Welcome to the second year of our ALP Support (ALPS) program at Jefferson Academy Elementary! I have many exciting activities and projects planned for this year.
This year’s program includes second through fifth grade, and I will see your students four days a week. Because I am a part-time teacher, I am not in the building on Fridays. Your students will have a “No Group” folder for Fridays and for when I am absent which will be kept in their classrooms in a special place (not their desks). The folder will include a menu of activities for reflecting on what they are learning. They may also use Friday time to practice scripts or continue the week’s learning in other ways.
The ALPS groups will meet during the classrooms’ RtI times, so your students will not miss any core instruction from their classroom teachers.
I plan to begin the year with some activities to help your students understand what an ALP is and to explore some of the joys and challenges of being a gifted person. We will then move on to learning more about what the classrooms are presenting in the areas of science and social studies. Language arts and math will be incorporated into the content and the projects as is appropriate. Due to time constraints, I will not be able to address every unit the classrooms cover: we will go more deeply into the content than the classroom setting allows, and that takes more time than they often have.
In scheduling my unit start dates, I do my best to let the classroom teachers begin presenting the core content first. I plan to start my additional content approximately a week afterward. We will then typically move into differentiated projects that students can choose according to their areas of interest. We have Chromebooks and iPads in the room to support their learning as needed, and third, fourth and fifth grades will begin using Google Drive in some capacity early on. Second grade will also use Drive a bit later on. This will be the basic approach, but there will be variations depending on the activities we do.
I will be writing your students’ ALP goals. You will see these goals during your students’ October conference with their classroom teachers. You will also see ALPS written work coming home in Monday folders. I will not be writing quarterly progress reports. ALPS projects will be graded with a rubric, and I will include comments on behavior as well as academics so that you are aware of how your student is doing.
Thanks in part to the generosity of Mr. Nolan last Spring, we have access to Explore Learning’s Gizmos, which are on-line science and math simulations that should be a tremendous asset to our learning.
We are continuing our adventure in GT learning this year. This is the second year, also a building year, for the new program. As was true last year, I have great expectations of how we will learn and how we will grow!
This year’s program includes second through fifth grade, and I will see your students four days a week. Because I am a part-time teacher, I am not in the building on Fridays. Your students will have a “No Group” folder for Fridays and for when I am absent which will be kept in their classrooms in a special place (not their desks). The folder will include a menu of activities for reflecting on what they are learning. They may also use Friday time to practice scripts or continue the week’s learning in other ways.
The ALPS groups will meet during the classrooms’ RtI times, so your students will not miss any core instruction from their classroom teachers.
I plan to begin the year with some activities to help your students understand what an ALP is and to explore some of the joys and challenges of being a gifted person. We will then move on to learning more about what the classrooms are presenting in the areas of science and social studies. Language arts and math will be incorporated into the content and the projects as is appropriate. Due to time constraints, I will not be able to address every unit the classrooms cover: we will go more deeply into the content than the classroom setting allows, and that takes more time than they often have.
In scheduling my unit start dates, I do my best to let the classroom teachers begin presenting the core content first. I plan to start my additional content approximately a week afterward. We will then typically move into differentiated projects that students can choose according to their areas of interest. We have Chromebooks and iPads in the room to support their learning as needed, and third, fourth and fifth grades will begin using Google Drive in some capacity early on. Second grade will also use Drive a bit later on. This will be the basic approach, but there will be variations depending on the activities we do.
I will be writing your students’ ALP goals. You will see these goals during your students’ October conference with their classroom teachers. You will also see ALPS written work coming home in Monday folders. I will not be writing quarterly progress reports. ALPS projects will be graded with a rubric, and I will include comments on behavior as well as academics so that you are aware of how your student is doing.
Thanks in part to the generosity of Mr. Nolan last Spring, we have access to Explore Learning’s Gizmos, which are on-line science and math simulations that should be a tremendous asset to our learning.
We are continuing our adventure in GT learning this year. This is the second year, also a building year, for the new program. As was true last year, I have great expectations of how we will learn and how we will grow!