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.

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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