January 2024

Welcome to the second half of 2023-2024 school year! We are excited to continue the journey with our students and families!

During 2023, our students made huge strides toward becoming proficient readers and mathematicians! Family reports with this information for your child will be sent home in the coming week. On these reports you will be able to celebrate areas of growth for your child as well as identify areas they continue to master skills.

One of our main focuses in literacy continues to be improving students phonics and phonemic awareness skills. Phonics skills include students learning to match sounds to letters or groups of letters while phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words.

While in math, we continue to work with students on numbers and operation which include fact fluency in addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

We have so much to celebrate as we compare our student's beginning of the year benchmark assessment to the mid-year assessment students completed prior to going home for Christmas break! Family reports with this information will be sent home at the beginning of next week. Please feel free to reach out to your child's teacher with any questions regarding your child's progress.

January 15th-19th: Charismatic

January 22nd-26th: Genuine

January 28th-February 1st: Essential

Check out the file below for definitions and examples of each word of the week.

January:

4th - School Resumes/Winter Bus Routes begin (see flyer below)

2nd Quarter/1st semester grades sent home

15th - No School: MLK Junior Day

18th - School Board Meeting @ 7:00 p.m.

• Students go outside for recess everyday as long as the temperature (including wind chill) are above 32 degrees and it is not precipitating. Please ensure your child has outerwear so they can enjoy some fresh air.
• If possible, please put your child's name inside their coat. We already have lots of lost and found items, including some very nice winter coats. At the end of each quarter, we take any unclaimed items to Salvation Army. Please help us in returning your child's items to them :)

We are very fortunate to have the opportunity to partner with West Central Boys and Girls Club of America to provide afterschool care for our students K-8th grade. B&G Club is open from the end of the school day until 6:30 p.m.

If you are interested in signing your child up for B&G Club, please complete the online registration attached below. If you need a paper copy of the enrollment packet please reach out to the elementary office. If you have any questions or need assistance with B&G club, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Area Site Director, Sharliene Fulton @ 660-233-2230.

Student meal prices:

Breakfast: $1.50

Lunch: $2.70

Reduced Breakfast: $0.40

Reduced Lunch: $0.40

There are two ways you can put money on your child's lunch account:

1. Submit payment to the elementary office. If you are sending the money with your child, please make sure to place the money in an envelope and that it is clearly marked whose account it goes to;

2. Pay online via the parent portal. Please note, there is a small service fee associated with this type of transaction.

Your child is allowed to charge up to $5.00. After this point, they will be given their meal each day, but no seconds will be allowed. Please also note that seconds are not offered to K-1st grade students. However, there is a fruit and vegetable bar available every day and students are allowed to have as much of these items as they would like as long as they are not being wasteful.

What is PBIS?

Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS) is a process in which our school staff has worked together to identify behavioral expectations (see Matrix below), teach these expectations consistently to our students, and provide positive specific feedback to reinforce expected behavior. Make sure to check out the picture below.

What PBIS is not...

PBIS focuses on teaching expected behaviors and providing positive feedback to students when they follow those expectations, but at Leeton we focus on providing feedback in ways that encourage intrinsic motivation (through verbal feedback and student shout-outs that are included in our morning announcements) rather than trinkets and tangible tokens. PBIS is also not a replacement for consequences when a student does not follow our expectations. Depending on the level of the offense, students will given consequences that are outlined in our parent handbook (pages 29-32).