PADDLE FORWARD in 2014-2015

Paddle Forward

in 

2014-2015

Welcome back to Neuse Charter School

I hope you all had a very enjoyable summer. I am looking forward to an excellent year with each student showing excellent progress each nine weeks.

Individual Education Program meetings will be scheduled for a Wednesday or a Thursday afternoon after school, and I will be sending you home invitations to your student's meeting so that you can plan for when that will be.

My office  and classroom is off of the new cafeteria if you need to find me at school.

My email is npeele@neusecharterschool.org

I will add websites that I feel will be helpful to you throughout the year.

For those of you who have students that have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, the 

ADDitude Magazine is excellent and is online.

Mrs. Peele

May/June

End of the Year 

I just finished a course called "Reading Foundations". I learned so much about teaching reading to students with disabilities in this course. One thing that I wanted to share with you is the importance of fluency, decoding words/phonics, and reading comprehension and that they all need to be taught in order for students to become good readers. It is my goal to continue to do just that.

As we wind down the year, my students have just written some amazing  Who, What, Where, When, and Why poems. Just answering these questions and putting them in poetry form was amazing. They are so creative and I shared some of them with Mrs. Haumont in the Media Center. By writing this type of poem, the students gained more practice in getting into the habit of answering these questions in their reading and writing.

I am working with some of the teachers in working on practice EOG readings and math problems.

I use a  checklist for each reading passage and ask the students questions about the passage as we read together. I am reading Paddle to the Sea to my fourth grade students and asking them EOG type questions as we go along.

It is a time of high anxiety at home and at school. Exercise is so important for each child. Focusing on the task at hand can help kids not get so overwhelmed with all that they need to do before the last day of school.

Thank you, parents, for all that you do with your kids. They are such a pleasure to work with.

We will be working very hard from now until the last day of school. I am so proud of all of my students.

Thank you and have a positive last few weeks of school,

Mrs. Peele

Week of February 24, 2014

EC News and Information

On Thursday, February, 27th, there will be the second meeting for the Exceptional Children's Department Continuous Improvement Plan. We will discuss various activities that the EC departemtn engages in to meet the North Carolina State standards for our school's EC department. There will be a time of sharing between team members of any ideas to improve the department in order for us to continue to meet state requirements.

The meeting will be held in the EC classroom closest to the office at 3:35. 

On ADHD and LD:

The ADDitude Magazine is very helpful to parents of children with ADHD, as well as Learning Disabilities.

Go to www.ADDitudemag.com to recieve and download your free copy of Book to Success at School.

For helpful websites go to :

www.Chadd.org

www.Ldonline.org

www.Schwablearning.org

www.Copaa.org

www.Wrightslaw.com

Some software to help students with writing and reading are:

Kidspiration

Inspiration

Co:writier 4000

Dragon Naturally Speaking  at Nuance.com/dragon

Bookshare--  books read aloud

I hope these sites and software programs will be helpful to you.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Peele

EC Cipp Meeting Announcement

 

 

Working to Make Kids Smile

 

 

Teaching students to write is a great reward for me as a teacher. Two of my students have been working on constructing a paragraph using all the stages of writing. Using a graphic organizer to get their thoughts down first, they wrote down any word they could think of about a trip that they had taken at one time. Next, they wrote three details and explained the details. After that they wrote their introductory sentence and conclusion sentence. Once they did that, they put all those sentences into their rough draft. They are already smiling and so proud of their work and they haven't even finished.

 

I attended my first out of four Foundations in Reading class. This is part of a state initiative to instruct teachers to help teach students with disabilities. The class was held in Greenville, NC.

 

**Next Thursday, January 30th at 3:45 there will be an EC Continuous Improvement Plan Committee meeting. Anyone on the Board of Education is invited and any teacher/administrator is welcome, as well. We will discuss the improvements we as an EC team have made this year in the referral process and in other areas. Activities for areas of improvement will also be discussed. One area is how to help K-3 EC students improve their Reading 3-D scores and how to help students in grades 3-12 improve their EOG and EOC scores.

 

*Report Cards and EC Report Cards go home this Friday.

*Awards will be next Friday, January 31st.

 

 

Enjoy the rest of the month!

Mrs. Peele

 

 

4

Full Steam Ahead

We are almost at the end of the first semester. It is hard to believe. I have seen so many great changes in our students but with today's standards it never seems to be enough. Do you ever feel like that? Please keep working with your students with all the love and understanding that you are giving them. It will prove to be a positive source of encouragement at all times. Love goes a long way in these days of stress and anxiety.

Last week I spent some time doing some reading and phonics testing. It proved to be very helpful and a positive tool in knowing what and where the students are missing certain skills.

Music helps kids memorize facts.

Reading helps kids learn to read.

"Thinking Aloud" while reading helps them to remember what they read.

Graphic organizers kept beside a student to mark on while reading helps a student remember what he has read and organize his thoughts, thus develop the main idea of a selection.

Vocabulary of questions is a major stumbling block to many students.

Please help explain the "lingo" in the question. Does he/she understand what is being asked, much less get the right answer!?  How do we expect the student to get the correct answer if he/she doesn't understand what is being asked?

NOT is a big, giant work to watch out for in test questions. Please help your student be aware of that dreaded word and what the question with NOT in it means.

Thanks.

January 16 and 17 are Teacher Workdays 

January 20th- Martin Luther King Junior Day

January 24th Report Cards go home

Thanks for all that you are doing for your kids!

Mrs. Peele

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

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!

My 6th grade students spent last week reading and writing about "Robin Hood". After reading the story and answering comprehension questions, working on pronouns, and synonyms, they had a very productive Literature Circle. They each had a job to do- one person was the director, one person shared about the characters, and so on. They all joined in the discussion and shared many interesting thoughts about the story, theme, characters, main idea, and plot. As students begin to express themselves about a story openly, they find they really do have a lot to write about. This week this class will be creating power-point presentations to present to each other on Friday and the first of next week.

Mrs. Beaumont and I will be at an Exceptional Children's District meeting on Wednesday.

My elementary students have been working hard on math, reading, phonics,vocabulary, and main idea of a story.
One of my students read a book this week on the story of Little League Baseball. Mrs. Smith taught me a song to help students remember what to think about in order to formulate the Main Idea. I taught it to my student and it really helped that student to remember the different questions to ask himself- who, did what, where, when, why?

In math, the game of concentration is helping students remember math facts and fact families. I also use a bean-bag toss game to help students memorize facts, as well as just asking them orally to answer fact questions. Also google "grandprix multiplication" to have your students engage in a great game to learn facts.

Neuse Charter will be a busy place over the next two weeks, especially in the Exceptional Children's Department. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

Have a very blessed and peaceful Christmas season and vacation and a very Happy New Year!

Mrs. Peele
npeele@neusecharterschool.org

Fall Back, Spring Ahead!

It's about time for Daylight Savings! I can't believe it.
This week my sixth grade reading and writing class will be mailing letters that they have written to
their pen-pals in Uganda. They worked very hard on the letters doing a first and final draft.
Using two different graphic-organizers, or diagrams, they also wrote a paragraph using a topic sentence and a conclusion. For a final draft, each student typed his or her paragraph.

One of my classes was studying the short "U" sound and read an interesting article about the Peanut Man in Raleigh who had served our country in World War II. You may have seen it in Our State Magazine. Students with disabilities need to learn to read where they are at but with age appropriate material. That is very challenging to a teacher but rewarding as when I heard one student tell other students about the article he read.

In math students are very busy learning math skills such as multiplication of one and two digit numbers, finding the Least Common Multiple, the Greatest Common Factor, time, money, and fractions. ( Not all the same grade :))

The CIPP team for the Exceptional Children's Department met for the first time this school year last Thursday. One parent, one student, an EC teacher, an EC teacher assistant, a general education teacher, a community representative, and the EC Director attended. We discussed the CIPP report that was sent in last spring, the results of that report sent to me by the state, and ways that we  can improve our program at Neuse Charter School. Thanks to all who attended.

I am having my students that come to me for classes, fill in a classroom management chart, a smiley face chart, each week. Each smiley face is worth 5 play dollars and they are given for the way the student enters the classroom and completion of tasks. At the end of each week each student is paid according to the number of smiley faces on his or her chart. A store of prizes is presented on Friday and each student can buy prizes with his or her "money". If you would like to donate to "our store" please feel free to send in small prizes- candy, erasers, mechanical pencils, pads of paper, pens, fun markers, etc.

Have a great week!
Mrs. Peele

Pressing On for Excellence !

What a beautiful weekend we just had! I even got to show a pig at the NC State Fair and won a third place ribbon!

The homework situation is improving. I have seen a red folder that is working! That is great news!
Please continue to make sure you as a parent check your student's agenda daily to make sure they are on track with assignments and if possible, their teachers' websites. Thank you parents!

Transitions for our students are difficult. I am going to start placing a sticker on the day one of my students has a change in his schedule with me until he gets used to it. Try this at home if your child has difficulty with a change in schedule. Place a schedule on the refrigerator and on the day you know there will be a change such as a friend coming over to visit or you need to go out to the store or to an appointment, place a star or sticker on that day and time. This helps everyone remember that there will be a change taking place at that time and you can all prepare for that ahead of time.

Please have your student use www.spellingcity.com or another helpful vocabulary/spelling website of your choice to help with sentences, vocabulary, writing practice, spelling and more.

Teacher workday- 10/22/12

Have a great week-
Mrs. Peele

Last Week of September

Dates to Remember:

• Tuesday, September 25: Severe Weather Practice
• Thursday, September 27: Picture Day!
• Teacher Workday- October 22nd

Our students are working very hard with a great positive attitude.
Parents, please check your children's teacher blogs for assignments and projects.

Homework Help:

• Check your child's agenda against your child's teacher blogs.
• Have your student place homework in a bright red folder marked HW before he/she goes to bed.
• Sign your child's agenda if applicable.
• Check on projects- mainly grades 4-11.
• Break a project up into sections per night for your child so that they are not overwhelmed.
• Keep project parts in a clear plastic scrapbooking box marked with the project's name.( Michael's has them with handles)
• It's okay to ask your child to see his/her homework whether they want to show it to you or not.
• Don't accept, "I don't have any" for an answer when you ask your child if they have any HW.
• Again, check out the teacher blog and/or email/call the teacher to make sure.

Incomplete Assignments:

• If your child has an incomplete on his/her progress report, give your child direction as to how to make it up.
• Check with the teacher as to how long he/she has to make it up.
• Write it down on your child's agenda and your family calendar when it is due as well as other assignments.

"Finishing is Better Than Starting"
Have a fabulous week!
Mrs. Peele

New Beginnings Lead to New Possibilities

New Beginnings Lead to New Possibilities

As we start out the 2012-2013 school year, I have already seen great potential in our students.

Not only academically but socially. I was leaving one of the buildings this morning and one student was carrying a bag for another student who needed help. After they got to class, another student in the class came to help as well. What a great start to the new school year! Students helping students!

Our speech classes will begin the week of August 27th, as well as the Occupational Therapy classes.

Mrs. Jernigan is our new Exceptional Children's teacher. Mrs. Beaumont and I welcome her and we hope you have a chance to meet her soon. She is also the elementary school's guidance counselor.

We are all excited about a new school year with amazing possibilities for our students!

Mrs. Peele

If you would like to email me- npeele@neusecharterschool.org