Take Home Tuesday

News from St. Cecilia Cathedral Grade School

Take Home Tuesday - December 14, 2021

Good morning Cardinal parents! For this week, I wanted to try out a new format for our school's weekly newsletter that comes out every Tuesday. After seeing it in action in a few other schools, I wanted to see what it would look like for us. As always, the goal is to communicate the amazing things happening in our school while also strengthening the school-to-home connection/relationship.

Last week our school completed our Cognia Accreditation visit. As a school, it's important that we continue to do the work to improve and sustain student learning. We go through this process every five years. During the review, we uploaded over 150 pieces of evidence to showcase all of our hard work over the past five years. We combined this with interviews between the Cognia review team and administration, school board members, parents, students, and teachers. At the end of the review, the outside review team provides us with what our strengths are and more importantly, what some opportunities for growth could be. These strengths and opportunities are as a result of all of the interviews and pieces of evidence we provided for them to look through.

Our Strengths:

1. St. Cecilia leadership models faith, purpose, and love.

2. A deeply embedded sense of engagement and tradition supports a culture where the care of the whole person is nurtured for all members of the St. Cecilia community.

Our Opportunities for Growth:

1. Expand data collection and analysis to include a formal process for teachers to engage with the data.

2. Create a strategic resource management process.

We are so proud of what the outside review team noticed/saw in our school. Thank you to every parent, board member, and student who took part in the interviews and spoke so positively about our community. We are happy to work on these goals (in addition to our school improvement goals) for the next few years!

Blessings,

Julia

Reading and English Language Arts (ELA) Classroom Connection

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Mrs. Gerken - Teacher Center

This is what "Teacher Center" looks like in reading rotations. With our small class sizes, your child receives 15-20 minutes in small group instruction with their teacher. In small groups, students work on reading skills that are appropriate for their level. We use data from STAR, Fountas & Pinnell, and daily running records from their reading groups to help guide the instruction.

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Ms. Bost - Read to Self

Here is an example of what "Read to Self" center looks like in reading rotations. Here your child picks a book from a bin that their teacher has carefully selected for them, based off their reading level indicated from STAR, Fountas & Pinnell, and observations during teacher center. These are the books from the Guided Reading Classroom sets that were purchased last year.

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Mrs. Zimmer - Word Work

An example of "Word Work" being done by a student in Mrs. Zimmer's class. During reading rotations, students have work to complete that not only builds their reading skills but also encourages independence and problem-solving.