What's Happening Around Lyon Academy? April 12th, 2017

Take a look at several highlights from around our school this week. If you see an anchor chart, student work, or something else in the building you would like showcased for the staff, please send it to Tyler.Archer@slps.org.

Ms. Kempf's students in 3rd grade Math demonstrated an understanding of geometry by applying it to a real-world task of creating a floor plan. 

Ms. McCord's students created a model to apply a concept in preparation for the MAP test. 

Essays composed by Ms. Smith's students are posted in the hallway with a descriptive feedback post-it note for each student. 

Ms. Latta's students practiced the skill of visualization by drawing an image of what they read in a passage and explaining their drawing. 

Ms. Benjamin posts the student achievement on reteaching objectives in her classroom as a reminder of what students are working towards for MAP. 

To practice using text features, Ms. Wolfenden's students drew a diagram of their hand and added labels. 

Ms. Connell's class created an alphabet book with each student creating a page of the book for letters A-Z. 

Throughout the year, Ms. Walker and Ms. Stuckel have introduced Pre-K students to letters. This is the latest project which demonstrates students' learning of the letter U. 

Ms. Archer's students practiced finding the mean, median, mode, and range by using real-world story problems. 

Ms. Jones created anchor charts to help students interpret scatterplots in Math. 

Ms. Cychowski's students demonstrated learning of the water cycle by creating a diagram and explaining their work. 

What's Happening Around Lyon Academy? March 2nd, 2017

Take a look at several highlights from around our school this week. If you see an anchor chart, student work, or something else in the building you would like showcased for the staff, please send it to Tyler.Archer@slps.org.

Ms. Jones' students constructed plot diagrams from their independent reading books using reading strategy graphic organizers. 

Ms. Andrews' Valentines Day-themed student work assignment was both engaging and relevant for students' learning in February. 

Ms. Wolfenden's students composed expository nonfiction articles after reading about polar lands. 

Ms. Smith used the red, yellow and green light visual to help students with what they should do when they encounter punctuation while reading. 

Mr. Wolfenden's students composed paragraphs responding to their reading from To Kill a Mockingbird.

Mr. Clark's students created a graphic representation of the lyrics of the song, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" in music class. 

Ms. Archer's most recent assignment included a student-friendly rubric, individual personalized feedback for each student, and a higher level DOK activity that was relevant for the students. 

Ms. Archer created an anchor chart to help students remember complicated formulas for circles. 

Ms. Wolfenden's "I Wonder" anchor chart helps students think critically about their reading and provides thinking stems to assist the students as they read. 

Ms. Wolfenden's students also wrote letters to Harriet Tubman after reading the book Letters From Minty in their writing workshop. 

Ms. Richardson's students completed a text features checklist for a nonfiction text during IDR. 

Ms. Cychowski's students created models of reproduction processes and described their knowledge of reproduction in the explanations. 

Ms. Connell's students practiced sight words by being a "Sight Word Detective."

Ms. Trapp's classroom anchor chart helps remind students of the PBIS expectations during class. 

Ms. Wolfenden's anchor chart helps students analyze nonfiction texts across all subjects. 

Ms. Kempf uses clothespins to move students along the data wall as they improve throughout the year. 

Ms. Benjamin's student work assignments are differentiated by skill, level and also color to help the students with what they need to be working on in the classroom. 

Ms. Benjamin displays visually for the students what group they will be working with during class. 

Ms. Cisar has several anchor charts to support student learning including one to support thinking about math vocabulary, another to model the process of division, and lastly an anchor chart to help students visually understand their academic progress. 

What's Happening Around Lyon Academy? January 27th, 2017

Take a look at several highlights from around our school this week. If you see an anchor chart, student work, or something else in the building you would like showcased for the staff, please send it to Tyler.Archer@slps.org.

Students in Ms. Jones' class created a book review foldable about an independent reading book they recently completed. 

Ms. Andrews' students analyzed an advertisement and completed a graphic organizer. 

Ms. Welch combined students' interest in social media with a lesson about Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Ms. Wolfenden asked her students to write about their own dreams. 

Ms. Connell's students wrote about what they would like to do on a snowy day. 

Ms. Richardson's students did a science activity about types of rocks. 

Ms. Salmo's students wrote about their favorite parts from an IDR book they recently read. 

Ms. Walker and Ms. Stuckel's students created snowmen. 

The Pre-K classroom uses a number board as a strategy for introducing a new number to the students each week. 

Ms. Cychowski's students created modeled and engaged in a higher level comparison activity. 

Ms. Archer implements the "Own and Track" strategy by giving students a model of what the students should complete. 

Ms. Archer also visually represents for the students their assignments and what percentage of their grade each part is worth. 

Engineer Efficiency

The subject of the first January new teacher professional development session was Technique 48, "Engineer Efficiency" from Teach Like a Champion 2.0. Engineer Efficiency involves creating procedures by which students can perform both mundane and academic tasks in ways that yield more time for learning. Three types of procedures can be engineered efficiently: behavioral, cultural, and academic. The same design criteria work for all of them:

• Simplicity
• Quick is King
• Little Narration Required
• Planned in Detail

See the anchor charts below to learn more about each of the criteria, and to see an example of how the criteria is present in procedures. For more details about how you can "Engineer Efficiency" in your classroom, see page 361 of Teach Like a Champion 2.0! 

Open Ended Questioning Article Summaries

The summary presentation posters from each group's reading of "Open-Ended Questions: Stretching Children's Academic and Social Learning" are below, in order. Refer to the article for more specific charts and visuals to support implementation in your classroom.