December 

My cat about 5 years ago- maybe we'll have snow this Christmas!

      I hope you all had a very good Thanksgiving break. From now until December 18th, we will be very busy indeed. 

     I am using a progressive level reading series called SRA which is working very well with my students. Each passage has 5 questions. If they get 4/5 correct or more, they can move up to the next level. After each reading, their questions are corrected by the students and their progress is marked on a graph.

We continue to monitor the progress of IEP goals.

In math, please make sure your children have memorized all basic facts. If not there are many websites that help make it less of a drudgery. www.AAAMath.com, Grand Prix mulitplication, IXL, and scholastic are just a few that help with memorization.

     Three teachers from the Exceptional Children's Departement attended the Annual EC Conference in Greensboro, NC. The theme was "Believing in Achieving". All three teachers first attended an Autism Institute, plus various other classes such as  Orton Gillingham Reading approaches, news updates from NCDPI, use of LiveBinders in our classes as a means of having quick access to other websites and teaching materials, classroom managment, and a class on the use of a therapy dog for students with disabilities. The key note speaker was Anthony Ianni who played basketball for Michigan State and has been diagnosed with autism since he was very young. He was the first person with autism to play college basketball and to be in the Final Four. He was very inspiring to say the least. We also heard Rebecca Garland speak, the Associate State Superintendent. She is an excellent, inspiring speaker as well. At the Director's Meeting, the NC Director of EC Services spoke and gave many updates to EC Services in the public schools of NC.

     The EC Department had their first annual Continuous Improvement Plan meeting in October. The following is the agenda that was followed:

Exceptional Children’s

Continuous Performance Plan

Committee Meeting , October 24, 2013

AGENDA

1.       Welcome

2.       Review of the CIPP for 2013

3.       Review of state EC submissions since August

4.       What’s Ahead

5.       Questions and Suggestions for the rest of this school year

We plan to have the next EC CIPP meeting at the end of January. 

________________________________________________

Please see the following sights for parent help:  www.ecac-parentcenter.org, www.weekdate.com, www.additudemag.com.

I hope everyone has a great first week in December.

Mrs. Peele

November News

Our students have been working very hard in all subjects.
In my reading classes this past week I reviewed  finding the main idea of a selection using the book, One Morning in Maine, by Robert McCloskey. After reading this to my students, I had them fill out a graphic organizer to help remember this story and the sequence of events. Using the graphic organizer, they then made a turkey with feathers- who, did what, where , when, and why. On each feather they copied the answer from their graphic organizer and the main idea was achieved.


Have a great week,

Mrs. Peele

Week of October 21-25th, 2013

Friday-  Early Release Day! Booster Bash at 5:00

Monday- October 28th/ Teacher Workday

I found a new website called www.ADDitude.com  

They are having a webinar for parents tomorrow at 1:00 about diagnosing children with ADHD. It's free!

If anyone has a gel-filled cushion for chairs for students and wouldn't mind me trying one, I would appreciate it.

Also we are in need of squeezey balls and chewy pencils if anyone has any. That would be great.

Welcome our new Exceptional Children's Department Teacher Assistants:

Karla Stern - EC Teacher Assistant Elementary

Karen Gooseman- EC Teacher Assistant Middle School and High School

I appreciate them so much. They are doing a great job.

2013/14  1st Exceptional Children's Continuous Improvement Plan Meeting

The first EC CIPP meeting for the year will be this  Thursday, October 24th at 3:45-4:30

in the conference room. We will be discussing the plan that was written last year, as well as improvements we can make this coming year. For more information please email me, Nancy Peele at npeele@neusecharterschool.org

Have an enlightening week,

Mrs. Peele

Exceptional Children's Blog

The following is a link to the Coucil for Exceptional Children's page on terms and definitions. I hope this will be helpful:

https://www.cec.sped.org/Special-Ed-Topics/Who-Are-Exceptional-Learners?sc_lang=en

Piglets on our Farm

I hope you all have a very good week.

Mrs. Peele

    Week of September 9, 2013

                                                                                   

This is my mystery photo !Can you guess what it is? Check back next week and I will put in my blog what

this is. The point is you may perceive this as one thing but someone else may see it as something completely different. Our brains all work so differently, consequently we learn in different ways too.  

Linguisystems is a learning publisher that has so many great tools. One of them is one I use to build sentence structure. Starting with a basic noun and a basic verb, the students see two pictures and write what they see underneath the picture after talking about it first. They continue step by step to build sentences with more and more parts of speech. 

Graphic organizers are something I use almost every day, especially in writing. It helps the students organize their thoughts and follow procedure at the same time. An example is a bubble map: graphic organizers

These charts or diagrams can be used for homework or for prewriting a story or a paragraph or essay.

When you click on the link, look at the bottom of the page you see first and it will say graphic organizers.

Have a great week and watch how your child learns this week- I'll be watching him/her too! We can all learn together. There is so much to learn and so many different ways to learn. That is good news for me, you, and all of my students. Check out some of my websites this week on the RIGHT side of my blog. 

Colored overlays are so great! Not sure what I mean? Go to the store and look for colored clear plastic

notebook dividers. Place them over a page one at a time in front of your student. See if your child responds positively to any one color when trying to read. Sometimes students see letters moving on the page and the overlay helps that to stop so that they can concentrate on the words. There are so many things that our children may be going through that they may find difficult to even verbalize. This is one tool that may solve many problems when it comes to fluency, decoding,, and comprehension. It may not be needed at all but it's worth a try if you suspect problems with reading.

Mrs. Peele

Welcome Back from the NCS EC Department

I would like to introduce the Exceptional Children's Department at Neuse Charter School.

My name is Nancy Peele and I teach children in grades K-5. My extention is 226.
My email is npeele@neusecharterschool.org
We also have an elementary  TA -Jeremy Repka(not pictured at this time).

Our Elementary and Middle School Classroom is taught by Mrs. Karen Hicks, Mr. Terry Tippett,
and our TA Nadia Johnson.

Our Middle School students are taught by Terry Tippett, each morning, and Carol Beaumont.

Our High School EC students are taught by Lili Marioara.

W

As we begin this academic year, I want to encourage our parents to continue to check this website for helpful websites and news throughout the year. I wish our students an excellent year at Neuse Charter.
Please feel free to email or call us.
Mrs. Peele

 Making Kids Smile 

Their Last Nine Weeks at Neuse Charter School 2012-2013

With the incoming pressures of the last nine weeks of school, it can be challenging for teachers and parents to keep a smile on their faces, let alone putting one on their students. That is the challenge I am taking on as an Exceptional Children's teacher while teaching my students all that I can these last nine weeks.

Concerning students with dyslexia, - check out www.dyslexia.yale.edu
There are many great suggestions and teachings to parents, kids, and educators about dyslexia.
They share how kids with dyslexia are usually very smart and very creative. They usually need extra time because their brains take longer to make connections and their brains use more steps. (From "Overcoming Dyslexia", by Sally Shaywitz, MD. Did you know that Dav Pilkey who wrote Captain Underpants has dyslexia. Did you know John Lennon of the Beatles did too and so does Whoopi Goldberg. All 3 are very smart and creative people. Please look at Dyslexia Straight talk at this sight which may clear up a few myths about dyslexia for you- it did for me.

Check out the explanation of a Livescribe Smartpen and paper for students with dysgraphia, a writing disorder on www.ldonline.org.  The Smartpen is good for middle school and high school students who have difficulty taking notes and then lose the content of the lecture. The Smartpen records the teacher when the student starts to miss the notes and it also takes a picture of the students notes. It has special paper that comes with it, allowing the student to focus on the content of the subject rather than on the writing.

For students with dyslexia and other dysablitlies, it is important for the teacher to break a lesson into clear stages such as in writing: brainstorming, drafting, editing, proofreading. This allows the students to focus on one at a time but learn the flow of the process at the same time. It stretches it out so to speak for them to be able to put the stages in order in their minds and be able to go smoothly from one step to the other on their own after they have learned the steps.

I hope everyone has had  very good vacation. I am looking forward to teaching our students these last nine weeks and helping them achieve their goals. With the pressure of the End of Grade testing, many students have a lot of anxiety concerning these tests. Here are a few suggestions for this time of year:

a. Try not to show your own anxiety to your child
b. Talk about the tests as little as possible if at all.
c. Stay on schedule with homework, projects, and reading.
d. Try to do as many fun learning projects as possible together and ask critical thinking questions while working on a project or discussing a reading.
e. Disguise your problem solving with your child and make it fun
f. Keep on laughing- laughing takes away a lot of pressure from within!
g. Pray: for students, teachers, administrators, testing co-ordinators, teacher assistants, administrative assistants, custodians, and parents!


Have a great last nine weeks!

Mrs. Peele

Exceptional Children are Just That !!

     My students have been learning parts of speech as they learn to write sentences with correct sentence structure. Using the researched based program by LinguiSystems, called No-glamour sentence structure, the students began with basic subject verb agreement. They then added an adjective to the noun in the subject and this week they have added a direct object. As they begin to see the patterns in sentence structure, this will also help their brains to organize their thoughts and enable them to get their thoughts down on paper or on the computer/Ipad in an orderly manner. All of my students are so intelligent and have so much to share. I really believe this is a great program and it should help all students improve in reading skills at the same time.

The EC department will be finishing up our spring count of students to turn in to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction by the end of the month. All records are submitted to the state through the CECAS system. The state then gathers the count information for Neuse Charter School of Exceptional Students.

We are so pleased to have our new High School EC teacher, Lili Marioara. She is doing an excellent job!

We also have a new Occupational Therapist, Ms. Deborah Martin. Welcome Ms. Marioara and Ms. Martin! This year we have Mrs. Karen Hicks teaching three of our students with Ms. Amy Johnson and Ms. Nadia Johnson. We also have Mr. Jeremy Repka who helps teach PE and one of our EC students. Ms. Beaumont is our main LEA for our meetings and our department and handles most of the incoming and outgoing records.  I appreciate our great team of people which also includes Ms. Lisa Brogdon, our speech pathologist and Dr. Sharon Leuenberger our school psychologist. They all work very hard to meet the needs of our students.

This spring is bringing many changes, as you know, to our state in education especially concerning End of Grade testing. We, at NCS, will make every effort to help prepare your students to do their very best the rest of the year in class, as well as on those End of Grade tests. We encourage each student to work hard and do their best at school every day.

I hope you all have a progressive next 2 weeks before vacation and a very Happy Easter and restful, and fun vacation.

Mrs. Peele

February

There are so many great themes for February- President's Day, Black History, Valentine's Day and more.

The 6th grade class is reading Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry. This week I will be supporting themes in this book which is about two families living during the Holocaust in Denmark. We will work together to devise a plan to hide a family as if we were living during that period in history. We will study a map of Europe and locate Denmark and Sweden and more....this will encourage inferencing, new vocabulary, and drawing conclusions.

All of our students are working hard in all subjects.

The EC Department just had our second EC Continuous Improvement Plan meeting where we discussed
two activities for our plan from last year for various indicators. We discussed what is going well and what still needs improvement.

We hope you all have an excellent February. Please welcome our new High School EC Teacher:
Ms. Lili Moiroira. She is doing an excellent job and we are so excited to have her as part of our EC Team.

Thank you,
Mrs. Peele

January 2013

Happy New Year!

2013

Did you know that 15 % of students in America have learning disabilities? Check it out for yourself at www.ncld.org .

If you suspect that your child may have learning disabilities in reading, writing, or math check out their website for some important signs to watch for and information about evaluations.

The second quarter will be ending soon and we will be trying to get work finished for this nine weeks.

Students with IEP's will be continuing to work on reaching their goals, along with learning the Core Standard Curriculum.

I hope everyone has a  very good first month of 2013.

Mrs Peele

npeele@neusecharterschool.org