December 26, 2013
Our Holiday Luncheon was a success! A huge thank you goes out to the PTA for making it so festive for our community seniors. They were all very appreciative and enjoyed the great food. Our students and staff enjoyed eating lunch together as well. Thank you to Mrs. Trimmer for her piano skills and to Mayor Daniels for assisting the seniors with parking. I am already looking forward to next year’s luncheon!
As a dedicated staff, we continue to aim at providing a stellar education for your children. This includes the ability to provide personalized assistance for our students when possible due to our small class sizes. It includes teaching our students that doing the right thing and making positive choices on a daily basis leads to good outcomes. It includes holding high expectations for all of us, and that working together as a team to attain goals gives us a sense of fulfillment when accomplished. In a nutshell, we are all learning together every day, we make mistakes and improve as a result, and we strive to be productive, socially responsible individuals that can work together to make things happen for a great future.
We continue to focus on building literacy skills, increasing technology use within our classrooms, and building a community connection with our global school house. While I have been writing about our Rutgers initiative over the past few months, one cannot get a true sense of what is occurring in the classrooms unless it is seen. As a result, look for a short video production made by the Rutgers team that will enable you to see the awesome English language Arts learning that is occurring every day your children come to Califon School! This should be available shortly.
We continue to utilize a blog for staff to communicate various technology uses and ideas for the classroom. We will be looking at opportunities to provide science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activities for students. One such change will be with our eighth grade. During the spring, we host an annual Science Fair with our sixth through eighth grades. This year, we will focus on a STEM project for our eighth grade students that will pertain to the field of robotics.
Our sixth through eighth grade students recently had a scientist visit. They learned about the science behind DNA and blood. While learning about any scientific concept is important, to me there is something equally important when we have our students meet scientists in the classroom or via Skype. That is, the possible connection they might make with him or her, and that this connection might be of such an interest that they look further into a career as a scientist. The same holds true when we have our students communicate with authors of various fiction or non-fiction books. Maybe one day your children will share their imagination or learning with others through their written words!
Our global outreach continues to show positive support for individuals around the world, so much in fact that it caught the attention of our state government. Governor Christie addressed a letter to us thanking us for our support of worldwide issues which includes literacy, hunger, and education. He further wrote that our school community serves as a role model for doing the right thing.
I hope that all of you are having a wonderful holiday and I look forward to continuing our work into the New Year here at Califon School!
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