Don't walk in the Hallways!

Happy New Year!

Happy 2019!   During our first staff meeting of 2019 we talked about setting our themes for the new year.  What will be your theme for 2019?  Setting a theme helps "reboot" our intentions for the year.  I would encourage you to spend some time and think about what your theme will be for 2019.

The second semester has brought new changes to our school.  New staff and a new schedule.  I would like to welcome Tyler Riffel, our new music teacher, and Julie Waldschmidt, our new special educator teacher to our district!  We are glad to have them with us!  I also appreciate everyone collaborating in the designing of our new schedule.  It takes an enormous amount of work on everyone's part to find a win-win within a schedule.  

In this effort we have to decide what are "norms" of collaboration are as a staff.  When something gets hard, how are we going to treat each other.?  When something gets hard a school staff has a tendency to circle the wagons and shoot inward.  This doing school thing is hard enough without us having to overcome each other in the process.  I would encourage all of us to understand how we operate in stress and especially how we act upon that stress.  I don't expect us to be perfect, believe me I've had my moments.  I expect us to work on our awareness, understand how we respond in stress, and make sure the conversation we are wanting to have isn't lost in the energy we are dealing with at that time.  I'm confident this is something that we will be successful at in our collaboration.

Lastly, at today's staff meeting we watched a video on sensory hallways.  I mentioned that I had another video which showed a Manitoba school using the system in their hallways. Here is the link to Sensory Hallways.

Give me your thoughts if this is something that we would like to bring to our elementary hallways!  Hope you enjoy the video!