Chatter

February Chatter Article

First I just have to say, “WOW!” What a huge turnout we had for our PTA Family Fun night! Our gym was packed with Churchill families having fun together. Everyone was entertained with a night of magic, laughs, songs, and even some dancing. We all enjoyed seeing some of our students assist in the show, a few of our dads perform, and the kids anxiously waited to see Mrs. Hopkins get all tied up. A big thank you to our PTA who provided this family fun evening to our community free of charge! Thanks also to the PTA clean up crew, who certainly made quick work of putting back all of those chairs!

Our PTA works very hard to support our school. With their time and support they are able to provide nights like Tim Hannig – The Pro-Kids
Show!, fun food days, hot lunch days, field day, yearbook, school pictures, book fairs, and much more. This is a good time for us to remind you to join the PTA. A portion of our membership goes directly to events like those mentioned above. If paying for a membership is not what you wish to do, we also ask that you consider giving the gift of time to the PTA. When we share the responsibility to support our students the load lightens.  Even 60 minutes makes a difference!  Call any PTA representative to ask; “What can I do?”

Not only does our PTA work hard, so do our students. It is evident, from the many students who met their mid-year MAP goals that you and your families are finding time in your busy days to read with your children, ask them about books, and check their homework. We are very proud of the progress your students are making here at Churchill! We thank you for your continued support in your child’s education.

You are a very important person for your child’s reading and language development. You are your child’s first teacher and mentor. Children of all ages love to be read to and have people listen to them read. Encourage your children to pick books out of the library they are interested in and share them together. You could promote effective reading strategies by suggesting the following techniques when your child struggles with an unknown word.

(suggestions adapted from Attempting Unknown Words: Suggestions for Parents , by Katie DeSotell)

SKIP AND READ ON
When faced with an unknown word, your child should continue to the end of the sentence or paragraph. At that point go back to the unknown word and have them make a meaningful substitution and then reread the sentence with the substitution. Always encourage children to monitor their own comprehension by asking, “Does that make sense?” Often time, children will provide the correct word by utilizing the context clues.

PICTURE CLUES
Ask you child, “What do you see in the picture that may help you?” Attending to details in the picture may support your child’s attempts at unknown words. In addition to illustrations, encourage your child to use maps, photographs, charts, and diagrams to support their reading. All readers should be gaining meaning from the pictures as well as the words.

VOCABULARY CUES
Often times, a student’s oral vocabulary is greater than their written. Children are exposed to language so much more than they are exposed to print. Many times children will already know the unknown word and use the word appropriately in their own vocabulary, but may have never seen it in print to make the connection. You could say to your child, “Oh! You know this word. This is the word you use if you are very, very scared.” The unknown word in this case could be frightened. This helps students connect what they already know to the print in the
textbook. 

SOUND IT OUT or “CHUNK IT”
Beginning readers should look at the letters in the word. Ask your child, “What sounds do you expect to hear?” Children can also think about word families that are familiar to them (such as cat, hat, sat). Ask your child, “Does this look like a word family you know? Does it rhyme with another word that you know?” Older readers should look for word parts they recognize‐‐base words/root, words within a word, suffixes and prefixes.

Happy Reading!
Mrs. Hopkins and Mrs. Lindblade

Behind the Scenes

Dear Churchill Community,

There is so much that goes on behind the scenes here at Churchill School that you might not even realize. We want to take this opportunity to spotlight a group of dedicated students here at Churchill. This is a group of wonderful, respectful, responsible students who volunteer their time every day to help ensure the safety of all of our students. Sure their job looks pretty great in wonderful warm weather, but these students will brave the cold, rain, ice, and snow! This group is our very own student Safety Patrols. These students take on a leadership roles at Churchill. They help our students get on their buses; welcome our students each day by opening our doors, broadcast our morning pledge and announcements every day, and collect our attendance each morning. We have been very impressed with their leadership! They truly are role models for all of our students. If you see our safety patrols doing their job please be sure to thank them! We also cannot forget to thank Mrs. Tomchuk and Mrs. Meyer who have worked very hard to recruit, train, and support these students throughout the year. Keep up the great work Safety Patrols!

We are also excited to share with you that this week was American Education Week. We are very proud of our students and staff, as well as the many fine opportunities we are able to provide at Churchill School. In order to celebrate this special week, we encouraged our parents to visit during the regular school day to see what a typical day looks like for your children. On November 17th, teachers and students welcomed visitors to their classrooms to share in a typical day of learning. If you were able to attend we hope you found your child’s classroom environment motivating and witnessed the students engaged in their learning. They were so excited for their special visitors to spend the day with them!

Additionally, we are equally excited to share the success of Churchill’s First Inaugural Turkey Trot hosted by our very own P.E. teacher, Mr. Wroblewski. 5th and 6th grade students from Churchill, Lincoln Prairie, and Muir participated in this one mile race at Eisenhower Jr. High School. Despite the snow and cold temperatures, the students were amazing! Mr. Wroblewski reported that through the students’ food donations, we were able to collect 196 items with a total weight of 192 pounds for the District 54 food pantry. So many district 54 families will benefit from these donations. Congratulations to Mr. Wroblewski for putting together this fantastic opportunity for the 5th and 6th grade students. This was truly an amazing event that brought together 44 students in our community.

Just as a reminder, Winter MAP testing will begin right after the Thanksgiving holiday, beginning on November 28th and continuing through December 16th. This is a great opportunity for you and your child to review the goals you set together with their teacher(s) at conferences. On behalf of the staff and students of Churchill School we wish your family a very safe and happy Thanksgiving Holiday!

Sincerely,

Mrs. Lindblade & Mrs. Hopkins

Letter from the Principals!

Dear Churchill Community,

Student-led conferences took place on October 6^th and 7^th.  The students and teachers did a great job sharing their progress, assessment scores, and academic and behavioral goals with their families.  We hope each of you were able to connect with your child and their teacher during this important time. If you were unable to attend your scheduled conference time, please make it a point to reschedule this conference as soon as possible by contacting your child’s teacher. Continue to ask your children about their daily progress toward meeting their reading, math, and behavioral goals during the school year.  Your interest and involvement in your child’s learning makes all the difference!  We look forward to the next round of M.A.P. testing beginning the last week of November and being able to celebrate your child’s academic progress with you.  As always, please feel free to contact your child’s teacher with any questions you might have or support you might need for ensuring your child’s academic success.

As we continue to work towards helping our students meet their academic goals we are also working to help students meet their individual behavioral goals.  Our PBIS team is proud to begin new check-in-check-out procedures for students that are in need of additional behavioral supports outside of their classroom.  Students who are identified as meeting the criteria established by the PBIS team for needing additional support will meet with a Churchill staff member before school to quickly discuss daily goals and at the end of the school day to review their point sheets.  Point sheets will travel with students during the day and help to focus the students on being safe, respectful and responsible. The point sheets will also serve as a way to provide specific data to PBIS team members in order to individualize support for students.

We’ve got spirit, Yes we do! We’ve got spirit, how ‘bout you? The Churchill PTA is excited to be able to offer some new spirit wear items for the 11-12 school year.  Some of the new items include: tie-dye shirts, zip-up hoodie sweatshirts, capri sweatpants, straight-leg sweat pants, girl’s flannel pants, and baseball shirts. Sample items are available to check sizes in the Churchill office. Look for the spirit wear order forms coming home soon.

Halloween is quickly approaching on Monday, October 31^st and Churchill school will celebrate with classroom parties in the afternoon and a school parade.  Please see the attached letter which outlines the Halloween festivities and guidelines.

Did your child(ren) come home excited to tell you about the PBIS assembly last week?  Together the Churchill learning community reviewed the importance of goal setting which included a special surprise flash-mob dance from the Churchill staff. The message we wanted our students to receive was: A goal is something you want and are willing to work for! Goals you set are goals you get! If you don’t set it…you don’t get it!  We hope
that goal setting not only is something students do at school but also outside of school, at home, and in their community.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Lindblade & Mrs. Hopkins

We are off to a great start!

Welcome to the 2011-2012 school year!  On behalf of our wonderful PTA and staff, we want to take this opportunity to officially welcome you and your students back to another terrific year of learning and growth at Churchill!  The school year is upon us and we are excited to start a new year with your children. The hallways and classrooms are freshly painted, our new playground equipment has been waiting for our students to come back to play, and our elevator should be ready for its ups and downs! Three of our teachers received a District grant to pilot the new technology to use in their classrooms. They will be integrating the use of promethean boards in their instructional day, and all of our 3-6 grade classrooms received new projectors and document cameras to enhance their instruction as well. Yes, we have had a busy summer! Who says teachers are off over the summer? We also hosted a Quantum learning workshop in June that was attended by over 2/3 of our staff. We spent the week learning various strategies to increase engagement in our classrooms and enhance our lessons. Our summer school students spent August with us getting ready for the new year!  No…learning does not stop here over the summer!

We were thrilled to have an approximate 90% turn out on our new “Back to School Night”. We hope this format will help you and your child get off to a successful year. It is our hope that you were able to informally meet your child’s teacher and get some questions answered about expectations, curriculum, and procedures before we even begin. As always, your feedback is welcome. Thank you for taking the time to join us!

Our PTA is always very appreciative of all who stop by their table to sign up to give some of their time to support our students. The partnership between school and parents is critical to the development of your child and our PTA is the vehicle we use to build this partnership. Through their gifts of time and talent, our PTA volunteers demonstrate the community’s commitment to the education of our young people.  PTA Volunteers play an important role in the educational process.  They provide assemblies, hot lunches, supplies, pictures, yearbook and so much for our students. We realize that everyone has different schedules and time constraints, however, volunteers can work at school or at home.  Any time you can give is greatly appreciated whether it is an hour a day, an hour a week, or an hour a month! Please contact any one of our PTA officers to find out what you can do to help.

On our first two in-service days our staff had a chance to celebrate their accomplishment and reflect on our mission and commitments to your students. We are proud to say we are closer and closer to reaching our 95-95 goal! This year we went from 84.3% of our 3-6^th graders meeting our exceeding on the reading portion of the ISAT in 2010, to 89.9% of our students! That is a 5.6% jump in one year! Incredible! In the Math, we went from 93.5% (2010) of our 3-6^th grade students meeting or exceeding on ISAT to 94.2%. We are only .8% away from 95%! Amazing! We could not do this with out your support and encouragement to your student at home. We also had the highest % of all of our students meet their MAP growth targets!. Just two years ago a little more than half of our students met this goal and now almost three fourths of our students have met their target growth. This is the sixth highest percent in all of our 27 schools in the District. That is a phenomenal accomplishment! Our students know their job is to learn and to show what they know so they can meet their goals. Please continue to encourage them at home!

Our focus as a staff will be to continue to build upon the excellent academic opportunities that are provided atChurchillSchool. We will continue to focus on meeting the individual learning needs of all our students.  Again this year, every child will have an uninterrupted literacy and math block.  We will also continue to support the children’s individual reading needs with an intervention block. We will be implementing a guided math approach during our math block to support reteaching, enrichment, and interventions for Math. Our grade level teams work very closely with our support staff and parents to ensure every child learns the essential skills necessary to be successful students.  This year we have also added a 30 minute instructional re-teaching block for teams to use to ensure that essential skills in literacy and math have been mastered. We will again begin the year focusing on ensuring that our students understand our Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS) expectations.  By ensuring that all of our students are taught the “Leo’s Laws”, we are able to improve student behavior to maximize learning.  We have had tremendous success with PBIS and we will work diligently to continue to improve our PBIS systems. We will review our PBIS expectations with your children during the first week of school. Please ask them about these three laws, our paw path to pride, and how to live “above the line”.

We are also going to try something new! This year we will be offering two evenings designed to help answer those tough questions that come up throughout the year. For example:

• What is an I-message?
• What is this lattice multiplication stuff?
• What does it mean for my child to get a picture in their head when they read?

Mark your calendars!

September 19: Leo’s Learning Night (Grades 3-6)

September 21: Leo’s Learning Night (Grades K-2)

We are looking forward to an exciting year filled with pure potential for all students!

Sincerely,

Lisa Hopkins, Principal                                     Jessica Lindblade, Assistant Principal

Assistant Principal’s Message – April 18, 2011

Dear Churchill Community,

Can you believe there are only eight weeks of the 2010-2011 school year left?  This year we have spent a great deal of time goal setting with our students and together we have been able to see our students achieve amazing new heights both academically and behaviorally.  As a matter of fact, our students were able to reach their behavioral goal for the month of March and earned a surprise recess.  We are excited to finish the year off as strong as ever with our last round of MAP testing and we know our students are up to the challenge of continuing to give 110% until the very last day of school.

Spring MAP testing will be held April 25-May 13.

1^st & 2^nd graders will be testing April 25-26

5^th & 6^th graders will be testing April 27-29

3^rd & 4^th graders will be testing May 2-3

Kindergarteners will be testing May 5-6

Make-ups will be held throughout the testing window when possible.

We encourage you to review and reflect on the goals you set together with your students and their teachers at the beginning of the year and again at conferences.  Remind your students to “Show what they know,” as Mrs. Hopkins says, by taking their time and reading each question carefully.  These spring MAP scores will be used to help determine which students are invited to attend District 54 summer school programs. We are looking forward to being able to celebrate your students’ individual successes and the progress we have made as a school toward our “BHAG” (Big-Hairy-Audacious-Goal).

 Also, please join us on Wednesday, April 20^th at Churchill’s Celebrate Reading and Writing Night.  This is a fantastic opportunity for our students to proudly showcase their work and for you to participate in many exciting literacy opportunities as a family.  You won’t want to miss it!   Stay tuned for many more exciting events at Churchill in the month of April and May.  We look forward to seeing you here!

Sincerely,

Mrs. Lindblade, Assistant Principal

I Hate Reading, It’s Boring

As I was talking to my niece a while back, I heard her say those few words that made my inner teacher cringe…”Auntie, I hate reading.  It’s boring.”  After talking with her and demanding to know how she could possibly hate reading coming from a family of educators, she led me down her path of reason.  It was hard for her, took a lot of energy, and therefore was boring.

On the drive to Chicago from Minnesota (where she lives) I introduced her to books on CD.  I’d like to say it was completely intentional, but it wasn’t.  I didn’t have a TV in my car, I thought it would occupy her for several hours and I could not possibly drive and read to her at the same time.  She had a copy of the book and followed along as I drove.  What I noticed was the more I started talking to her about the book the more excited she became.  This “time filler” ended up being the jump-start she needed to prove that reading wasn’t boring or as difficult as she thought and all it took was a little conversation, a little guidance, and a little bit of “auntie time.”

Taking a few minutes to read with your child, listen to them read, or simply talk to them about what they are reading can go a long way in helping to develop a good reader.

Discuss a book or story before you begin reading. Talk about what you know or about the book’s title and author. Ask your child what she/he thinks the title tells you about the book, or ask if she/he has read any books or stories by this author before. Talk about questions you might think about while reading, like if the book is similar to something they have already read, or if the book was anything like what they first thought it would be.

Ask your child to tell you the story’s events and ideas as they are reading along. Retelling a story in their own words can help children find out how well they understood the book. Summarizing can also help children remember what they have read. Encourage your child to pause after pages, chapters (for higher readers), important events or confusing parts and ask your child to summarize what has happened. Help her/him come up with a summary if they have trouble.

Ask specific questions to check that your child has been following the story’s events, and ask questions that require their opinion. For example, ask why they think a character might have done something or acted in a certain way.

Help your child identify clues in the text that can help them identify what might happen next. Ask your child to tell you what they think will happen next in the story based on these clues.

Ask your child to visualize the setting and the characters in a story. Have her/him describe what she/he thinks a certain scene looks like.  They can draw this out or describe it in words.

Discuss the story after they finish reading it. Ask your child whether the story’s events surprised her/him or unfolded as she/he expected they would. Ask questions about what might happen next in the story if it continued, or ask questions such as whether or not the child liked the story’s characters or its ending.

Ask your child to circle or point out any words she/he does not understand. You could help them sound out words or look for “chunks” of words they know already to help them figure out unfamiliar words.  Explain those words for the child or have her/him look them up in a dictionary.

Continue reading aloud to children even after they have learned to read themselves. Reading aloud to children allows them to practice reading-comprehension strategies without having to worry about how fast they are reading.

Adapted from: “How to Help Kids With Reading Strategies,” www.livestrong.com

Mrs. Hopkins and I are proud to be able to say that wonderful things are going on in your students’ classrooms at Churchill School everyday. Our Winter MAP data tells us that we are close to meeting our 90-90 goal. With parent support at home we will continue to soar above and beyond our goals!  We are excited to celebrate your students’ progress with you. We look forward to seeing you during student-led conferences on February 3^rd and 4^th.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Lindblade & Mrs. Hopkins

Message from Mrs. Lindblade

First I want to thank all of you for coming to find out about your child’s school day at our curriculum this past Wednesday. It was so nice to start getting to know the community. I have also enjoyed getting to know your children here at Churchill. We have spent the last two weeks taking our first round of MAP testing. It is fun to see the excitement on their faces when they realize they have made progress. We encourage our students to read–read–and read some more. This is the practice that will help them increase their skills.

Some of my fondest memories of my childhood involve reading with my mother.  We would lie down together and she would take me on fantastic journeys to far away places.  We would talk about the stories and share what we liked and what we thought was going to happen next.  Little did my mother know, she had given me a gift that would last a lifetime.

According to the National Institute for Literacy, when children become good readers in the early grades, they are more likely to become better learners throughout their school years and beyond.  Learning to read can be difficult for children.  As a parent, you can help your child by understanding what teachers are teaching and practicing those strategies at home.  Don’t be afraid to ask questions about your child’s progress!  Learning to read takes practice, more practice than children get during the school day.

I am excited to share with you some strategies for success. The easiest way to get started helping your child become a better reader is to make sure that they are reading everyday and talk to them about what they are reading.  Here are some suggestions for beginning a conversation about reading.

• What you think this story will be about?
• What do you know about (the topic) before you start reading?
• Who are the characters in your story?  Where does the story take place?
• What is your book about?  What is happening in your story?
• Did you understand what you just read?  Can you re-read that for me?
• Can you make a connection to the story?  Has anything like that every happened to you? 
• Remember when…That reminds me of…
• What do you think is going to happen next?  Was your prediction right?

 It can be very difficult to find time in our busy schedules to fit in another task, but small adjustments in our daily routine can make a lifelong impact.  Turning off the television to read together, having our children read aloud to us while we make dinner, or listening to reading in the car while on the way to run errands are just a few ideas. We can also teach by example.  Simply reading a newspaper, magazine, or book allows our children to see us as readers.  Spending just 30 minutes of uninterrupted time every day for reading can greatly impact a child’s ability to read. 

 Mrs. Hopkins and I encourage you to take part of your child’s learning by spending some quality time reading with your child.

Happy Reading!
Mrs. Lindblade, Assistant Principal