Welcome! An Elementary Principals Notebook

I am super excited that I am finally here to share all the great things happening as I end the first year in the Principalship.  I hope that you find ideas and resources to assist you.  I created this site, because I wanted to create a place where teachers and school leaders could find inspiration to assist in our craft of teaching and leading.


Professional Learning Summer Reading:

1. Mindset by. Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D
2. Real Talk Lessons in Uncommon Sense by. Adolph Brown
3. Short on Time by. William Sterrett
4. Learning by Doing: A handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. By. Richard Dufour, Rebecca Dufour, Robert Eaker and Thomas Many
5. Reading in the Wild with Donalyn Miller
6. Grading Smarter Not Harder by Myron Dueck


Professional Development Trainings:

1. AWSP/WASA Summer Conference
Theme: Recipe for Success!

2. Solution Tree Training: Professional Learning Communities at Work
Theme: Establishing a high-achieving PLC


We are excited to Announce:

Pinterest: Follow us at Satus Elementary on www.pinterest.com

Twitter: Follow us on Twitter at Wapato School District


Writing Gallery Walks

A way to integrate writing within Reading and all other core subject areas.  A great way to teaching writing to our students.  And the best part is that it teaches students to take pride in their ideas and work as a finished product.  Our School has Gallery Walks three times a year.

What does it look like you ask?  We set dates for the year and we give teachers and students about 1 to 1 1/2 months to prepare and take students through the writing process and teachers then display all students work in our hallway bulletin boards with the CCSS attached to the work displayed.



LIT Retreat Ideas

Thanks to the ideas of a Coach in my first year as an Elementary School Principal and Instructional Leader i did some research online and adapted the business model to fit the needs of our school and Leadership Instructional Team.  I worked collaboratively with the teams chair person and we created and approved an agenda and topics that we would present at out retreat which will be held at our brand new high school. The team building day will be 4 hours and we will  come together to work on team building and create action plans along with commitments we can take back to our grade level teams and share our work and how we can all work to align our work with the mission and vision of the school.

 Each member received this little package in the mail this past week.  For me it was important to ensure that I could give staff something to look forward to along with an idea of the work that would take place on our day together (the anticipatory set for our work).

August 7,2014

 I want to share the outcome our LIT Teams Retreat.

It was a positive meeting, each member was asked at the beginning to write down a few things they wanted to walk away with from this retreat.  And after an ice breaker activity we began the work or creating a focus for the team and how that focus would then be shared with all staff.

Solution Tree website has many ideas and resources regarding PLC's: www.solution-tree.com
look under PLC tab

Our Teams Focus:
Professsional Learning Communities (PLC's) to utilize this time with our grade level colleagues and the work taking place at these meetings is focused. Ideas for this I have is to order each teacher a binder where they organize their notes and tasks from weekly PLC time.

We will continue to build expectations for staff meetings. I plan on gathering the staff at our first staff meeting of the year and creating a Paw poster, having them come up with norms we should have and then past the poster around for each member to sign as their commitment to the work and their commitment to abide by the norms. Our group came up with a code word we will say when a member is off task "Norm."

Toward the end of the retreat we jigsawed and discussed a great article from ASCD.  You can subscribe for a yearly membership. They send you great articles, and books.  This resources has been great, because I am able to send out weekly bulletins and share what i have learned from topics i've read.

I shared this article with the team and they found great information and validation from what written.
Feb,2012 Vol. 69. Number 5
Data, Our GPS by Rich Smith, Marcus Johnson and Karen D. Thompson.

one part that really resonated with the group was the section on Guiding Principals: 1. Hope is not a strategy. 2. Don't blame the kids. 3. It's about student learning.

We ended our retreat with ideas for August 2015's retreat.