April 1, 2016

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Happy April Fools Day! I hope everyone had a good spring break and was able to relax and enjoy some time away from school.

Our next extra hour meeting is on April 13. In that meeting you will meet in your department PLC's to discuss your SMART goal and what you have done so far to achieve it. This SMART goal takes up to the Iowa Assessments. The next building meeting is on April 27, the SIT team will meet to come up with the agenda for that meeting.

Just a reminder Iowa Assessments will be April 12-14. We will have the reading assessment on the 12th, the math on the 13th, and science on the 14th. Students will take their tests in their advisory rooms. We will use the following schedule:

EB - Normal
1st - 8:30 - 9:00
2nd - 9:04 - 9:34
Assessment 9:38 - 10:38
3rd - 10:42 - 11:12
4th - 11:16 - 11:46
5th -
1st Lunch - 11:50 - 12:20
2nd Class - 12:24 - 1:05
1st Class - 11:50 - 12:31
2nd Lunch - 12:35 - 1:05
6th - 1:09 - 1:54
7th - 1:58 - 2:43
8th - 2:47 - 3:30

Our Junior local assessments will be the week of April 26th. I did email the info out earlier this week. If you have any questions, please stop and talk with me about this.

We do have our last evac drill on April 4 at 1:30 pm.

And finally, our last day of school with students will be June 2. That means May 31 will be the last day of class and June 1 and 2 will be semester test days. June 3 will be the teacher checkout day and we can start signing slips after noon that day.

Have a great weekend!

Staff News

Congrats to Rosemary Cronin and Larry Johnson on their upcoming retirements. Both were approved by the board on Monday night. Thank you for all the hard work and leadership you have provided.

Students as Leaders


Mr. Zeka took his Advance Government class to Des Moines on Wednesday. There they were able to meet with Governor Branstad and our legislators.

Congrats to Kelli Susemihl for qualifying for the state competition for National History Day. This will take place on April 25.

Good luck to all our performers and non-performers at All-State IE Speech on Monday, April 4.

Good luck to the jazz band at the Jazz Championships on April 5 in Des Moines.

Assistant Principal's Corner

The LCHS student council is sponsoring a dodge ball tournament on Sunday, April 10th starting at 2:00 pm in Cary Gym.  If you are looking for something to do that weekend, we can use help refereeing and would greatly appreciate it.

I will be out of the district on Monday, April 4th for the Student Council Adviser's Conference in Des Moines, IA.  If you have any issues with students, please consult with Dr. Iverson.

I realize that the students have a bit of Spring fever so I wanted to share some ideas that I got from an article called, "How to Combat Spring Fever at School".  The author suggest the following tips to help out in this situation:

1. Be careful to build relevance to make sure students are aware of the benefits of what they are learning.
2. Consider using multimedia in your presentations to engage student interest.  Music, art, video clips...whatever your students enjoy can be used to snag their attention.
3. Challenge students to beat their personal best on assignments.
4. Allow more wiggle breaks when students are restless.
5. Consider sharing silly facts each day for your students to think about, dispute, talk about, research, write about, and enjoy: www.amusingfacts.com

Enjoy the Spring and keep the students engaged the best you can.  Practice patients and keep on encouraging the students to make good choices.

Librarian's Corner


In our Innovator's Mindset (by George Couros) book study, we discussed a chapter that talked about focusing on student's strengths rather than their failures. That also led to the discussion on how we get students to do what they have to do. Do we take away something they value? If so, is that an incentive or punishment? And, does it work? This led to the discussion of technology and how we AND students are using it. Is technology a tool to deliver information or is it a tool to create and connect? Here is a blog by John Spencer that addresses this a bit more: NEW DIGITAL DIVIDE?

Instructional Coaches' Corner

If you create timelines in your class or you would like your students to create timelines, Timeline Maker is a tool you might want to check out.

Google has a user friendly way of inserting special characters into their documents. It gives you a trackpad to draw the character you are searching for and it will search for it based on your drawing. Here is a very short video explaining how to do just that!

Have you seen the Google Docs outline tool? If not, here is a less than 2 minute demonstration of how to use it.

 Google also has the ability to convert a picture of text into an editable Google Doc. This link takes you to a less than 3 minute video showing you how to do it. Keep in mind that OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology is not a perfect tool. There may be some mistakes so be sure to read completely through the text after you turn the image of text into a Google Doc. It is also important to remember that this works best with images of typed text versus hand written text.

 Recently Google gave you the ability to set expiration dates if you choose to grant someone access to your Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and more. Click here to watch a 2 minute video showing you how to do it. This feature will only work for collaborators that you have given the rights to view or comment. This will not work if they have the rights to edit.

For those of you who enjoy Quizlet, they recently released their Beta version of Quizlet Live. It allows you to select one of your sets to use with your class, provides a code for them to join the game, randomly puts them in groups of 3-4, and then they race as a team to complete the set. Click here to see a 2 minute video about it.

If you have a project in your classroom that you would like some technology assistance with be sure to plan ahead. Some teachers are already filling up dates on my calendar in April and May.

Tracy

Articles Worth Reading

Mastery Simplified: Five Tips to Make Mastery a Reality
Resources and Downloads to Support College Readiness

Video Worth Watching


Upcoming Events

Saturday, April 2
  • State Solo/Small Ensemble Contest
Monday, April 4
  • All State IE Speech Festival @ Cedar Falls
  • 4:00 pm Boys JV/Varsity Tennis vs. S.C. East
Tuesday, April 5 -
  • 4:00 pm Girls Varsity/JV Golf @ Brunsville vs. Cherokee @ Emmesburg
  • 4:00 pm Boys Varsity/JV Tennis vs. Bishop Heelan
  • 4:30 pm Girls Varstiy/JV Track vs. BCIG, Heelan, Cherokee, Hinton, SBL, & North
  • 4:30 pm Boys Varsity/JV Track @ MOC
Thursday, April 7
  • Sine Nomine Honor Band @ Cherokee
  • 4:00 pm Boys Varsity/JV Golf vs. Western Christian
  • 4:00 pm Girls Vasrsity/JV Tennis vs. ELC
  • 4:00 pm Boys Varsity/JV Tennis @ ELC
  • 5:00 pm Boys Varsity/JV Track @ Cherokee
Friday, April 8
  • 5:00 pm Girls Varsity/JV Track @ Cherokee


 Be Extraordinary!
Mark
Location: Le Mars, IA 51031, USA

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