Amazing Teacher Bulletin Boards

One of the things that Castleberry Elementary (and other schools in the district) are becoming known for is our Standards Based Bulletin Boards (SBBBs).  These are bulletin boards that are interactive and that show what the teachers have been working on with the students in their classroom.  As I walk the halls of CE I have the opportunity to see great bulletin boards on display that show the work of students who have followed the teacher's directions, been completed very well, and clearly display the skill that has been worked on by the class in the previous weeks.  Included here is a picture of a very clever bulletin board from the Special Education class at our school.  The thing about this board that first caught my attention was the creative name, "Our Poetree".  Isn't that just great!?  If you could look closer you would see examples of acrostic poems that the students have written.  You can also see that the class has been talking about similes, metaphors, hyperbole, alliteration, personification, and onomatopoeia.  The teachers include explanations as to why a particular selection was added to the board, the criteria the students needed to follow to complete the task, and the TEKS that support the objective(s) being taught.  It is a clear, creative example of one way that our teachers are showcasing the work of students and what is being covered in the classrooms for any passerby to see.  Every month a team of judges visits our campus and chooses the best of the best of our bulletin boards to be showcased at the Central Office.  During the monthly school board meetings, the teachers who have their board show cased at Central Office are given the opportunity to be recognized by the school board and share exactly what their board is all about.

Thursday Faculty Meeting Assignment Regarding LEP Students

It's the new year and you all know what we do during the new year........we make resolutions.  I have a resolution that I would like to make for Castleberry Elementary School.  That resolution?  To help the LEP students find even more success in the classrooms.  This can be a daunting task, but if we take it one step at a time.......if we eat the elephant one bite at a time.......if we don't try and do too much but choose one activity, one skill, one area of focus and master that particular technique we will find success and more thoroughly meet the needs of our LEP students.  So, how are we going to do this?  Earlier this school all of the teachers on the campus received two documents in their e-mail.  Those documents were the Linguistic Accommodations for Each Proficiency Level planning guide and the Differentiating by Language Level Instructional Planning Guide.  These two documents are full of ideas designed to help teachers help their LEP students become more successful in the classroom.  The documents have ideas for beginning, intermediate and advanced students in all four of the TELPAS domains.  I encourage the teachers to choose one or two ideas from these documents (no more than this or it will become overwhelming) and begin to implement them in your classroom.  Once you have mastered the first couple of ideas, choose one or two more that you can add to your toolkit of teaching techniques.  That is how you slowly increase your impact on your LEP students over time.  In order for us to get off on a good foot as a faculty there is an assignment that everyone needs to prepare for.  This Thursday is our next faculty meeting.  At the faculty meeting we are going to share different ideas that you have chosen to use from the documents mentioned earlier in this blog.  Come ready to share.  Better yet, post a comment here that could possibly help inspire others.  Let us resolve together to take more steps in helping out LEP students find success in the classroom.

Using Big Words in Context Helps To Close The Achievement Gap

When I was serving as a 2nd grade teacher in HEB ISD I had an Assistant Principal friend named Michael Granado who loved to use the word cognizant.  He used the word so often and so effectively (within proper context) that I became cognizant of the meaning of the word without even having to look it up.  This one example is a perfect example of how we need to be teaching vocabulary to students in our classrooms.  We need to be using what is known as tier II words (words like verify, superior, and negligent) in our daily classroom written and spoken language in context in varying situations so effectively that students will be able to infer the meaning of those words.  Another example that stands out in my mind comes from a walk through I did in a kindergarten classroom earlier this school year.  The teacher, Mr. Remis, was talking with the students about the attributes of different shapes and using content specific vocabulary like vertices and surfaces.  He was using the terms appropriately in context and these kindergarten students were clearly beginning to grasp the meanings of the terms.  Using specific words in context over and over again so that students intuit the meaning of those words is good pedagogy.  This is something that needs to be purposefully practiced by all educators and will help to close the achievement gap between those students who come to school with big vocabularies and those who come to school with limited vocabularies.