Welcome back!  It is my hope that each of you had a great Thanksgiving break with family and friends.  Hopefully you found time to just relax and enjoy life.  I didn’t do any work until Sunday night and it felt great.  It’s so easy to get bogged down in work that we forget about all the things that are most important in our lives.  Never lose sight of that.

As I always say coming back from an extended break is a time to start fresh and hit the ground running hard.  Use this time to rebuild a relationship with a student that may be strained or to encourage a student to turn over a new leaf to be great in your classroom. You also have the opportunity to work to be more intentional in your lesson planning. The best lessons take time to plan.  Do not cut corners in your lesson planning because it is easy for you.  Remember we have to do what’s best for our students and not what’s most comfortable for us.  Goals aren’t achieved being comfortable.

Some of you have started the strategic data meeting process where you are being asked to analyze student work and use the work to design appropriate reteach.  We analyze student work at a minimum in order to identify gaps between goals for student achievement and actual student performance, to provide you with information to modify your practices, and how you plan to reteach. We have to know how they perform, why they performed that way, and how we plan to address it.  This is how you have powerful PLCs.

Be on the lookout for #observeme.  It’s coming!  More details to come!

Thank you to all of you have been supportive of our Ranger Athletic teams.  Volleyball and Football were first up and represented us well in the playoffs.  We had a great turnout at the game against Prosper.  We came up short but it was so great to see our boys play so hard and to have so many turn out.  Go Rangers!

A big shout out to the Ranger Ladies Basketball team for winning the Highland Park Scots Classic!!!  Great job! Another shout out goes to Jordan McClenton for wining MVP.  Wow!

The talent show is this week.  Many of our students will be excited about this.  This is one of the few events this year that we will allow students to pay to leave your class.  I made a commitment to you that we would cut down on these and we have done that.  The talent show is a tradition and we want to keep that up.  The students always enjoy their peers showcase their talent.

Go Rangers!

#ThisisNaaman

The weekly event calendar can be found here: https://www.garlandisdschools.net/nfhs/activities/calendar

Students working/learning in Ms. Wiser’s Environmental Science class.

Congratulations Champs!

A great send off!