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The Siena School Blog

Discover, Learn, Celebrate, and Empower

Welcome to Siena's blog, your source for helpful, cutting-edge resources tailored to teachers, parents, and other advocates in the learning differences community. We are dedicated to providing a wealth of curated knowledge spanning various topics, ranging from dyslexia advocacy and awareness to classroom teaching strategies, heritage month profiles, and social and emotional health.

 

Posts Tagged "students"

Making the Most of Parent-Teacher Conferences

November 12, 2024
By Joe Fruscione, Communications, Content, and Advancement Coordinator

Advice for Parent-Teacher Conferences

Conferences are incredibly important to develop a communicative relationship with your child’s teachers. Remember that the goal of each conference is to help your child be successful in and out of the classroom. Conferences are a powerful occasion for meaningful communication with your child’s teachers to review students' assessments to date and answer questions about the rest of the year.

You may only have 10 minutes with each teacher, so being on time and well prepared for the conference is vital. Be sure to ask lots of good questions, encourage your student at home, and remember that you are an important part of the educational equation to help your child get the most out of their educational experience.

Let Siena help you get the most out of conferences with your child’s teacher with these tips and questions: 

Prioritizing 

Try and prioritize topics to address with each teacher before you go to the conference, since time is so limited. We recommend writing down a list of questions to go over during the conference. To think of some questions, talk with your child before the conference. Explain that this meeting is to help them and to not worry about the conference. Ask your child:

  • What are your strongest and weakest subjects?
  • What subjects do you like the most and least?
  • Is there anything specific you’d like me to ask your teacher?

Asking and Listening

During each conference, listen carefully to what the teacher says. Write down key information you’d like to remember or questions you want to ask at the end of the conference. If you don’t understand something the teacher is talking about, like an educational term or an explanation of a school policy, don’t be afraid to ask for clarification.

It is important to understand what your child’s teacher is telling you. If there is a problem that needs addressing, ask your teacher to work with you to create an action plan that may be implemented in the classroom and at home. Here are some questions you may ask each teacher:

  • What is an important goal for [child’s name] in your class? How have you communicated this to them?
  • If there was one tool or strategy you wished [child’s name] used, what would it be? What can be done in class and at home to encourage this tool and/or strategy?
  • What should we do to support you at home?

You may also ask teachers what authentic assessments they are providing in their classrooms. Authentic assessments are assignments that give students multiple ways to demonstrate proficiency and real world applications for their skills apart from traditional tests and quizzes.

Talking with Your Child

Following the conference, discuss what you learned with your child by emphasizing positive points and being direct about problems. Make sure to follow through with what was discussed during the conferences at home, especially if an action plan was created.

Here are some questions you could ask your child after meeting with their teachers: 

  • How often do you feel in control of your own learning? How can I help you better feel in control?
  • Do you feel organized at school and at home? If not, how can I help you? 
  • Is there anything you wish we would know about how you’re doing in school? Can we talk about ways to help?

Siena Blog and Resources

For additional relevant information from The Siena School blog, see our Parents and Community category, as well as previous posts about tech detoxing for teens in school and common language in LD education.

The Siena School, a national leader in dyslexia education, serves bright, college-bound students with language-based learning differences on campuses in Silver Spring, MD (grades 3-4 and 5-12) and Oakton, VA (grades 3-12). 

2 Important Tech Skills Students Can Improve Over the Summer

June 29, 2022
By Joe Fruscione, Communications, Content, and Advancement Coordinator

As students are reviewing their summer packets or doing other academic work, the summer is also a great time to reinforce tech skills. This needn’t be too complex or time-consuming: brushing up on students' tech skills can be an easy and fun part of their weekly summer routines.

Technology at Siena is integrated into the curriculum across all divisions and subjects. Students routinely use laptops, assistive technology, and a host of multimedia apps in classes to enhance their learning and equip themselves with 21st-century skills.

Likewise, summer tech work can be integrated into students’ other academic and social activities. Here are two key tech skills that students can easily learn—or improve—this summer while they’re getting some well-earned downtime after a long school year:

Touch Typing Skills

Touch typing is an important way for students to get their ideas onto paper (or a screen). As opposed to the hunt-and-peck approach of using their index fingers, touch typing can teach students to type via muscle memory so they can focus less on the how of expressing their ideas—and more on the ideas behind their writing.

For students with dyslexia and other language-based learning differences, touch typing is a multisensory approach that complements the assistive technology they might already be familiar with—such as Speech to Text—and helps develop a skill they can use throughout their time in and out of school.

Parents looking for ways their children can improve their typing skills this summer can look into Typing.com, which we use at Siena during the school year. There are also free apps that don't require an account to use, like TypingClub, as well as apps like Nitro Type that let students hone their skills by competing against other users through interactive, visual, and gamified learning.

As this Read and Spell blog post shares, “For dyslexic students, learning touch typing emphasizes spelling and phonics. Repeatedly encountering high frequency words also helps with training learners to recognize words by sight, which saves them from the decoding process that causes trouble in reading.”

Regardless of which typing app they use, students can hone their skills by practicing regularly each week of the summer.

Designing Basic Games

K-12 educators are increasingly using games and other interactive content in their classrooms, such as Kahoot! quizzes, WordFlight, and Prodigy. This 2021 article from Edutopia emphasizes games’ educational benefits, such as to “increase student participation, foster social and emotional learning, and motivate students to take risks.”

“It’s important to recognize the educational value of interactive games such as Minecraft,” adds Siena Director of Technology Simon Kanter, “insofar as they can develop students’ reasoning, problem solving skills, and social skills.”

Students who enjoy learning through games during the school year might enjoy spending some time over the summer creating their own through a platform such as Scratch. Originally developed at MIT, Scratch is a free service that lets students recreate classic games on their own while increasing their digital fluency and computational thinking. Siena students have used Scratch during the annual Hour of Code and during weekly Coding Club.

As Scratch’s website notes, “The ability to code computer programs is an important part of literacy in today’s society. When people learn to code in Scratch, they learn important strategies for solving problems, designing projects, and communicating ideas.” (See here for information and FAQs for parents about Scratch.)

Still Image of a Student's Coding Project from Scratch

Coupled with regular work on touch typing, learning basic coding and game design through Scratch over the summer can help students sharpen their tech skills to prepare them for next school year.

Resources for Summer Technology 

See Siena’s blog for more posts about having a rejuvenating and productive summer, including ones on the benefits of summer tutoring and on summer camps and academic programs.

For additional ideas, you could also look at this guide (primarily for older students) from the University of Toronto St. George, as well as these STEM Resources (for middle- and high-school students) from Texas Instruments. And, have a look at this iD Tech blog post on helping kids develop their tech learning and related skills
 

Siena's Head of School Challenge, 2020-2021

May 27, 2021
By Joseph Fruscione, Communications and Advancement Associate
community, students, head~of~school~challenge

I liked the Head of School Challenge because it gave me some goals to set during distance learning. —Middle School Student

This year, Siena introduced a new initiative to keep students active and gamify the school year: the Head of School Challenge

The first challenge submitted: Coding.

In celebration of Siena’s 15th anniversary, we designed 15 challenges around the arts, athletics, reading, social and emotional health, and more to energize the school community. Many of the challenges incorporated the 15 theme to mark the school’s anniversary year. 

We introduced the Head of School Challenge at an all-school virtual assembly in the fall (complete with a video overview). Students then started completing the tasks, all of which could be done virtually. Some especially popular challenges were:

  • Find a 15: Find the number 15 somewhere (and take a selfie with it)
  • 15 Acts of Kindness: Perform 15 acts of kindness for friends or family and then reflect on your acts
  • Coding: Show off your creativity and animate SIENA by code
  • Design and Creativity: Make something to show what Siena means to you (see video example below)
  • Read 1,500 Pages: Read for at least 20 minutes a day and see how it adds up 
  • Thank 15 Teachers: Show gratitude for teachers who’ve been especially helpful and supportive this year
  • Sports and Exercise: Play your favorite sport or exercise 3 times per week (for at least 15 minutes) for a month
  • Learn Something New: Choose a sport, hobby, activity, or skill you’ve always wanted to try

I really liked doing the Head of School Challenge because I could get House points. I also had a lot of fun doing the activities, and it gave me something to do outside. —Middle School Student

For every challenge completed, students earned points for their Houses, with bonus House points, gift cards and school merchandise waiting for the top finishers.

Someone found a 15!

All of Siena’s students and faculty are sorted into four Houses, which are modeled after the seventeen Contrade of Siena, Italy. Siena’s Houses (Drago, Leocorno, Pantera, and Aquila) are composed of a mixture of 4th-12th grade students who compete over the year for house points in athletic and academic challenges. This year, the Head of School Challenge upped the ante, as it were, by giving students the chance to help both themselves and their Houses. The winning student will earn almost 400 points for their House.

Since students were still learning from home at the beginning of the year, the Head of School Challenge helped them feel connected to the school community and varied their routines. In a time of limited social activity, the Head of School Challenge enabled students to boost their physical and mental health, strengthen community connections, and have a fun, school-wide activity to break up the routine of distance learning. 

I really love doing the House challenges. It helps me learn new things. My favorite House challenge was finding a 15 because I made Rice Krispies Treats and used the sprinkles to make a 15! —Middle School Student

Students have experienced a lot of change—which was outside their control—in the past year. The Head of School Challenge gave some control back to our students through positive, community-building activities that supported themselves and their Houses as a constant in a variable year. 

Enjoy this middle schooler's Design and Creativity challenge about science: 

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