Coalition for Glen Cove

Minutes

Meeting 26 November 2007

Connolly and Landing School Principals Speak at Coalition Meeting

Connolly School principal Rosemarie Sekelsky and Landing School Principal Michael Israel

Connolly School principal Rosemarie Sekelsky and Landing School principal Michael Israel spoke at the November meeting of the Coalition for Glen Cove. Both schools serve students in third to fifth grades.

Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop programs encourage students from kindergarten through eighth grade to read and write. Literacy coaches work with the teachers who present these workshops and librarians help students to choose books that interest them and are at their level of ability. The Writing Workshop starts by showing students that writing has a purpose and is needed in many areas of life and that ideas have value and can be communicated in writing. They learn to observe, to record and to discuss what they see and think. Students learn what efficient readers do and don’t do, what successful readers do when they come across an unfamiliar word, and how to tell if a book is too easy or too hard. They learn that the way to become a successful reader is to read often and read a lot. Parents at the meeting mentioned that their children are reading more and are writing journals with more skill and feeling than ever before.

Dr. Elliot Bird, the well known math coach, has been holding meetings and demonstration classes each year with groups of math teachers, one grade at a time. There is a new emphasis on solving math problems in groups, on organizing and documenting problem solutions, and on discussing problems and the meaning of their solutions, skills that can be used throughout a student’s life.

Students are now studying violin, viola, and cello in third and fourth grade as the beginning of a strings program that will extend to all grades.

The recent move of the fifth grade from the middle school to the Connolly and Landing Schools has worked well. Students are more mature in sixth grade than in fifth and are ready to advance to the middle school. By having students longer, from third through fifth grade, principals and teachers can better know students and their families.

Dr. Israel pointed out that the addition of a modular cafeteria for Landing School will improve the quality of hot lunches. For some students, lunch is the only hot meal they get all day. There are no extra classrooms at either school, so that the new modular classrooms now being finished will allow smaller classes and more flexible scheduling. An elevator being installed at Connolly school will make the building handicap accessible. Both buildings have relatively new laptop computers on carts that are replacing some of the old and unreliable desktop computers now in use. The laptops have wireless access to the internet anywhere in Landing School. Classrooms in both schools now have digital projectors that allow the whole class to see a computer or video screen.