It is hard to believe that we are extremely close to the end of the first full semester of school! As we enter these final weeks before Winter Break and begin our second set of FAST progress monitoring assessments (PM2 assessments), we will continue to encourage our students to grow. Across the course of this semester, we have focused on learning and giving students the strategies to apply their knowledge. This hard work has required our effort, learning from feedback, and trying new strategies to succeed on class assignments, homework assignments, and assessments. We have seen growth, big and small, across the term and we look forward to seeing this growth reflected in these upcoming assessments. We will use this data to find more ways to support our children. The most important take away for our students is it is not too late to grow in our mastery of our grade level benchmarks. Let us finish this semester strong!

I am repeating what I noted in the last newsletter. Please remind your students of the importance to doing their best on any assessment they have. We are looking for growth, not perfection.

You may see us posting many ways to motivate our students to keep trying. Some of these are in the form of "challenges" and others are just simply reminders for students to use strategies they have been taught. We understand that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation play a role in shaping academic performance. NCES will be reinforcing the importance of student growth from one assessment to another. We will continue to talk to our students about their performance on their assessments and allow them, to have a sense of control over their learning. We will also reward our students' accomplishments and hard work. Please see the flyer below.

Special thanks to Neocity students that came to build robots with some selected students. Our students learned some strategies to building their robots, then got to move those robots. We will continue to get an idea of our students' interests and get some of those students to try their hand in robotics. Thank you Neocity and NCES students.