Mrs. Kiernan and Mrs. Allen will no longer using this blog. We have created separate blogs and will be using those for the rest of the year. Here are the links to our new blogs:

Mrs. Allen’s Blog

Mrs. Kiernan’s Blog

Thanks!

Student/Family Information–Fill out our classroom forms online!!!

Family Information Form

Technology Information Form

We are excited to meet all of you and begin the year! Please take a minute to fill out the forms above. These forms give us some basic information about each student and family. The information you provide will remain completely confidential, it is password protected and for our eyes only. If you do not feel comfortable completing these forms online, paper versions will be available the first week of school.

1st Day of School – Important Information

Our first day of school will be Tuesday, September 6th. It will be a half day. Our priority on this first day of school is getting to know our students and starting to build a community of learners. Due to this focus, we ask that you send your student to school on Tuesday with out any supplies. We know that students are very excited about their new school things, but on such a short but important day we really want to focus on the students and not the items they bring with them. We will provide all the materials they will need on Tuesday and provide a snack for everyone. Any school supply DONATIONS can then be sent to school on Wednesday. Thanks for your understanding!

Birthday Celebrations

Birthdays are a very special day for children in our classroom.  Parents are welcome to send/bring in a birthday treat with your child on their Birthday or on the day nearest their Birthday.  When selecting a Birthday treat for your child to share, please remember that we are a peanut free classroom and a lot of foods prepared may contain peanut contamination even if they do not have peanuts in them.  We have found that fruit snacks, fruit roll ups, fresh fruit, popsicles, etc.. are safe options in our peanut free classroom.  Please remember that we celebrate birthdays as a team and that there are 56 students on our team.  Students with summer Birthdays are welcome to celebrate their half Birthday or to pick a day towards the end of year to celebrate.   Finally, it is ideal if Birthday treats brought in are ones that can be easily passed out by the student.

Peanut Free Classroom

We just wanted everyone to be aware that we will be a peanut free classroom this year.  We do have a student in our classroom with severe peanut allergies, therefore students will not be able to bring any snacks that will be eaten in the classroom that contain peanuts.  However, they will be able to bring peanut products in their lunch boxes to be eaten in the lunch room as our student with allergies sits at a peanut free table in the lunch room.  If you have any questions regarding this, please feel free to contact us.

Did you know?

Facts about your child’s teaming classroom! What makes a teaming classroom unique!

• Your child will have 2 teachers.  They will plan together to meet the needs of all groups of learners.
• Your child’s teachers dialogue continually about their classroom teaching and the environment to make sure they are meeting the needs of all kids—We continually ask ourselves:  “How do we want them to learn _____?  Did it work?  How will we group the kids so that we meet the needs of all the learners?  Where do we go from here?”
• 2-3 hours a week your child will be in the classroom with only 28 students and have 2 teachers working with them.  This is because when both classes do not always go to specials at the same time, one of the teachers chooses to work with the rest of the students during their prep time because we see this as an awesome opportunity to work with really small groups  or individuals on their learning goals.

Our Teaming Story

So many people we have run across have asked about our teaming….Why did we decide to team? Why in the world would we want so many students in one classroom? What are the advantages of teaming? Here’s our teaming story and the answers to all those questions you’ve been wondering about since you found out your child was going to be in a classroom with 2 or more teachers.

We decided to team 5 years ago when the opportunity arose and Mrs. Allen was moved into the classroom next to Mrs. Kiernan and assigned a 3rd grade position. Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Kiernan are philosophically very much alike and had already traveled in the same teaching circle, so we were both familiar with each others teaching style and backgrounds. Both of us had previous experience with teaming in other schools and really liked it. So, we decided to give it a try. Research had shown that teaming classrooms could be powerful learning environments in which a lot of differentiation happened.

Both of us were excited about teaming because we saw it as a way to be able to finally meet all of the diverse needs that students brought with them. We hoped it would be a way to create more focused learning groups and allow more easily for acceleration and remediation. Our hopes and extreme desires to see all students succeed, led us to want to take a risk and give teaming a try.

The result of our risk taking was much better than we ever dreamed it would be. For the first time in both of our teaching careers, we felt like we were finally able to succeed at meeting the needs of ALL OF LEARNERS on a daily basis. In the past years when we were teaching alone, we had rarely ever felt like this because there was never enough of a single teacher to go around. We remember the first week we did lessons plans after we started teaming and the excitement on both of our faces when after 1 ½ hours we not only had our lessons plans done, but had grouped kids so that they were learning what they needed, completed and organized all that we would need to go along with our lessons, and solved 2-3 unknowns dealing with classroom issues.

What we realized was that the old saying of, “2 heads are better than one” really rang true for us. The two of us were very efficient and always seemed to be able to figure out a solution to almost any problem. All of these things were a refreshing change from when we had both taught by ourselves. In the past, when we had taught by ourselves, all we remember feeling most of the time was overwhelmed at the sheer number of ability levels in our classroom, the feeling of never being caught up on any given day, and the feeling of exhaustion at the end of the day because you had planned, prepped for, and taught 6-7 subjects in one day.

Currently, on any given day, we feel energized and excited about teaching and feel organized and successful at being able to reach all kids. This leads to a exciting learning environment where students learn what they need when they need it and all learners can feel successful!