Fourth-grade math teacher Katie Gatrell was recently featured in the Edulastic Sunday Spotlight for her efforts in the classroom.
JES Teacher In The Spotlight
Fourth-grade math teacher Katie Gatrell was recently featured in the Edulastic Sunday Spotlight for her efforts in the classroom. Edulastic is a technology platform for personalized formative assessment for students, teachers and school districts like Cardinal. Mrs. Gatrell has been using it for testing preparation in her classroom for several years.
“It took me a while to get the hang of writing tech-enhanced questions,” Gatrell says, “but the instant data reports are so valuable in the sense that it allows me more time designing lessons instead of tallying how many students missed a question.”
Students Form Human Timeline
Sixth-grade students form human timelines as part of a lesson in social studies class. Teacher Sarah Mast tasked each student with looking up a random event and recording the date. Events could be B.C.E. (BC) or C.E. (AD). Students then had to arrange themselves in order of occurrence.
“This was an interesting project,” says Mast. “Some dates didn’t specify BCE or CE and students had to infer the date based on the context of the event – it was a great depth of knowledge exercise.”
Schools Receive State Awards
The Cardinal Local School District is excited to share that for the second year in a row multiple district buildings are being recognized by the state for their positive behavior supports.
The Ohio PBIS Network and State Support Team 4 are awarding Cardinal Intermediate School and Cardinal Middle School with bronze medals and Jordak Elementary School will receive a silver medal for their successful implementation of the positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS) within their buildings during the 2016-17 school year.
The schools are just three of nine in Lake and Geauga counties to receive recognition.
“Two of the items the committee said really stood out are the nearly 50-60 percent decreases in incident reports in each building from the 2015-16 school year to the 2016-17 year and the PBIS implementation increases from the beginning of the year to the end of the year – it was nearly 20 percent in each of the schools being awarded,” says PBIS coach Sherry Peters. “PBIS has really proven to be a successful way to get our students involved and I am so proud of them, our staff and our community for working together to create a more positive school environment.”
PBIS team members from Jordak Elementary School, the now closed Cardinal Intermediate School, and Cardinal Middle School will be recognized at the 2017 Ohio PBIS Showcase on Nov. 30 in Mansfield.
