Friday, September 4, 2020

Welcome to the 2020/21 School Year!

 Welcome to the Hill & Brown Classrooms

My name is Josh Hill and I am teaming with Nathan Brown and we are super excited to be your Cascadia 5th grade teacher team. I teach Math and Science and Nathan teaches English/Language Arts and Social Studies. Additionally, we both teach Ruler, a social emotional curriculum. Our fantastic specialists will be teaching art, music, P.E., and library with your students as well! 

 

It is truly a different time for learning and teaching (and life!). We’ll be starting the year and teaching remotely indefinitely, but our goals for your students remain mostly the same. We hope to support your students’ social and emotional health during this trying time, encourage them towards being independent learners, and to adequately prepare them for middle-school. We expect a lot of hiccups along the way—but we’ll do our best to communicate and to keep class organized and straight forward.

First Day/Week

We are in the process of designing the structure of our daily and weekly classes, but here is the plan for the first 5 days of school, September 4th-11th. Your student will have class for 2 hours each morning from 8:30-10:30am. We will also assign assignments that can be completed independently. Some of that time will be spent with their homeroom teacher moving towards 50% time with each teacher as we move along. Below is a Team's link to Mr. Hill’s homeroom meeting starting at 8:30am, Friday, September 4th. We will only meet with our homeroom this Friday, but you can look forward to spending a lot of time with both Mr. Brown and Mr. Hill!

You can open this link in the Teams app or just follow the link in the browser. Details about the app below. The sooner students learn to login with their student login, the better and I will be available to monitor the chat in this Teams meeting to answer questions throughout the school day (until 3:30).

School Supplies: 

We are asking that students set up their Learning Space with the supplies that they will need this year. We hope that this area is one in which your student will be able to be comfortable learning during the school day.

 

Student needs to have

·        Binder/Organizer with organizational system (divider or folders)

·        Pencil pouch

·        Rulers

·        Pencils/pens

·        2 Composition books

·        Highlighters

·        General art supplies; colored pens/pencils, crayons, paints

If you need any of these please feel free to contact us. We do have extra supplies at school. The school is also working on a system for students to receive additional supplies such as math books and other consumables that are to be supplied by the district.

Technology:

We suggest that you go to https://www.seattleschools.org/ and explore under Students at the top all the resources your student may need this year. It includes links to Office 365 where students can create and save work using programs such as Word, PowerPoint, Excell, OneDrive and other powerful Microsoft tools. It also has links to Schoology which is the primary point for students to keep track and turn in assignments. Additionally, there are many other district resources that we will be using this year. If you are not familiar with these resources, we will be taking a great amount of time to teach students how to use all the resources they will need this year.

 

Teams Help:

·       Download Microsoft Teams

·       You may need to have your student login using their SPS username and password

·       Hold “ctrl” when clicking the “Join Microsoft Teams Meeting” hyperlink

·       Follow the link below for more tech help: make sure to scroll down and look through the FAQ.

·       https://www.seattleschools.org/student_portal/technology_supports_for_families

Room Parents: 

Room Parents are vital to helping us coordinate volunteer needs for the classroom and with planning and support of parties and other classroom events. If this is something you're interested in, please go to the Cascadia PTA website and sign up. 

About us: 

Josh’s background is in business and design and he hopes to bring real world situations to every class period. He feels this helps students to make connections to their future. He has a master’s in teaching from Willamette University in Oregon and is licensed to teach elementary education, as well as math and science at the middle school level. He spends much of his off time with his family but does enjoy traveling and seeing the world.

 

Nathan's background is in Interdisciplinary Learning and Spanish Language and Culture. He completed his master’s in teaching at Seattle University, and worked in Highline School District before starting at Cascadia. Outside of school, Nathan loves reading, creating collaborative art projects, playing Ultimate Frisbee, and spending as much time as possible with friends and family.  

Our goal is to create an open conversation about your student’s education, so please feel free to contact us with any questions related to school. Our contact information is listed below; we prefer email, and we will try to get back to you as soon as possible. 

  

Joshua Hill 

jdhill@seattleschools.org  

Nathan Brown 

ntbrown@seattleschools.org  

 Below is a link to the state websites that shows Washington State Standards. It has a lot of information and is searchable. Math at Cascadia is two years ahead with students learning the 7th grade Common Core Standards. The curriculum for math is the Envision 2.0, Course 2. Students will have their own login for the many digital resources. For ELA, Seattle has adopted a new curriculum called Center for the Collaborative Classroom (CCC), which Mr. Brown enriches with additional, project-based social studies curriculum. Social Studies and Science are on grade level.

State Standards:  https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/resources-subject-area

 

No comments:

Post a Comment