Monday Morning Memo - January 13, 2014

Monday Morning Memo --- January 13, 2014

Upcoming Events:

MON. (1/13) PTSA Meeting @ 9am In Room 500 --- ALL ARE WELCOME!

School Site Council Meeting @ 5:30pm In Room 500

TUES. (1/14) Leadership Council @ 7am In Room 500 :)

Period-by-Period Copier Training In Media Center

Come to the back side of the Media Center where the new copy

machine is located to receive training on the tools and functions

of the state-of-the-art machine. (See the machine here.)

WED. (1/15) LATE START WEDNESDAY, 1st Period @ 8:37am For Students

This day is slated for Department Meetings all morning...

THUR. (1/16) English Language Arts Common Core Committee, Noon-3pm

This group meets at the District Office Thursday afternoon

Los Al Dance Presents "RELATIVITY," In PAC @ 7pm

The show runs until Saturday, so hurry up and buy a seat

before they all sell out!!!

FRI. (1/17) BIG TIME BASKETBALL GAME AGAINST EDISON @ 7pm

Word on the street this year is that Los Al & Edison are going to

battle it out for League Honors. Come join the

#beststudentsectioninOC as your Griffins take on the

Chargers in a packed Los Al gym!!!!

Los Al Dance Presents "RELATIVITY," In PAC @ 7pm

The show runs until Saturday, so hurry up and buy a seat

before they all sell out!!!

SAT. (1/18) Los Al Family Yearbook Photo, 10am

If you work at Los Al and have a student that attends here as

well, be sure to show up for the annual Los Al Family Yearbook

Photo. Contact Yearbook Advisor Tracy Lundblad at

tracylundblad@losal.org if you have any questions.

ATHLETICS: Home games are going on this week for ALL Winter Sports. Be sure to catch a Boys/Girls Basketball Game, a Boys/Girls Soccer Game, Wrestling or Girls Water Polo and support Los Al athletics in what's been a banner year!

& On The Horizon...

1/20 --- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, NO SCHOOL

1/22-23 --- FINAL EXAMS, 1st Semester

1/23 --- Transition Information Night, Room 500 @ 6pm (Open to families of

Juniors & Seniors On IEP's)

1/30 --- Common Core Math Committee Meeting, Noon-3pm @ District Office

1/31 --- Mentor Breakfast, 8am In Gym

.............. Unlimited Possibilities!

Winter Formal Was...

With over 1,000 Los Al students taking over the Long Beach Convention Center Saturday Night, Winter Formal 2014 was everything a Griffin could hope for!

Students want school dances to be fun. Parents and schools want them to be safe. And everyone wants to help to make sure that the memories of good times spent with friends last a lifetime. Fortunately, this year, Los Al's Winter Formal was able to accomplish all three.

FUN. With a theme like "Circus Circus," how could Winter Formal not be fun? Like these young ladies pictured to the left, hundreds of students took beaks from the dance floor to play one of the many carnival-style games that lined the second floor of the convention center. There were milk-can tosses, and leap-frog games. There was even a popular photo booth that took more than 1,500 photos on the evening for students looking to share memories and make funny faces at each other that will last a lifetime.

SAFE. With Dean Off Attendance Dr. Gates (pictured on the left) and ASB Advisor M. Keely Hafer (pictured on the right), students were in good hands as they were supervised by more than 30 chaperones, including parents, teachers, paid security staff and School Resource / Los Alamitos Police Office Dan Brandt. Of course, all Los Alamitos dances and activities are safe and sober events, and Winter Formal 2014 was no exception as the dance took place without incident :)

MEMORABLE. School dances are about dressing up and creating memories with the people you spend so much of your time with. Take the photo on the left, which features not only a group of close friends, but a cohort of closely-bonded Drama students. Winter Formal was a chance for them to hang out and spend time without the rigor of preparing for a performance at the top of the agenda.

And so went this year's Winter Formal. Thank you to everyone for pulling off a truly classy event. And we look forward to doing it bigger and even better at Prom in just a few months!

This Ain't No Regular Grammar Quiz:

In The Digital Age, Skill-Building Tasks Are Easier (And Better) Than Ever!

Please visit www.noredink.com to experience what every teacher wishes was in existence when they first started teaching: An infinite amount of automated grammar quizzes that accurately grade and record student progress.

Dear Teachers: You don't have to grade grammar anymore!!!!

English teachers at Los Al have started to use NoRedInk with great success this semester, and it's quickly becoming an indispensable tool, both, inside and out of the classroom. Similar to Khan Academy's progress monitoring of math skills, NoRedInk keeps track of a student's success and challenges over the scope of the American grammar curriculum.

And since grammar (and the lack thereof) is not just the plight of the English teachers, any teacher can use the FREE site to assign some important brushing up of skills before a big paper is due.

Here's a blurb from the site:

NoRedInk.com is a web-based learning platform that helps students improve their grammar and writing skills. Here's what makes us special:

High-interest Content: Students generally find grammar boring because the content doesn't relate to them. We generate all our grammar sentences using each kid's favorite celebrities, hobbies, TV shows, and personal friends, making the content inherently interesting. Students can get unlimited practice -- which is important since it often takes a long time to learn new skills.
Adaptive Learning: Our engine provides differentiated instruction, adjusting questions based on what students get right/wrong and drilling down to their underlying misconceptions. When learners get stuck, we show them tutorials that help them correct their mistakes and keep going.
Practice Exercises/Quizzes/Assignments: In addition to students practicing their grammar skills on their own, teachers can use the site to give assignments and quizzes that are uniquely generated according to each kid's interests.
Progress-tracking Features: Our color-coded "heat maps" allow teachers, students, and administrators to track progress easily. Teachers can use class trends to instantly inform instructional decisions as well as view students' homework and quiz scores. This site was created by a teacher, so it's easy for teachers to use.

Shout-out to Ms. Weber for introducing me to NoRedInk. Feel free to contact her, Dan Bennett, or any teacher with the site's knowledge for more information. (lweber@losal.org, dbennett@losal.org.)

Week 17 2013-2014... IN THIS ISSUE:

Upcoming Events

Winter Formal Was...

This Ain't No Regular Grammar Quiz

The Geography Of School

The Modern Classroom

The Geography Of School:

How Being Outside, All The Time, Changes Everything...

Lunch at Los Al is bright, open, and pretty picturesque. In the scope of a long learning day, that's one of the luxuries of going to school in Southern California.

For those of us who have gone to school in a climate other than Orange County, let us tell you... it's different.

For one thing, most American high schools exist in a building (not on a campus). There's usually a single point of entrance, and maybe a few more doors available for exit in the afternoon. And there's multiple lunches (the cafeterias of most schools can't serve thousands of people at a time) taking place each and every day.

School buildings also have the tendency to feel crowded and cramped. And there's a distinct value to walking on the right-side of the hallway, or learning how to be patient in a cluttered hallway.

None of these things mean anything at Los Al :)

Where we go to school, there aren't even hallways (ok, maybe in the 700 building). Our lockers are outside, and we make democratic choices about what route we take to class, where we sit at lunch, and what time we decide to leave school and go home.

This democracy, this choice to make good and bad decisions about the simple logistics of life, allow our students, teachers, and staff members to experience the kind of individuality Californians have become known for. Where Midwestern and East-Coast high schools require aspects of collectivism be put in place to allow everyone to function in the closed-off space of a school building, we are fortunate in that we get run around in the sun all day and make millions of little decisions that don't impact anyone but ourselves.

Going to school outside matters. And whether it's Los Al's hundreds of trees, acres of grass, or dozens of little hills, the environment in which we all get to work and learn couldn't be more perfect.

The Modern Classroom...

Chalkboards Are Gone, And Teachers @ Los Al Are Changing Their Roles In The Classroom Forevermore...

Once upon a time, teachers stood in the front of the class, students always faced forward, and there were pens and paper on everybody's desk.

Walking into a classroom nowadays, at Los Al or any high school, is an interesting lesson in semiotics. On one hand, there are sure to be desks, whiteboards, projects on the wall, and all the remnants of educational realia from the 80's and 90's that are still good practices today. And then, you might notice a blue light flickering from the ceiling indicating the room's wired with Wi-Fi. Or students might have their headphones on watching a video clip on their phone.

Classrooms have changed, learning has evolved, and the role of the teacher as the sole deliverer of content is slowly fading away.

Today, content is literally everywhere. Students come to school with access to so much information, the new problem for teachers to help them solve is what to do with it, and how to make sense of every image, sentence, novel, or article a student reads.

Teachers, literally, stand to the side in classrooms now. Or, they sit in and amongst their students; or direct the class from behind the room to see what their students see. The new role of teacher requires that they are thoughtful planners, and that they devise multi-tiered tasks for students that are relevant, rigorous, engaging, and meaningful.

In other words, a teacher of today may set a course for students and not deliver any content or refine any skill for days at a time. Just a few years ago, not partaking in daily direct instruction would have been cause for concern. The times, they are a changin'.

So feel free to experiment, adapt, and modify the way you build your students' knowledge and skill. There isn't just one way to teach. And as long as you're at Los Al, you'll always be supported in taking your instruction and achievement to even greater heights year after year.