Letter from the Principal

Greetings Madrona Families and Community,

The staff at Madrona is prepared to partner with you for our best year yet. We believe that we need you in order to be successful with all of our students.

We are here with the goal of academic achievement for every student. Achievement in reading, writing, and math will determine the future for every child at Madrona and in our country. Your staff at Madrona is committed to making sure that your child has choices for the future. We have the benefit of keeping our children for up to nine years, and it is our responsibility to send them to high school prepared for future success in college.

More specifically, we are focusing this year on literacy and math. Every morning all students from kindergarten through eighth grade will have consistent 90-minute literacy and 60-90 minute math blocks. We are committed to protecting this time from any interruptions so we can make every minute count for each of our students. We will not have morning assemblies or classroom pull-outs for any non-emergent reasons.

We ask that you support this time by ensuring that your child is at school every morning on time. If your child is 5 minutes late every day, he or she will miss 15 hours of instruction over the course of the year. We need your help in making every minute count by getting your child to school on time so they can start learning on time every day!

We will be using assessment in a more formalized way to guide student learning this year. We will have several days this year that will mirror what it is like to take the WASL for students. This experience will give our students practice and confidence with this kind of assessment, and it will give teachers information that will help them move each student individually toward success on the WASL in April.

We need your help in supporting student learning by ensuring that your child does his or her homework every night. Please ask your child to show you his or her homework every night. By creating a quiet place for your child to do homework every night, you will help develop long-term habits that will help build success in your son or daughter.

Another way you can support your child this year is by reading with him or her every night. Insist on reading to your child or having them read to you. After reading, spend a little time discussing what you've read so you build up good thinking habits around reading with your child. A simple question like, "What do you think will happen next in the story?", "Why do you think the author wrote this story?", or "If you were to rewrite the ending of the story, how would you change it?" We want to encourage complex thinking in our students even before they are fluent readers. Asking questions that require children to think about what they've read and create their own understanding/interpretation of it can happen before children start kindergarten, and it should be happening all the way through high school.

Please spend some time reading the Madrona Family Handbook with your child. Thanks to our wonderful Volunteer Coordinator Michelle Manion for putting this great resource together – we hope it will help you better utilize the resources we can offer you and your family.

Thank you for trusting us as a partner in your child's education. Together we can make this the best year ever for the whole Madrona K-8 community.