First Full Week in the Books

     Well, we have finished our first full week of school!  What a busy week we had.  We have the students into their schedule and things seem to be running smoothly.  The students all have their MacBooks and we have worked hard to take care of any issues they had to start with.   Most students computers seem to be working well now that we have cleaned the old stuff out of them! 
     We kicked off our first PBL project this week and the driving question is, "How does a large event impact a community?"  Of course this question has led our students to think about our large event the Blueberry Festival!  Students have been put into groups and finished up group contracts on Friday!  We will be working on this project for the next several weeks.  We are excited to see what the students come up with during this project.
     This week students were introduced to Achieve 3000 and they were able to practice a few activities with our help.  This week we are asking students to complete two articles.  After Labor Day this will be an expectation each week.  The expectation is that the activities be completed with an average of a 75% average.  We will be giving students points in language arts for this requirement.  This is a program that is based on each students reading level and we have seen great growth from students how complete the requirements each week.  We hope that you will help encourage your child to do their best on this each week.  Also, remember that students are to be reading each night for 30 mins. 
     We will be starting some new math online programs this week to help with math skills and math facts.  We will be introducing these programs this week and students can work on these at home as well as here at school.  Some students are struggling with their math facts and we encourage them to practice their math facts daily.  Any help you can give at home would be greatly appreciated.  Students who know their facts have a lot easier time learning more difficult skills. 
     Don't forget that next week there is no school on Friday for students.  We hope you have a great week! 

Welcome to the Innovation Academy @ Riverside 2014

     New school year, new building, new space, new teacher/facilitators and new learners/classmates are a lot of new things to get used to for the students and for the facilitators!  We are all super excited to start this school year off right.  We have worked a lot over the summer to make sure that we started the year off creating a culture of collaboration and learning.  We were so glad to see so many of you at our Meet the Teacher night.  Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.  We are only an email or phone call away.  If you did not receive a packet on Monday night look for one in the Monday folder. 

     This first few days we have been working with the learners on getting to know each other and leaning about how we can use Trust, Respect and Responsibility to become well rounded students/citizens.  We have done some fun activities to get to know each other and to learn about these characteristics.  We worked together as a team to come up with our class "Norms".  We decided we could work hard at living the following class "Norms"

 Be Responsible for your actions and behavior.

Be Respectful of yourself, others, and property.

Be Truthful/Trustworthy, to yourself and others.

Be Prepared to come to school to do your BEST!

Treat others the way YOU would want to be Treated!

 

      We will be teaching the students about Echo this week in our classes.  Everyone is now in Echo including parents,  For parents to log in the first time your username is the email you gave the school and the password for everyone for the first log in is iarisecho .  If you are not able to log in please email Amy Gerard @ AGerard@plymouth.k12.in.us.  We will be having an Echo Parent Night this coming Thursday. August 21 at 6:30pm here at Riverside.  There are reminder sheets with the correct information coming home in the Monday folders. 

     We have finished our first three days today by having six speakers from around the community come and speak to us about how they use Trust, Respect and Responsibility in their lives.  This was a neat way to culminate our work in this area.  We hope that the students have learned something and that all of this work helps us to have the best year!  

     Enjoy some of photos from this busy week!