Partnership Educators,
I hope and pray for joy and happiness from the holiday season to continue for you and yours for the coming weeks and months. I send a firm heartfelt sense of gratitude for your efforts to support our students with thoughtful high quality instruction. Thank you so much for another safe and viable opening of our schools this week.
Offering a safe and predictable environment that is filled with joyful, caring adults is one of the most important things we can do today and every day. Children learn about safety and security from watching and listening to the adults around them. Our children's world surrounds them with many different messages that can be confusing. Stabilizing that message while they are at school about how they are safe and that we care about them is important. Attention seeking, be it negative or positive, is said to be one of the most powerful things we do as humans that help us build who we think we are. I loved seeing the multitude of photos of our students playing board games within the classrooms. Having fun is a way that our students will learn our lessons within the Portrait of a Graduate lineup of traits. Empathy, Perseverance, Responsibility, Communication, Critical Thinking, and Adaptability are all a huge part of game play. The lessons come within the need to guide students how they lose or win and how to set up a game, stopping a game, or just saying, "Hey, I'll see you next time." The fun is had from the whole experience and not just the winning. Thanks for helping our students with these life changing lessons. As we learned on Monday, Hope is an action to be taken.
I also would like to highlight the multitude of classrooms that have instituted individual student goal setting. It is great to see how you are helping students choose a goal that they really want to accomplish and helping them get there. One student in particular set the goal to come to school for an entire month. As a sixth grader, this would have been the first time in his entire career to come to school for an entire month straight. Thanks to his dedicated teachers who supported his efforts to accomplish this one goal he made it. This student is far from perfect and had many other issues throughout that month but for this one instance he accomplished something that he set his mind to. A strong foundation for every monument starts with the first brick.
"Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. " Aristotle
Thanks again and enjoy your weekend,
Rob Adams