The holiday season is often an emotionally difficult time for some. Franklin students, teachers, and families, please take a look at this video that describes emotional health resources our district provides:

English Version

Spanish Version

Our teachers and school leaders have been reflecting on our first two months of virtual learning this school year, and while we are proud of the steps we've taken to build on our delivery of instruction since the start of the pandemic, we remain engaged in a cycle of continuous improvement. Of late, we have become most concerned about the extent to which we are creating conditions that support student engagement during our live lessons. The screencasts below capture a portion of this discussion, but the most important idea we hope our school community takes away is that a student needs to be an active participant in his or her own learning in order for it to endure. Our teachers are working very hard to provide opportunities for students to "construct" knowledge as a result of their interactions with their teachers and classmates. Whether by engaging in whole-class discussion; partner-chats; small group talks in breakout rooms; written ideas added to discussion boards; or by completing projects or demonstrations, our students learn best when they participate actively in their lessons. I invite our families to join me in thanking our students and teachers for persevering and continuing to be reflective about the ways in which we can improve upon the learning experiences we have been building together.

Student Participation Screencast (English)

Student Participation Screencast (Spanish)

Hello, Franklin Families! It is so important in these challenging times to communicate expectations clearly, and our schools have been working to improve communication with our families as much as possible since last spring. The rubric below is another tool we are using to communicate learning expectations with our students and families at the elementary school level. Even though many of us will move to hybrid format on November 30th, most of our students will learn remotely for at least part of the time. We hope this rubric will help guide discussion about the importance of being prepared for a lesson as well as the importance of engaging with the teacher and classmates.  We will add a brief screencast about the rubrics tomorrow as well.  We hope you find this tool to be helpful!

Rubric (English)

Rubric (Spanish)

Good afternoon, friends.

As we near the end of our first elementary trimester on December 6th, I thought it would be helpful to share these two screencasts that describe our new report cards. 

PreK/K report card screencast.

Grades 1-5 report card screencast.

We have also had the videos translated into Spanish. 

Nueva boleta de calificaciones de preescolar y jardín de infantes screencast

Grados 1-5 Nueva boleta de calificaciones screencast

In addition, you can learn more about our report cards on the district website. We hope this information also helps inform our conversations during Parent/Teacher conferences next week. 

Thanks, and please enjoy a restful, peaceful holiday!

We've been engaged in conversation on the topic of "numeracy" at our leadership meetings this year.  As is true with literacy, for which it would be absurd to think of our students' development of reading comprehension skills to be the sole domain of one language arts teacher's instruction, so it is true with numeracy. Read more..