Music] and outside as often as possible um all right it's great all right well julio and i'll stand for another minute or two so if you have any questions or comments thank you for the really kind uh thoughtful oh i gotta hide this now um yeah we're we're excited for all we're excited to be working in collaboration with all of you um jennifer thank you for your comments um yes it's good
026to be working with a person like tammy she trained to seattle sleep very happy she's always she had a positive attitude that's always good same thing you julia oh my goodness all right well i guess it's bedtime what do you think all right everyone i just want to thank you all for being here with julio and i tonight it was great we'll do this again next month we're going to increase our our viewers from 8 to 16. but you know what we could have this little private party too this was amazing so thank you thank you well awesome thank you everyone good night bye juliana