Notes from Principal Simmons: A Positively Exciting First Week

Friday, September 8, 2017

A Positively Exciting First Week

Welcome back to our returning students, and WELCOME to our new kindergarten families. The first week of school is always an exciting one! New faces, new friends, new teachers, new routines. It's all new and we strive to make the transition from summer living to school a smooth and enjoyable one for our students. (Please be sure to scroll through the blog post for even more pictures from our great first week!)

One way we did this was to help our students learn the behavior expectations for our building. Students spent their first day in classrooms becoming acquainted with their peers and teachers. Thursday and Friday the students rotated through stations around the building, on the playground, and on the bus and met with Instructional Specialists who explained the behavior expectations for that area. Each child now knows what it means to be responsible, be respectful, and be safe everywhere in the school!

Mrs. Stone met with students and discussed bus behavior. She spoke with students then they went on the bus to demonstrate respectful, responsible, and safe behavior.

Mrs. Farrow joined students in the cafeteria and spoke about expectations for behavior during lunch.

Mrs. Vislosky walked the halls with classes and spoke about ways to walk down the hallways in a respectful, responsible, and safe manner.

These student expectations blend seamlessly as an introduction to our brand new character education program The Positivity Project. The Positivity Project teaches children by acknowledging and defining 24 different character strengths and that these strengths are already a part of who we are as people. It helps children to identify that as individuals we have these strengths and we continue to develop different strengths throughout life. It is such a positive way to appreciate the strengths in others as well as in ourselves! Next week we talk about #OtherPeopleMatter. The premise of this slogan is that building healthy and lasting relationships between and among people is going to make you happy because other people matter! We will be providing continuous information as the program unfolds.