001here miss harlan here miss ham here ms harrigan here mr matelli mr paragini here mr white mr chairman thank you i asked you to stand for the pleasure united states of america and to the republic for which stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you for joining us have an awesome showcase so i'm going to head over to this leader thank you tony well we're really glad to see everyone tonight down here in the chapman library this is a really fun evening for most of us because we get to showcase something new something exciting that we're doing within the district so if you were at convocation if you were at one of our curriculum committee meetings you saw mike selem you need to put together a fantastic video for
002us highlighting this summer's curriculum writing institute of which we had over 80 teachers participating in rewriting revising and reviewing curriculum across our district we were revising rewriting with the eye towards writing curriculum with deep authentic learning tasks at hand we wanted kids to do authentic problem solving and be involved in real world experiences and so today we have with us some first grade teachers and kindergarten teachers and we are going to show you the work the fruits of the labor from the team that was in kindergarten in first grade and the units that they developed for first and second grade so now i'm going to turn it over to kristen lopa who is going to kick us off and kristen is now our full-time assistant principal at doolittle school we are really excited to showcase
003some of the work that was done over the summer by our elementary team this is just a quick picture of what the curriculum writing institute looked like at highland school these this summer on those dates in june um we are going to be talking tonight about a couple of our units that were revised our kindergarten and first grade units so we that's why we have our kindergarten and first grade teachers here tonight they are in the process of teaching these units right now so we're seeing firsthand the impact that they're having on the students in cheshire so here are some of the projects that we worked on and we are going to showcase the kindergarten and first grade tonight i'm going to introduce kathy carlucci she is assistant principal at norton in chapman so school
004at the institute this summer um our instructor was linda van wegen and um using these principles here she really guided our instruction as teachers um as we created these authentic deep learning experiences for the kids um i was in a unique position because i was leaving the classroom and becoming an administrator right when this was all happening so for part of the institution i actually worked with colleagues in creative units and then for part of it i acted as an administrator and worked with all the different elementary teams and watched what they were doing so i can assure you that the overwhelming message that i heard on both sides was that the teachers were just so grateful to have this opportunity to work with everyone in the district you know especially teachers from one elementary
005school collaborating with teachers from another to really spend the time to get into this kind of planning because this isn't the kind of planning you can get done in a you know 40-minute prep period on a busy wednesday afternoon with kids all over the building so it was really really appreciated um the teachers were excited they were energized um and i think that the results of their work um is now benefiting other teachers and all of the kids of course as well um so next i'd like to introduce pat castle um she is our ela k-6 literary um literature specialist um and she's going to get into a little bit more about what the teachers actually put together for you hi everybody so um during the summer at the cricket so as uh kathy was
006saying what i do is i support reading in all of the elementary schools so i go to all five of the elementary schools including darcy and um we've done we've always done very well with reading um and especially ever since full day kindergarten we've worked really hard and you know routinely we have about 70 i'm sorry about 90 90 or higher of our students at grade level or beyond in reading by the time the year ends um but we're always trying to be better we're always trying to get better and so our little group during the summer who met two of the teachers who are with me today uh just gene petro and christina borger from from here at chapman and join me on the committee to look at our curriculum and decide uh how
007what could we do better about reading kim desert who's the principal at darcy sat in with us on numerous occasions we also had the help of michelle torres who's an ot specialist at darcy so we had a lot of eyes on this project that we worked on and what we were seeking to do was to um improve that very early literacy piece we were very good at getting kids to read like look at words and read write in the code and read and we're thinking well what else could what is there something we could do better and and we knew that we probably could do a little bit better on helping kids make the connection between reading and writing because they're reading over here at this point of the day and then we're here in
008the afternoon writing over there but when you're little you don't really see how those two things connect right so they're really two sides at the same point and what we wanted to do is to bring in uh that whole piece of literacy so that kids could experience it in a holistic way and so that the reading and the writing both was benefit we wanted to develop children's moral language we wanted to make them aware of the sounds in words this is the science of reading this is what we know from the national reading panel of 2000 this is what works so the phonemic awareness phonics alphabetic principle the fluency with whatever skill level you're at and then eventually in vocabulary so what you have under your table is um a menu card the other thing
009that we were seeking to do was to create something that wasn't going to be ponderous for teachers to have to carry out that it could be carried out quickly very efficiently and very effectively so we're looking at is something that a teacher could have and look at and work very instantly off of um so the first column that you'd be looking at would be the standards of kindergarten and there are standards for phonological awareness and phonemic awareness which is sound awareness it could be rhyming it could be words and sentences but it's mostly the sounds of individual words right phonemes and then the second section as you go down those are the standards for alphabetic principle knowing the names and the sounds of the alphabet and then using clinics to read and the last section
010on the back page is motor work so we have to produce letters right we know the sounds and then we need to connect the symbols that make those sounds so that's what the first column is the second is a series of activities that we would have our students do on a regular basis that would hit particular standards or particular skills that are aligned with the standards on the left and the other three columns are what part of you as a human being is doing this okay so in the green is the auditory piece i'm listening for sounds can i discriminate individual sounds can i tell the difference between one sound and another and you're going to do a little activity in a minute and we'll see if you can do what kindergartner can do we'll
011find out well sometimes the things we are supposed to do they've never been asked before and so you'll see what it is we're seeking to go more deeply with this instruction and make connections for kids so that so that reading and writing are more not only more connected but more effective then you've got your auditory piece you know some kids are auditory learners that could be your strength that could also be an area of weakness for you so how do we how do some of these standards connect with your auditory systems and then the last would be your kinesthetic so if you're visually maybe you're a better auditor or vice versa or maybe learning through your whole body in a holistic way it's going to be best for you or one part of that is
012going to serve everyone so then when folks are out and students are out there working everyone's getting something everyone's getting support all the time that helps them and so the idea would be that we take a piece from each of these a piece from the phonemic one or two pieces which you're going to see now demonstrated by our teachers one or two pieces and today you're going to see two pieces from phonemic from chronological or phonemic awareness that just targets sound like it says here you can do it in the dark you're not looking at words not looking at the alphabet this is getting your sound awareness uh sharpened right your auditory discrimination and then a little piece from pre-re you're going to see a pre-reading skill that is mapped on to letter sound fluency
013and then you're going to be participating in a dictation piece as if you're a classroom of kindergartners so you're going to see what it is to be asked to produce a sound instead of being asked to produce a letter so it's the flip side of what we teach anyway and so we think it's more connected and so when you go through this loop of things through all of your modalities really you can own it and you can use it because the standard is to use what you know and not just to receive it right and that's what our goal was to be more effective and again that's why we had the ot person in there because we wanted to be sure that we were following best practices even in an area that i'm not an
014expert in the expert in reading i'm not the expert in ot then we had afterwards folks from um uh you know speech therapists and other you know expert kindergarten teachers a lot of eyes were on this and really helped us to kind of really uh tighten it up and make it good what are the key points about this approach it is multi-sensory which like as i explained essentially it packs the whole child it's a universal design so it helps all students if you're an english learner there's support here for you it's just all baked in the bread right if you have an iep if you have a speech goal whatever it's helping everyone including our gen ed students you want to make everyone a little sharper maybe understand things better it keeps asking students to
015participate so it's fast it keeps waking up the brain and it keeps you ready to learn um i already said audio visual audio and visual anaesthetic the fact that the same little activities a small set of activities keep on repeating the children learn them and that frees up cognitive space when they're working so they can pay attention to the content so the content flows through the activities all year in fact these activities the same ones are could be used first second and third grade because when i say to you guess my word what's the first sound and locate you can still say oh it's cold and um last one it's a repetitive but not boring the kids are really enjoying is very active and for our students for you know for all of our students
016it's a long day to sit in kindergarten and listen to the teacher talk all day so when they're active they're better learners i'm going to introduce justine petrov kindergarten teacher at norton and christina borger who is kindergarten teacher here [Applause] hi everybody so this is an example of a visual that we may give to our class to give them an idea of what we are going to be doing today during the bridge module so we want them to understand that we're going to be listening first then we're going to be looking then we're going to be doing um and this is a visual that we can use throughout the whole year because we're adjusting the standards um as we go through the year to focus on whatever we're doing in our reading conferences in our
017readers workshop in our writing curriculum and um these activities can flow through that like pat was talking about we can continue to up our game with the same activities um hitting different objectives and standards so the first game we're gonna play is we're gonna play guess my words remember friends we're listening for the sounds you're gonna listen for the three sounds and then when i snap you're going to say the word remember to wait for the snap give everybody time to think so the first word listen nice loud and proud voices all right next word nice job sap sat we changed the ending sounds nice job [Music] nice last one nice job today with guess my word [Music] all right boys and girls get ready we are going to do change a word i want
018you to listen to my word and then you'll echo it the first word is matt echo matt matt change the um to er ready go right excellent echo rat rat change the er to go excellent echo hat change duke go all right this one might be tricky echocat change ah to i go here [Music] remember the sound we're changing a sound not a letter echocat check change ah to i typed excellent nice job with change of word all right it's fluency time just remember your eyes are up on the board we're getting our brains ready we're gonna be looking and saying all right friends remember we're working i'm starting on this side and moving all the way across just like when we write our name we've got to start on the side move across your
019color experts so we're going to start that tracking with our eyes using our color words get ready to say the color words all set you bet good and you know what i forgot to say something so important and you remember if you make a mistake keep going it doesn't have to be perfect it's okay if you make a mistake keep going we're getting ready for our letter sound fluency and we want to keep reading got time to fix those mistakes later oh my goodness there's another line when i get to the end of this line what am i going to do mr white what am i going to do when i get to the end of this line [Music] just like when i write just like when i read i gotta go back to the
020beginning all right two lines here we go all set red purple yellow purple orange green green orange red red purple [Music] nice job you kept going you were loud and proud you are color experts all right it's time for sounds let's get ready remember we're going to start at the beginning of the line and we're going to go all the way across this time we're going to say our sounds it's okay if you make a mistake keep going i'm sad you bad wow that was so good all right friends here we go two lines what's that nice job my friends all done with fluency let's get ready all right boys and girls for the folks in the front row you have a whiteboard marker and eraser underneath your seat if you'd like to play along
021um you can pretend to have a whiteboard marker eraser for this okay all right you're going to listen to my sound and then write the letter that makes that sound on your whiteboard thumbs up when you're ready here's your first sound when you have it ready hold it up nice job get rid of your second sound hold it up great job next one ah interesting boys and girls i'm wondering it's not a think of another vowel that says ah like opera or octopus there you go very good all right here's your next one great and last one and erasers away and you're all set right just to wrap up the kindergarten piece with just a few thoughts one is picture doing that letter sound auditory visual kinesthetic connection on a daily basis for just that
022amount of time that's a seven minutes right just that amount of time on a daily basis building the sound skills over the course of a year you're really going to be able to do exactly what these attend intended which is a be able to read and bridge that skill to writing so many um this is kind of a one-off from some of those deep learning tasks that you'll see as a feature in some of our clicking writing institutes the authentic tasks here are being here so that's that's kind of the grounding for for uh this work and you heard pat mentioned that um this is set up for now but it's also set up to be the skills of the embed and routines that we've met with students over a period of time just to
023make sure that they've got this really strong foundation for both reading and writing all right now we're ready to move on to first grade um then i'm going to introduce caitlyn hi and christine anachrio they are first grade teachers at doolittle who are in the process of teaching [Applause] all right good evening everyone we are so proud and excited to be here to talk to you about what has been going on in our classrooms during writing time this is a poster that was created by one of our teammates kelly lauren to kick off the unit so what it says is first grade authors wanted so we told our first grade kids that the new kindergarten classes in doolittle really are in need of some non-fiction books and the teachers came to us asking for experts
024on some topics where we could create our very own nonfiction book to share with the kindergarteners and you could see them absolutely light up with excitement they were so excited to become real authors and to really experience an authentic task that would really be tied throughout the rest of the year in writing to really authenticate what writing means to them and how they can use what they know in an awesome way to create something amazing so what we first did was we brainstormed different topics that the kids are experts on so we talked about what is an expert what does it mean to be an expert we talked about how an expert is someone who knows a lot of information about something so right now i'm going to show you an example of what we
025did with our kids i want you to turn and talk to the person next to you and talk about some things you are really good at some things you know a lot about share that with your friend go ahead [Laughter] [Music] lot of is in the room and as you can imagine in first grade we also had a lot of experts on some really cool things we had them share out and then we gave them a recording sheet where they were to record certain topics they're an expert on in first grade believe it or not we have experts on leaves we have experts on marvel and ferraris karate video games there was a wide range of topics that the kids came up with and they were so excited to get started so the kids were
026trying to master writing an informative text in which they name a topic supply some facts about the topic and provide some sense of closure that's how we connected this unit to the common core state standard and these rubrics are underneath your choice yes if you want to look at a hard copy so we want the students to be able to earn a three in order for mastery in first grade but what's really awesome is they do have the opportunity to extend their learning some of those students that are a little stronger in the subject of writing can extend what they know and earn a for so what was really cool about the creation of this unit was that not only we had the teacher rubric that was switched around and made a little more specific
027for us but we also had a student rubric that was created so what we did was we shared this with the kids so they knew exactly what was expected of them and they could anticipate what they were going to be doing and what's awesome about it is over here they have not yet starting to and yes so we talked about how authors start off at a starting point and then they need to keep adding things and sometimes we don't add those things right away but this is going to be the process that's going to lead us to create a sex successful chapter book um if you want to go back one slide what um we did as katelyn said we gave this them to start off with we went through every piece that they needed
028to hit they needed to make sure that they were specific about their topic that their writing was organized we went through all the sections that they had facts not opinions in their piece that their sentences sound the way that they talk and all the conventions as well uppercase letters lowercase punctuation and this rubric was extremely helpful because it was in kid-friendly language so one of the lessons in the unit is peer editing which in the past has been a little challenge because we didn't have this rubric in this kid friendly language and this time when i did it it was so nice to see i paired them up they were able to share their pieces and listen to their friends and somebody was like that's a that's a lowercase b not a capital b you
029need to make that a capital if this size just doesn't have a period you need to add one so they were being teachers themselves and helping their peers fix their piece so that was really nice to see as teachers that they were taking on that role themselves and editing their piece as they went along like real writers do it was so cute my kids were like this is hard work i'm like yeah to be an author it's hard where christina gave her kids the example that harry potter what was it in one day i know they think that that's magic and that's what happens they put in a lot of work so i'm going to go through each section that their piece had and caitlin is going to pass out some student samples we also
030have one on the board to share with you each piece needed an introduction they needed a table of contents they needed some topics a closing sentence and they were really excited about the about the author page so this is an example of one of my students he told me he was an expert about karate which is based off of actually taking karate he said his sister wrote a book about it was sharing facts with him so he felt like he was an expert and could write the book about it he was very excited he said miss macro i get to write the dots like they do in the real books and i said absolutely so he was able to show the introductions on page one his different sub topics in the matching pages as well
031the conclusion and the all about the page so his introduction sentence was do you want to learn more about karate i can teach you the sub topics we took a lot of time focusing on these subtopics there was a lot of editing during this process trying to get them to understand that the heading goes on the top we have our sentences underneath we also talked about how in informative text they have real pictures and not just fake pictures so they added labels to their work this is his trophy this is the belt that they wear in karate he added the dojo china japan him breaking the board and as caitlyn said especially these subtopic days when they were really working hard with them the room was quiet and during writing time in the past we've
032noticed hands are up i don't know how to spell this i don't know what to do for this but because it was something that they actually knew a lot about and they felt confident in that their writing time was really really great in the classroom when they were focused and really giving it their best work in their conclusion i hope you liked learning about that and all about me page was something that they were excited to do too because they know in the books that they read the authors tell a little bit about themselves he said his favorite color was red he thinks the word that describes him is cool he doesn't like shrimp um different things that they got to do so we noticed that this piece was just a great way to connect
033everything in writing to make it really authentic and real to them and we saw a huge change in this implementation of this unit compared to past years it was it was really great and um we just wrapped up this first book they actually get to make a second book about what they're experts on and that one is going to be a little more independent we're still going to guide them along but since they did this first one it's really going to be them showing us what they know because they did a wonderful job with it the first time and we're going to share it with the kindergarten classes at doolittle so he made a little um preview for them to get them excited hi my name is [Music] because he says at the end hi
034my name is robert and i wrote this informative book about karate because i'm an expert on karate and i hope you're excited to read it um because i was excited to write it and i'm going to share it about where um where projects started what you wear and what it is hi so they really did an awesome job and as kevin said before what um jess and christina and pat talked about we do those similar tasks during our foundations time too and we've noticed that them writing on the whiteboards with the digraphs the short vowels they're able to sound out these words a lot better so as we said it goes to the grades that's a perfect example of how in first grade that's crossing over into the reading and the writing as well later
035on in first grade we do a whole unit on non-fiction text features and a lot of the time the kids struggle with it because it's just looking at a book and they're not actually doing the task we're really interested to see how much they pick up from this writing unit in correlation to the reading unit because we really think that because they actually did it they created the table of contents they did their labels included all of those parts that they're really going to do well [Applause] okay thank you thank you so we are really excited about this new unit we're really seeing now the impact that it had on our students and we realized that we really focused on making sure that our students had a lot of opportunities to practice writing really giving
036them a lot of practice during the writing block so we realized the more that writers write the more that the students write the better writers that they become so we're very hopeful and interested to use all of these practices that we've changed in some of our upcoming units so we want to open it up to see if you have any questions or comments for anyone on the on the team i don't have a question but i think this is really great and fascinating and you know to think about like five and six year olds well you know being able to sit down and really sort of walk through that whole process of becoming a life that's fantastic so um and kindergarten activities you know i can see where they would really be engaged and like
037alert the whole time it was a lot i was having fun [Music] but anyway that's a terrific job thank you thank you thank you for all the work you guys did during the summer um have you had to uh or i don't know if you have a chance to implement this uh in the second and third grade perhaps the kids who maybe missed some of this in kindergarten or first grade or second grade when we shut down in 2020 they may have missed some of this development if you have to use that just these techniques for older kids may have missed out or i can answer that question um so one of the first things that we did of course we monitored very closely last last year how students were doing and and i think
038that you heard probably on other board meetings the outcomes were very good um better than we had hoped we didn't do we were on it but you know you don't know what's really going to happen when when things are interrupted that way but um we've been proactive in taking a look at all of our primary students in first second and third grade we have screened them at the right way in the beginning of the when they came back in september to take a look at the the whole phonetic piece to see any gaps at all if there's anything that people didn't really really know um and then uh so that we could make a plan and so the teachers could right away address it for example in third grade they don't usually work on the
039six syllable types until later in like about now november but we moved that unit to right away in september so that teachers would immediately if they're gonna if somebody doesn't know the short vowels they would teach them in the closed syllable type so that right away you know and that's kind of a layering thing where you're gonna pick up speed because you're addressing what someone doesn't know and yet it's in the curriculum to work on two civil works um things like there were strategies where we made sure that we were catching folks up there a couple of individuals who weren't here are available for learning somewhere out of the country for example i mean yes there's a few there's a few when we're working with those students but in general we look to see is
040there anyone who doesn't have the skills that they should have coming in so our first great teachers as they said they we we shared uh the the strategies that we're working on in kindergarten with grades one two and three so they have something similar to this it's not a curriculum piece it was more informational but they know what the activities would be and um what how it aligns to their standards so second and third grade don't have phonological standards but that listening piece and what you did where you manipulated that that sound in the center and you really listened to it was a long eye sound and not a short eye sound um that's what really gets people stuck when they're spelling and things like that is like can you isolate where that place is
041and what's wrong about it and what audit you know to what from sound and not just from looking all the time right so um so and i've been going into classrooms and modeling these strategies as have the rams so that teachers uh in those grades are exposed to it and they're using it and the other day i was at highland and a third grade teacher said you know my kids are over there writing during writing cream they're going like this with their hand they're they're tapping the sounds because we're now giving everyone a strategy that they can use um when they're not with us right when they're sitting out by all by themselves you might see it at home someone might be tapping sounds or doing any one of these little quick little activities and
042so yeah we aren't trying it to uh to degree in all of those primary grades to just be sure we never let nothing uncovered right right so i noticed i was not up to grade level on the vowel sound so i'm just curious you were using the short vowel sounds versus the one and then on a broader uh perspective it's only november and you're dealing with kindergartners do they already know the difference between have you gotten so at what stage were we in the process we purposely put in something that would challenge adults because kindergartners are really just working on individual letter sounds of the alphabet and they're the most common sound so they would be short sounds or vowels and hard sounds are c and g right they don't do the job for you
043not yet because the assessment that they're given the letter sound that you saw that's the standard for that standardized assessment and so you know you teach yourself how they can get through it right but it's very important that we don't only always practice with one kind of phonics feature because you're never going to find a book that has only one feature in it and so it's important for students to be flexible so most of your sounds are going to be short a and throw that extra thing in there just for the kids who actually do know those things and can't do them but also just to keep you on your toes just like when you teach three letter words not all words have three sounds some have four so you'll put in a two sound
044board or a four sound word here and there just to keep everybody flexible so did that answer your question yeah sure of course good the other thing is that we um we were using the long vowels only during the phonemic awareness piece where they're listening not looking and when that relates back to writing and they're sitting trying to sound out a word they're not thinking about is this a long vowel or short vowel they're just trying to get their idea down and so if they're trying to sound out cake they need to be able to take a it's not so much about how they're representing the sound or the a sound and at you know it's not the convention of adding this silent e it's getting the a and k down so they show all
045three sounds and somebody can read it and that's something that they're already starting to do quicker because they're hearing how to take those sounds apart and then being able to recode those sounds and and encode those sounds onto paper there is a kindergarten standard though instead of answering your question where they need to be able to discriminate is it a long sound is it a short sound they don't have to read it they have to be if i say a they say oh that's the long sound oh that's the short sound so they should be able to discriminate auditorily but they have all year to do it so it's maybe something you wouldn't do this early in the year but again some folks will be out there that do know that or are ready to
046learn it and so we'll throw it out there we'll see who knows it the only way to know that you don't know is to find out [Music] are there any i love i was reading all about coyotes i love the artwork too but i'm also amazed was that just how far has come along uh in terms of in faith and katherine talked about these advanced techniques of movement fairly great levels because my daughters went through uh i want to do school i remember i remember getting to book you know to book structure layout table conference a little bit later it's just great to see this happening very level are there any additional resources that you as educators can use to help to help make this a little more easier or impactful for you what is
047technology whether it's more right i only have because our budget season's coming up in a couple months and i'm sure you'll all be sending your your and your pledges but either is there anything you see out there being under school systems that can help with uh phonics or other things technology wise or are you fairly comfortable with the tools you have right now i will answer that we have been looking at kevin hanlon has helped me research some of the um materials that are out there for finance programs they're very pricey they're very large and if you implement it as it's written that you would take you forever just forever there's every lesson you could think of you have to the teacher has to have the knowledge to know okay they know that i'm going
048to move forward now they cover everything because you might have to teach it all but if you don't have to teach it you have to go by and go to the next place you have to follow the children so so yeah so yeah we work from the science of reading and you know what we're looking for is you know i was reviewing the other day the list of coffins and materials they all do the same thing you know i always just like phoenix and pop star they all do the same thing but because they're all based on the science but um maybe maybe eventually i saw something the special ed teacher was using the other day and it was like our card and it just kind of went through a lesson so that's it's a
049lot faster um if you know what you're doing you don't need to have the look explain it to you in every chapter that sort of thing but we did purchase some single ten sets of different resources and pack worked with some others to strip those down and say what do we really need to be able to do and have from this um and rebuilt kind of what you saw from the keyboard cycle and something similar happened in writing you did go out and nab a whole series of different writing resources that kind of led to some of the conclusions on okay we can bundle these two units together let's give them practice of running through the society practically this first time you'll be more authentically doing it the second time really just a small shift
050of writing and putting this in book format and making an authentic task to say yeah you're writing a book for kindergartners right so just to gain that excitement on it and another part of this was just some shifts in understanding that information isn't the same as research on that so that you know just some of those resources pointed us to some of the decisions that were made ahead of converters so instead of buying sets culture every class we bought some singleton of a variety of resources stripped them down and said what are we ready to get out of the support well again you're able to do what you do best and customize the the material in the classrooms and i just love the tropical hands-on actually writing the book versus my computer i applaud for
051wonderful work things awesome there are some materials that we probably will end up being made by some phonics but readers you know specialized types of readers we may buy some materials not really we have a lot of magnetic letters but things manipulatives that kindergarteners can use so they can learn because for example if you're going to learn something in the beginning you just look at pictures and you say oh that's it that's the sun what is the sun what's the first sound and sun if you don't have anything to look at you know you can't just talk about thin air so you know there are some materials that we might end up needing that are going to help if we if our goal is that all of the kindergarten teachers have the same resources and
052that there's a consistent approach and the resources our resources are consistent that helps a lot with helping us all have a consistent practice and all being effective so like kevin i won't say no we don't need any resources but i would say that we would be targeting certain ones i think the number one resource that that i that i don't want to say we need is time and i think that was what was the most amazing thing about the curriculum institute is the time that we were afforded to do this work that is going to have a lasting impact and so more of that so my question is what happens next summer do you take what you've done and go further or do you go to the next grades in the next phrase so kevin
053and i sit with pat and alicia and we sort of have a math outline of the things that need most attention to the least attention so i'm kind of intrigued by the acceleration and i'm just wondering how this compares what you've got now it compares to what you were doing two years ago you know as i understand acceleration morally you can correct me it's it's getting down to the the core skills that these kids have got to have what isn't there anymore that that was i want to call it stranius but is how how is this different from what say a fourth grader learned when he was underground i think that um a big piece of it is his economy of time is having those that high difficulty small dose um and and having explored
054that really in depth and seeing um even if you look at our math curriculum and that's something that we talked a bit about during the institute was if you look at the eureka math curriculum that we took on a number of years ago when those fourth graders were probably in winter um we we started this new model of having a fluency piece and having an application problem and then going into the concept development and it was quick quick and then deep and that's kind of what like almost a component of the bridge is that quick quick quick so that during reading and writing we can go deeper um so that it's we're not spending a whole mini lesson just talking about letter sound fluency or a whole mini lesson just talking about changing initial sound
055we're we're dipping into it every single day so it becomes very routine it becomes very um practical and they become really confident in it you know something like the color fluency was something that we did for the first time this year and i saw such a huge impact not just on the performance on their first letter sound fluency which is the first time it's october they've been in kindergarten a month and they're doing you know rows of sounds and some of them don't even know how to write their name but they went into it with confidence because they had practiced the routine of it with colors they know their colors even even my student who is an english learner who is very quiet during the day was shouting his colors he was so excited to
056show his fluency and practice that routine and he was able to tell us some sounds that he knew on that letter sound whereas in the past many of our students in the beginning are gearing headlights um and it was just a quick dip i mean that was i would have done even less getting ready for the first time so in kindergarten that's been a big change it's just that frequency one of the things i'd like to add about acceleration is acceleration to me that's been going faster it's about being more efficient and effective so kindergarten teachers they won't tell you what all they ever have done is accelerate all the time because what happens is i come in i see who knows the letters which letters you don't know if they take tons and tons
057of data and say you know these five letters you know seven letters you know these twelve letters not the same kind that who knows everyone knows different ones right and so we're constantly keeping those records to say the way to make make people move forward and to accelerate learning from people is to make sure that you're learning what you need to learn but you're not spending time with something you already know how to do um it's it's very detailed it's you know doing a lot one-on-one and kindergarten teachers and first-grade teachers that's all they would do kindergarten and first-grade teachers take more data then add everybody else in this district together because there's so many small pieces to measure right there's a lot of strong pieces to mention and so you you can only go
058so fast as what you know that is the next place for that person today so does that help with acceleration we were we were covering the same standards when your fourth grader was in kindergarten but we are trying to be more efficient with time and get things like i also think going off of jess the kids having the foundation that they have doing what they're doing in kindergarten and then coming in with that confidence that they know how to phonetically spell out their letters and they can do it in a chapter book we've never done chapter books before this is our first time doing it and their excitement alone was enough to get them to sit down and like christina had said normally we have a whole bunch of hands and sometimes even tears because
059they don't want to put the pencil to the paper but this unit they were so excited to get to their seats they were so excited to get started so i think it just like um she said it just bridges it all and it just all comes really nicely together even the first unit we did in september compared to this one we're like okay it's new there's a lot more writing or we're a little nervous and it was ten times better than what we did we were shocked like wow they can actually do this and the higher students got an opportunity to write more facts they could keep going the lower students that needed help it gave us time to sit with them and really work with them it was easier to fit it to each
060individual student if you can write more facts keep going if you need some help we'll come fool you so it was great in that sense how much time was it for this i'm sorry what how much time did that happen that was a couple weeks yeah two weeks about pushed him along because we wanted these ready for tonight but they did it they did which was right we might have done a lot of writing in one day but maybe even a little bit more two slides that had the rubric so you heard the standard right here's the standard then you heard the focus on this is what really needs to happen for students oh and we're showing our students what that is so that when they're conferencing they are spot-on with look at practicing so
061a lot of it has to come with here's the standard here's the most important things that have to happen from that and putting that in front of students so they have some ownership of that when we were talking about this ahead of time the commentary on students we really understood exactly where they were going where they were going to be so it's things like that that help promote kind of what we're talking about acceleration-wise things like that are afraid of the heart and they get to write another one this is just their first one that's right a whole nother one so we're so excited to see what happened it's so cool to see them so little and like the really high kids are so responsible now that they have this rubric like i say then
062you know how to read your writing you sit down you look at that rubric you tell me what you're missing and they go and do it and it's so cool to see them responsible for their work and held accountable and be able to self-reflect on their own progress i'm curious about say like kindergarten you were talking about data collection i mean how do you literally do that you know here's 26 letters long and short sounds marking everyone by hand do you have an ipad and then you go back and look at it i'm not comfortable with doing anything like that on an ipad it's just a pencil paper and use we have but you know in the beginning you take a lot of data and the more letters you know i don't have to check
063on so many so we have a good reason to rub it out and we're very fortunate to have kindergarten instructional oh yeah absolutely who really are all lifeline when it comes to that data collection and intervention okay on the spot support um you know i've i've talked to gary in other districts where that was not afforded to us and it's it's a massive absolutely not true and in first grade too it's not it's not the same degree of support we do have a first grade ia and she's awesome and she does similar things interventions and it's not reading it's not a whole day yeah it's not very great it's not for every classroom the great the grade 1i circulates among the classrooms so they don't have as much time for support as the kingdom of
064our niece who are there throughout kindergarten instructional systems which are separate okay and they're not they're for juice boxes and pine trees they're many of them actually have some educational background some of them had last you know certification they're not working under a certification right now but in any case they're very well trained and they're very responsible and they carry out these not just the assessments but also when the kids need extra reading and so forth they know what to do you know how to do it stay consistent so is that is that only a kind of does that go through the 12th senior year like is there a so for regular a general education primarily in kindergarten and also we have a shared ia from first grade to help okay thank you if you
065put the effort into primary you won't have to do so much remediation we also have one um our our ia the year this year patty amato i believe is um she works with christine castellano in the leading program at dodd middle school so another non-special education support so it's like one person that died she's the only one are there any questions or comments from our steamed audience as soon as they're in them uh that's i first of all on behalf of the board thank you so much for taking the time uh not just for being here tonight and walking us through and i love the hands-on exercises but you know also having your kids prepare these books for us please send them our our thanks and we have a very impressed facebook so that's awesome
066in a couple weeks uh you guys also put a lot of hours in today so thank you for staying late tonight and uh this is huge for us this year mike is recording this and you know hopefully he gives his resources parents uh if we're aspire to come to church you want to see what he's all about we can greet up on i think it's a great program so thank you so much thanks for everyone joining us this evening [Applause] thank you so much