"Building Stamina"

I saw this poster as I walked around the school last week. It's in a classroom with a first-year teacher.

"You're doing Daily Five!" I exclaimed. "How's it going?" "We're working on it!" she replied. I encouraged her to keep at it.

I love the phrase, "Building Stamina." There's lots of talk nowadays about grit and perseverance and growth mindset, but personally, I like the word "stamina." When I think of stamina, I think of endurance, determination, and building up to reach a goal. Building stamina for silent reading is a challenge for little kids, but I've seen great progress in Daily Five classrooms.

The trick is to track stamina. I was thinking about stamina today when I went to the gym. When I first started a few years ago, I got very tired on some of those machines, but over time, my stamina improved Yesterday, I decided to try the lateral movement machine for the first time. Well, I was only on the machine for a few minutes, and I was winded. This morning, I woke up with sore muscles which convinced me to use that machine more often. When I went back to the gym today, I got on that machine and stayed on a little longer than yesterday. I'm building my stamina just like those first graders are building their stamina to read quietly to themselves a little longer each day.

A few years ago when one of our teachers asked if she could try Daily Five in her classroom, I was thrilled. I had just read the book and was hoping someone would be willing to try it. Since then, other teachers have used Daily Five literacy centers to help their students develop independence during language arts time while the teacher works with small groups of students on intervention, extension, or enrichment activities tailored to students' needs.

I plan to check on this poster whenever I visit this first grade classroom. Students feel proud when they see their progress on a chart like this, and I hope they realize that "building stamina" is not just about silent reading. They can build stamina in all aspects of their lives!

#dailyfive

Connecting with Our School Communities

Principal-in-Residence, Lisa Nagamine, is working on improving communication between principals, primarily those at the elementary level within the Hawaii Department of Education. She decided to try blogging out information and asked me for suggestions. I admire Lisa; this is a worthy goal but a pretty tough task to get busy principals to buy into reading a blog. As a school that uses blogs to communicate (staff bulletin and weekly DKIES Highlights published by our parent-community coordinator), I made a few suggestions. One of them was to get other principals to share an idea via her blog. Since I made the suggestion, I'll be the first t contribute to the Elementary Principals Forum News and Announcements. 

A few years ago, our SCC asked for feedback from our parents, and one of the suggestions was to improve communication with the school community. At the time, many of our parents were deployed so we decided to use social media to share what we were doing at our school. Today, we have an active Facebook page, a Twitter feed. and use Remind.com in addition to our blogs. We even have virtual School Community meetings twice a year with much better participation than we had with face-to-face meetings.

What social media tool is best for the "beginner?" I started with Twitter and later linked our Facebook posts to my principal account so now, when I post on FB, it automatically tweets to my followers. Now we have more opportunities to share what's happening at our school! One of my favorite bloggers and author of The Innovator's Mindset is George Couros. He presented at the 2016 Leadership Symposium and at the New Principal Academy. I noticed that after those sessions, many more of our principals started Twitter accounts for themselves or their schools. It's been fun to see what's happening at the schools and to learn from others. The great thing about Twitter is with a maximum of 140 characters, the message needs to be simple but effective. Here are a few tweets from this past week:

• Jennifer Sueoka, principal of Ha`aheo Elementary
• Kaipo Simpson, principal of Pearl Harbor Elementary
• James Kau, principal of Aiea Elementary
• Kaimiloa Elementary
• Aina Haina Elementary School 
• Webling Elementary School
• Waiahole Elementary School
• Waiakeawaena Elementary School
• Iliahi Elementary School

Let's not forget our Hawaii Department of Education and Superintendent Kishimoto! Follow them and they'll follow you!

As you can see from the tweets, there's a lot of opportunity to be creative or to use photos to tell our stories. Twitter is not only a way to share about our school. It's also a great way to get professional development, but that is a whole other blog that maybe someone else will write for this Elementary Principals Forum and News Announcements. 

I'd like to end this blog by sharing a slide show we created in 2016 to share about how our school uses technology to connect with our school community. I'm sure other principals have ideas to share. Let's use this Elementary Principals blog to connect with others in our Department and share our successes!