12-4-10

MONARCH MEMO December 4, 2010

THINK YOU CAN! WORK HARD! GET SMART! Vol. 1. Issue 15

“Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.”

~ Nadia Boulanger, composer, often pronounced one of the greatest music teachers of all time

Monday 12/6 Tuesday 12/7 Wednesday 12/8

Thursday 12/9 Friday 12/10

On Campus: Welcome Back, Kaaren!Off Campus: TabachnickDibel-ing begins this weekNO Leads Meeting

On Campus: Fecerro, Foster, Gallagher4/5 & Villanova Meeting, 4-4:30

Off Campus: Staib, Rocio, Snyder @ Read 180 TrainingRescheduled Leads Meeting, 3:45-5

Aspire Hoops, 5:00

ROPES Mentor Meetings, 12:45-1:30Catechism

Upcoming Dates

12/6 – 12/17 – WINTER BENCHMARKS (Scanned by 12/17)12/12 – Dia de la Virgen Celebration at San Luis Beltran Church, 5:00 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.12/13 –Tooth Fairy Assembly, 2/3, 10:00 – 10:15 a.m., K/1, 10:30 – 10:45 a.m., University Hall (You will receive an info-email on Monday if your classes are involved in this brief assembly.)12/16 – 5th Grade Raffle, 3:30, at the Ball Wall12/17 – Benchmarks must be turned in by 8:00 a.m. today12/17 – Winter Program, during Town Hall (No Buddy Reading that day)12/17 -- Staff Party, Casa de Alejandre, 6:00 p.m. (No Staff Meeting)12/20 – 1/7 – Winter Break1/10 – PD Day @ Monarch: Data (No school for students)1/11 – Students return from Winter Break1/17 – MLK Holiday; No School

Admin News & Needs

After the wildly successful Family Food Sale, our next Fifth Grade Promotion fundraiser is just around the corner: the Raffle. Students will be receiving baggies of tickets to sell for $1 on Monday or Tuesday this week (along with an instruction flyer.) Staff is asked to bring any items you’d like to donate for the raffle to the front office no later than 12/15. Any questions? See Angelica or Mina.

This coming Sunday, 12/12, San Luis Beltran Church will host its annual Día de la Virgen (de Guadalupe) celebration, beginning at 5:00 a.m. with Las Mañanitas (a musical procession) and lasting til about 8:30 with bands, mariachi, and folklórico dancing involving a good number of Monarch students. Chocolate and pan dulce will be served to all. Consider joining many of our families for this community event!

Please note that the City of Oakland has begun charging Monarch for false alarms. Please ensure that you know the code to our security alarm and how to operate the control panel before entering the building during off hours. If you need a refresher course on this,



see anyone on Team Villanova, Ramon, Manuela, or Isabel. [The first person to correctly identify to Jill what shape the security code makes wins a small prize.]

We are now current on our Learning A-Z bill and our services are reactivated for use. Thank you for your patience as we abide by Aspire’s budget-crunch bill paying methods.

Uniform reminder: We continue to see many students out of uniform on a daily basis. Most common uniform infractions are tops that are not blue or black and/or that have non-uniform logos or designs, and tights that are not solid navy blue or white. Please remember to send students out of uniform to the office to make a call home.

o Shirts: White with collar, or Monarch T, tucked in

o Sweaters, Sweatshirts, or Jackets: navy blue or black, no logos or designs except Monarch or Aspire

o Pants/Skirts/Shorts: Navy blue

o Tights/leggings: Navy blue or white, no patterns or designs

o Shoes: closed toe, no heels, no color restrictions

Winter benchmarks are now loaded in each grade level folder in Edusoft. Teachers are free to print the benchmarks when they want and administer them in the 12/6-12/17 window. Office staff will scan benchmarks for teachers. Please be sure to submit benchmarks to the office for scanning by the start of school on Friday, 12/17, unless you would prefer to scan them yourselves. If you will be scanning your own benchmarks, you must do so before you leave school on 12/17. Our staff PD day on Monday, January 10, 2011 will utilize winter benchmarks for robust data analysis.

Birthdays

12/4 – Jose Rodriguez, Cesar Santana, Shayla Valdez-Galindo12/5 – Angelica Alejandre12/6 – Santiago Lazcano, Lorena Reynoso12/7 – Jennifer Moran-Gomez12/8 – Alejandro Briseno12/9 – Donovan Diaz, Ismael Axtle, Corina de la Cruz

Magnificent MonarchsCongratulations to Steph Roth, who was selected as a Fellow in the TEAMS (Teacher Education for the Advancement of a Multicultural Society) AmeriCorps Teaching Fellowship Program. Steph was selected from among more than 700 applicants for her teaching commitment to urban education. What an honor!

Thanks to Keisa Williams for successfully securing a $500 University of Phoenix Stars Grant, which will bring Follett Textbooks for reading intervention to Monarch.



Congratulations to Sarah Sugarman, who was selected to present her master’s research at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference this spring in New Orleans. Sarah will do an amazing job representing Monarch and Mills College to the over 10,000 attendees!

To Natasha, Emi, and Melanie who have reached that tricky time of the year where students are working so hard to learn how to read, but they aren't poppin' as fast as we want them to. Friends, we are watering their seeds in the soil we've planted and providing as much light as we can. They will blossom like flowers in the Spring! ~HeatherThanks to Cori for bringing me crutches, incorporating a whole new literal meaning into what a supportive Monarch family member she’s been! ~ Jill

Thanks to Angelica, Mina, and Lisa Staib for their efforts to get us caught up in OnCourse over the break, resulting in a streamlined, organized, technologically advanced new era in conduct consequencing at Monarch! ~ Jill

Simple Pleasures…

Making a very quick, wise choice to TELL the word 'grass' to a student rather than having them CHUNK the word like we've been practicing (as it would have made it gr-ass). ~ Heather

Consuelo from CAL including “[let them talk]” after her sales pitch in her donation script for Home Depot. (MagMon to Consuelo for getting paint donated for Monarch!)

Principal’s Notes

As we heard today at our staff meeting, when coming up with a list of the Monarch community’s needs, our fifth grade students unilaterally found the student bathrooms to be the number one problem at our school. Penn State and Cal are right: during the day, the bathrooms turn into squalid nightmare zones, and they are also “scary” to students because some classmates regularly peep at them over, under, or through stall doors.

As someone who regularly has to enter the bathroom to investigate graffiti or shoo out noisy loiterers, I wholeheartedly agree that they are a dreadful place to be, and we’ve brainstormed some steps our facilities team can take in response to this issue. At the same time, I notice that the chief offenses during the school day are toilets not being flushed, toilet paper and towels being thrown on the floor, and in the boys’ room, misdirected urine. These problems all arise from a lack of student responsibility.

The quote of the week this week talks about how failing to bring attention to detail and care to any project, in contrast to being life-affirming, is a denial of life’s potential and glory. Our students’ attention to keeping our school neat and clean reflects, for all the world to see, the respect with which we treat our learning family home. Join me these few weeks before break in communicating with our students how CARES skills apply to the care we take with our physical community, too; about how we can’t be great at the big, important things like thinking hard, working hard, and going to college if we aren’t great in the little moments when we choose not to pee on the floor, to close our lockers, to pick up after ourselves in the cafeteria, to take pride in the Monarch we present to the world. I’m excited that our fifth grade community activists will



be bringing this message to our younger students and ask that we all show solidarity with them in paying attention to our figurative windows AND masterpieces at Monarch.

12-4-10

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