Dear PS 107 Families,
It’s been a wonderful week here at PS 107, with me and Ms Rinah able to spend lots of time in classrooms. We’ve focused a lot of our classroom visits on observing our new literacy curriculum, Wit + Wisdom, in action, along with ensuring that we’re giving students solid foundational literacy skills with our phonics curriculum, IMSE OG+ (formerly known as Recipe for Reading), and our phonemic awareness curriculum used in grades K and 1, Heggerty.
It is truly remarkable how well our teachers have not only been able to learn and understand, but also make their own, a brand-new curriculum, based on a fundamentally different way of teaching reading and writing than what they were trained for and have been using for the last two decades. I am blown away by the work that I’m seeing in classrooms – from students’ understanding of incredibly rich content and vocabulary to their ability to share what they are learning and how they are connecting it to their own experiences, in classroom discussions and in writing.
Because of the more explicit focus on writing conventions and structures, student writing has improved by leaps and bounds in just a few months. In fact, the other day, one of our Kindergarten teachers came into my office excitedly to show that her young students had learned to write complete sentences, with capitalization, punctuation, correct spelling, correct letter formation, use of spacing – AND with great ideas! We have never seen Kindergarten writing like this before, and I attribute it wholly to our adoption of evidence-based literacy instruction (and of course, to our amazing teachers).
Come to our Upcoming Math Workshops!
We have had such a focus on literacy instruction this year, but math remains as important as ever. This year, our teachers are using a new version of Eureka Math2, our longtime math curriculum. The new version provides students even more opportunities to grapple with complex math content, and ensures that they are developing both conceptual and procedural understandings of mathematical principles. If you’d like to learn more about how we teach math now at PS 107, please join us for one of our upcoming workshops, led by 5th grade math teacher and PS 107 math leader, Ed Schulz:
Parents of children in Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades: Wednesday, January 17th, 8:45-10 am, Cafeteria (in-person only)
Flyer and registration here
Parents of children in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades: Wednesday, January 24th, 8:45-10 am, Cafeteria (in-person only)
Flyer and registration here
What to do about your tweens’ group chats?
Group text chats are a challenging issue that many parents face once their children have use of a smartphone or other device. This is something that we confront every year at PS 107, with problems mainly arising in late 4th grade and throughout 5th grade. Along with PS 107 parent and Common Sense East Coast Education Director, Tali Horowitz, School Counselor Sarah Green and I are hosting a special lunchtime workshop for parents of 4th and 5th grade students tomorrow, Thursday, January 11th, 12-1 pm on Zoom. Fourth and fifth grade parents: if you can join us, please do! Flyer and registration are here.
Your feedback matters!
Finally, thank you to those of you who complete the feedback form for ways that we can make our school even better in 2024! If you did not have a chance to do so and would like to share your feedback, please do so here. It’s completely anonymous and ideas will be discussed at our next School Leadership Team meeting.
Have a terrific week!
Warmly,
Ms Joanna