One of the wonderful things about this week was my observation of incidental learning that is taking place at UDAES.  One example of this is when I walked by a classroom and saw students reading a poem on the door while waiting in line to go to recess.  It is so great to see kids seeking out opportunities to read and the teachers providing these opportunities to them.  Another example of this was students practicing their spelling words on their way back from lunch.  The great part about this was that they weren’t disrupting anything so the teacher stayed close to

I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday and had the opportunity to spend quality time with friends and family.  I enjoyed time with my family, but I am happy to be back.

 It is great to have the kids back at school!  They all seem to be happy to be back and learning again!  The classrooms are back in the swing of things and moving forward full speed with their curriculum.  I can tell already that 2012 will be a great year!

 We started this week with data meetings to reorganize our RtII groups so we are ready to jump in with both feet after the holiday break.  The data was encouraging and resulted in the reduction of intensive RtII groups in most grade levels.  For example, Fourth grade went from having four intensive groups to having one group that is working on basic reading skills.  The DIBELS is just one of the data points we use, but below is a table to show a snapshot of the data (note: kindergarten will benchmark in January).