KARCHER STAFF BLOG
Karcher 2016-2017 School Calendar
November 28 - December 2
- Ella Braun: (Diamond)
- Ella is a great student that excels inside and out of the classroom. She is a leader that goes out of her way to help her peers. She is a great example how to represent the Karcher Way.
- Emma Lashbrook: ( Silver)
- Emma brings her A game to class every day, she has a positive attitude that brightens up the room and she has some serious silent dance moves.
- Hailey Ball: (Applied Academics)
- Her positive attitude, attentiveness to work, willingness to help others and all the little things she helps with around the Art room to help out shows Hailey is a student that exemplifies the Karcher Way.
- Samantha Dareville: (Onyx)
- Samantha is always an upbeat, polite young lady. She has an exemplary work ethic which is a wonderful model for her peers. Thanks for being a ray of sunshine everyday.
- Zachary Cowan: (Karcher Character Bucks)
- Zachary is a super polite young man in his best effort, models responsibility, and is kind to those around him.
- Ryan Brauckhoff: (Hive)
- Ryan approaches all learning opportunities with a positive attitude and is an excellent contributor in group situations.
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Kudos
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- Sue Bekken was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK! Congrats Sue and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits.
- Kudos to Jack Schmidt and Stephanie Rummler along with the rest of the 8th grade staff and students who participated in two successful trips to Madison this past week. When talking with students both days were educational and enjoyable!
- Kudos to Dustan Eckmann and our band students on their first performance of the year! It was a GREAT performance with a gym that was packed to the max! Nice job!
- Kudos to all of our students and to any staff who took part in the Burlington Christmas Parade. Our dance team participated and had a great time! (pictures below)
- Congrats to our wrestling team and coach Mike Wallace for taking second place this past weekend at the 8 team dual tournament in Slinger!!! 38 of our students were able to wrestle at the tournament - awesome!
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Reminders
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- Monday, December 5 - Parent/Teacher Conferences from 4:00 - 6:00.
- All staff should be meeting with parents and your name should be on this Google Document indicating which parent/teacher conference you are attending.
- Some of your names are not listed under any of the conferences - everyone needs to participate in the parent/teacher conferences so look over those who have confirmed and add your name to the conferences you will be attending.
- Some ROOM numbers are not listed, please fill that in prior to the start of conferences so we can assist from the main office to direct them to the correct location.
- When you are not meeting with parents the expectation is that everyone is making phone calls or sending emails (positive or informative) to students you are not meeting with but have in class.
- Wednesday, December 7 - Content Area PLC in the library.
- For the first 10 minutes of the PLC you will meet with your SQIDVPAC group to share how the literacy lesson went that you shared and collaborated on at the last PLC.
- Then, around 2:50 you will move into your content areas to discuss your upcoming literacy strategy you plan on utilizing in the next two weeks.
- Applied Academics - I would like to see you split into two groups as your group is fairly large. Please split as follows: Hans, Marilee, Rod, and Dawn. Jennifer, Kaylyn, Dustan, and Jayme.
- ELA and math you are both fairly large as well... if you want to split by grade level you can or be together - that is up to you.
- Team time: please discuss with your team, one day this week, tweaks that could be made to the current schedule for the 2017-2018 school year. We will be talking at BLT about next year's schedule on Monday, December 12 so please come with your teams tweaks/suggestions.
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Pictures from the week
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Dance team in the Burlington Christmas Parade!
Studio students are working on self portraits that morph into a background. Students chose the kind of paper, drawing materials & image.
8th grade Madison trip to the State Capital
Band Concert - 7th grade band, 7/8 Jazz Band, and 8th grade band. It was a GREAT performance - well done students!
Band Concert - 7th grade band, 7/8 Jazz Band, and 8th grade band. It was a GREAT performance - well done students!
Article of the week: This article will be broken down over the next few weeks... it talks about the 5 principles behind disciplinary literacy - there is some essential information to reflect upon within these principles and the work we are doing within our building. Reflect on which aspects of these principles are you already doing? And which aspects will you deliberately work to practice?
- One aspect of this first principle shows the importance of modeling - students need to see and hear the metacognition of an expert thinker (you)!!!
- One aspect of this first principle shows the importance of modeling - students need to see and hear the metacognition of an expert thinker (you)!!!
Task, Text, and Talk: Literacy for All Subjects
Disciplinary literacy builds secondary students' academic content knowledge and their reading, writing, and thinking skills at the same time.
The disciplinary literacy framework, introduced in 2002 by the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, is grounded in five principles for designing rigorous, inquiry-based instruction that integrates academic content and discipline-appropriate habits of thinking. The following stories show how teachers are bringing disciplinary literacy principles to life.
Principle 1: Knowledge and thinking must go hand in hand.
To develop complex knowledge in any discipline, students need opportunities to read, reason, investigate, speak, and write about the overarching concepts within that discipline. Because of time constraints and coverage concerns, many teachers understandably choose to teach either content or process instead of marrying the two. But to build students' literacy in a specific disciple, instruction must do both at once.
Ed Abbott's 10th grade U.S. history class at Central High School in Providence, Rhode Island, is beginning a new unit on immigration that a group of Providence teachers adapted from an Institute for Learning model unit (Ravi, Leinhardt, Stainton, & Mohr, 2005). For the first lesson, Becky Coustan, a fellow teacher who helped to develop the unit, begins by introducing two overarching questions that the students will be addressing:
- What are some of the forces pushing people away from their homelands and pulling people to immigrate to the United States?
- What were the attitudes toward immigration in different historical periods?
For the next few weeks, these questions will drive the class's intellectual work. Unlike old-fashioned drill questions that students can answer by memorizing isolated bits of information, these overarching questions push students to go beyond lecture and textbook toward using multiple sources to construct their own explanations—practices mirroring those of the history community.
To fully explore these essential questions in the classroom, Ms. Coustan explains, the class will study immigration to the United States during four different eras—the 1890s, 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s. To answer the first question, students will explore the conditions and historical context of the home country of each group of immigrants, as well as the political and social context of the United States during each era. To answer the second, students will analyze the public debate over immigration during each period, looking for evidence of how the United States responded to each wave of immigration. They will be working in the same way historians do: reading and analyzing a variety of primary and secondary source documents, including key pieces of immigration legislation; artifacts of public discourse, such as newspaper reports and political cartoons; and oral histories from immigrants coming to the country in each period.
Ms. Coustan knows that the students can decode text and understand generic reading processes. Still, she does not assume that they know how to work with these materials in ways that help them respond to the overarching questions. She and Mr. Abbott will support students' initial forays into this kind of genuine historical inquiry by modeling and making explicit the ways they want students to read, interpret, and talk about the documentary evidence before them.
Ms. Coustan also knows that more than half of Mr. Abbott's students are first- or second-generation immigrants and are thus likely to have some prior knowledge and beliefs about immigration issues. She spends the first 10 minutes of the 50-minute period tapping into what the students bring to the classroom from their personal lives.
“Let's look at the first question and talk about what you already know about immigration. See if we can come up with some pushes—reasons why people leave their country—and pulls—reasons why people come to the United States.”
As the class generates a list of pushes (such as war, poor living conditions, and lack of food) and pulls (such as job opportunities, freedom, and the desire to join family), Ms. Coustan listens carefully. She is assessing what each student knows and believes so that she can determine what supports to provide later in the unit, when she will ask the class to read and analyze a primary source depicting one immigrant's experience.
Next, Ms. Coustan models how to read source materials for specific push and pull factors before letting students practice this kind of reading in their groups. At the end of the unit, students will be expected to produce a written response to the two overarching questions for the unit using evidence from their analysis of primary and secondary source materials.
