Welcome Holiday Park Staff, Students, and Families to the 2015-2016 School Year
As we start the 2015-2016 learning journey together, it is important for us to remember that we are in the business of kids. Caring for them, helping them, connecting with them, and ensuring that we focus on thinking, are just the beginnings of our job. Being in the business of kids is the most important job in the world. We take our jobs seriously and will do everything to make sure we are doing our job with excellence, every day!
The focus the first weeks of school is all about building relationships, getting to know our students, teaching routines and expectations, and collecting data to drive our instruction. We believe that all of our students deserve a learning environment that includes adults that are connected with students, where behaviors and expectations are clear, and where thinking is honored above "the right answer"
Thinking, searching for information, the desire to dig deep, the ability to work with others, and the understanding that our ideas can and should be shared, is the direction of learning in the 21st century. We understand that engaging students minds to think and connect to content is the genesis of learning. We live in an era of boundless availability of information. We must create the desire to go find it. When found, look discerningly at complex information to gain knowledge that satisfies the mind. While searching, we know that we must give all students opportunities to work with each other and collaborate on ideas and thinking. Working together builds common knowledge and encourages deeper thinking. The thinking should not stop when we think we have completed the task, it is actually just the beginning of understanding our responsibility to present, publish, and share our findings and thoughts with others.
What an exciting journey we are on. As we start our story, we will strive to stay the course no matter the swing of the "reality" pendulum that will swing joyfully in success and heavily in failure. Our "home" will always be right in the middle, focused on what is best for kids. What a great home to have.
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