A Note from Our PrincipalHappy New Year! 2020 is going to be an amazing year. Our first Student Exhibition Night is set for next week, January 9th from 5:30-7:00. This exhibition is a great way for our students to showcase their individual and/or team projects that they have been working on. We are hoping to have a great turn out of families, friends and community members in attendance. Please invite others to join us and help celebrate our student's work. Our Walker School Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser is also set for that evening from 5:00-6:00. This is a pre-paid event and all profits will go towards renovating our school's Learning Commons, which will benefit all students. Please contact your child's team or the school office if you need a spaghetti dinner order form. Forms are due by Monday, January 6th. News from our TeamsTeam Persistence - This month, Team Persistence students enjoyed a visit from a wide variety of community helpers. The visitors were asked to share about the tools they use for their job, their educational background, how their job impacts the community and which success skills are most important. Visitors included a nurse, firefighters, Toppers pizza, Officer Nelson, Mayor Dan Devine, skilled trades workers including carpentry foreman Tyler Hansen, and Ms. Mary from the West Allis library. Students are excited to share what they've learned and synthesized at our upcoming student exhibition! Team Persistence's play centers are an engaging way to practice collaboration and communication. Students are loving the new materials purchased by families and through the crowdfunding site, DonorsChoose! Our dramatic play center has turned into a pizzeria with a brick oven, drink dispenser, candles and more. Blocks has been revamped with new garages, cars, and hard hats. Thank you to everyone who has made these centers a reality - both the teachers and students are so grateful! Team Respect - This month we have continued to interview experts in preparation for our Exhibition night on January 9th. We are building a cool box city using google earth to observe actual businesses in our area as examples. We also have researched a career and used scribble press to create ebooks to share. We have been embracing diversity by showing kindness in our classrooms and outside. We try to play with different friends and share ideas with others during Genius Hour and recess. We finished this month with a great holiday party. We are so grateful for the volunteers that came in to help. Team Integrity - Team Integrity is working hard and having fun learning about different types of measurement. We are so excited to apply the knowledge and skills we have obtained to our Little Library Projects! Team Diversity - This month, Team Diversity is daring to go where we have never gone before and have started our Math Adventurers. This is where the students are given an open ended math problem to solve in a group. Open ended math problems help students:
Team Excellence East - Students in East have been learning about animal adaptations. They have written informational pieces about specific animal adaptations and will create a snowman with its own "special" physical and behavioral adaptation. Students also created their own elves and had a special holiday Elf celebration with the 4 Elf food groups! Team Excellence West - Excellence West students have been studying Geology in Inquiry. We have explored many topics including rocks, weathering, soil erosion, fossils and landforms. To enhance understanding, students took part in a Skype session with park rangers from the Grand Canyon and experienced the landforms firsthand through a Virtual Reality Expedition. In literature students studied drama by participating in Excellence West's annual holiday play. All students were involved in sharpening their public speaking and acting skills. Students were excited to demonstrate their hard work for family, friends, and the Walker community on the day before winter break. We are so very proud of the hard work and effort they put forth. Team Endurance - This month we focused on working towards challenging every student to work just beyond her/his reach. Student engagement is increased when they are working towards something they cannot easily do but is within their reach if they put forth effort while believing in themselves and making academic growth. We also focused on kindness and acceptance of differences and diversity in both school and everyday. This month in Specials and Clubs...PBL - Students worked on various STEM challenges during PBL time. Using various tools, they had to build and design structures working together. Collaboration and teamwork was in full action. Student Council - This past month Student Council worked on finishing our birthday boxes for children in foster care. We fundraised money during Walker School's Halloween party, among the classrooms, and before and after school when families dropped students off for school. We worked very hard to make birthday's special for children in foster care. Thank you to all of you for your support. Coming in January, we will start a school wide collection of pajamas for the West Allis Hope Closet. This community closet services our community families and friends. Our hope is to have all children warm and cozy. Junior Coaches - 3rd grade Jr. Coaches have been hard at work trying to reach their goals. The goals that they have set for themselves are: building relationships, teaching success skills, helping our school community, and most of all-- having fun! The Jr. Coaches noticed that the amount of students that were participating in their structured games at recess was decreasing. They then set up a plan to fix this hiccup! They presented at assemblies, asked students in teams Persistence and Respect what games they wanted to play, and interviewed the gym teachers to learn new games they should know how to play. Going forward the 3rd grade coaches decided they wanted to change the structure of their role. Instead of having a planned game to play, they will give the choice of play back to the students. They will be outside to assist and play with the student's desired game that day. Starting in January the students want to be trained on conflict resolution strategies so they can help students with social problems outside! Thank you Jr. Coaches for all your hard work and the difference you are making at Walker Elementary!
Not Pictured: Athena K. and Reed Byrge |