The Roar from the LowerCats Den
by Sarah Barton Thomas | Sunday, March 3, 2024
A frequent refrain from home to school is, “How is my child doing in school?” Each and every school has its own way of communicating progress across the spectrum of school. At Trinity, communication is an evolving process, and we are in a reflective pursuit of finding the Goldilocks way of communicating.
How do we concretely communicate in the Lower School at Trinity?
In addition to these formalized ways of communicating, we regularly engage in email conversations and formal and informal conferencing about student-granular student progress. We also send student work in communication folders, and, of course, there is always what comes home for homework to give an indication of what students are up to in the classroom.
This week, you’ll receive your child’s Trimester 2 progress report containing their skills ratings for the academic standards for the second trimester. Trinity intentionally uses standards-based grading to guide students toward mastery of standards and objectives.
As you may have read in last month’s Middle School update, standards-based grading prioritizes mastery of content and skills versus arbitrary value systems such as numerical or percentage grades. By focusing on evidence towards mastery criteria for each standard, our teachers use students' individual and collective work to assess progress and determine the next teaching steps to ensure each child is given the optimal challenge and support to meet or exceed the standard. Our teachers worked in teams during winter grade-level retreats, looking at student work, and norming the expectations for each standard. This norming creates consistency of understanding, based on standards and experience, for determining the evidence for mastery.
One of the best ways you can learn more about your child’s progress in the classroom is to regularly engage in conversation with your child about their own feelings and beliefs around learning. In this week’s student-led conferences, you'll see that our children are taught self-reflection and self-efficacy within their learning. In collaboration with their teachers, our students can identify their glows and grows and will have evidence of their learning, which they can describe in age-appropriate detail.
Whenever you have curiosities about your child’s growth, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our teaching teams, learning catalysts, or directly to me. We love to talk about our students and walk alongside you as we help them grow.
Onward,
Sarah Barton Thomas
Head of Lower School
The Roar from the LowerCats Den
by Sarah Barton Thomas | Sunday, Feb. 4, 2024
Greetings from the Lower School! It is a pleasure to connect with you through a new touchpoint from the division. In these notes, I’ll offer a “from the balcony” perspective of our community of teachers and learners. Topics may range from what we are up to to how you can support your child or our teachers as we pursue our daily mission. Please know my door is always open for you to express affirmations, concerns, or noodle about the best ways to support your child. This week, we explore an update from our Literacy Task Force. If you attended our State of the School event, this may seem familiar to you!
In our pursuit of creating scholars, we know that excellence in reading, writing, and speaking are critical skills for a lifetime of success. Our Literacy Task Force, led by Stephanie Griffin and Monica Browne and composed of faculty representation from every grade level, has engaged in a months-long look at our current practice, our mission and vision for literacy in Lower School, best practices, peer examples, research, and curricula examples as we walk our next steps towards piloting materials. We have a shared desire to hold fast to our decades-long success with shepherding children who love reading, have choices in their texts, and spend significant time building their rich reading lives. We commit to ensuring solid foundational literacy skills that support each of our readers and writers to reach their unique potential. Our Kindergarten, First, and Second Grade teachers are piloting foundational literacy programs to support our students in explicitly and systematically building phonological and phonemic awareness skills. Our Fourth Grade is piloting a spelling and vocabulary program. More than half of our Lower School have training in the Orton-Gilligham approach, and more are being trained now and in the spring through the Institute for Multisensory Education. Our LS Learning Catalysts, Kimberly Monteleone and Suzanne Newsom, lead data-driven intervention groups across our lower school.
This past Wednesday, our teachers began the pilot planning phase as each grade level will explore Collaborative Classroom’s Being a Reader and EL Education’s ELA Curriculum. Teachers will explore materials and resources with our students in the weeks leading up to Spring Break while continuing with the foundational skills work in each grade level. Along the way, they’ll offer feedback in various ways to look holistically at each curriculum before making a unified decision to move forward. It is important to note that these two distinct approaches to literacy instruction meet our initial vetting criteria using The Reading League’s curriculum review rubric. Our Literacy Task Force explored a variety of core and core/foundational curricula, beginning with twelve, winnowing to four, and ultimately choosing two options for a weeks-long pilot in the classroom. Both of our finalists are supportive of the Science of Reading, weave together the strands of the Scarborough Reading Rope in their design, and align with core standards for English-language arts.
Our commitment to sequential, intentional, and differentiated literacy instruction remains firm. Our commitment to our mission and students is central to all we do, and this literacy shift is no exception. Thank you for the gift of your children; they are our North Star.
Onward,
Sarah Barton Thomas
Head of Lower School
What You Can Do
- Continue to engage your child(ren) in a literacy-rich home: access to a variety of texts, reading together, and reading aloud.
- Ask questions to build comprehension and inference skills. I always recommend listening to kid-friendly podcasts in the car and then pausing along the way to ask questions. “What might happen next?” “What is going on?” Ms. Thomas recommends Eleanor Amplified, The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel, Brains On, Circle Round
- Trust the process at TES. The Lower School Staculty, the Literacy Task Force, and the Academic Team have put countless hours of work into making thoughtful, intentional, research-based decisions about our next steps in literacy. Our students and our school mission are at the center of these decisions.
