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Dear Ocean Shore Families, Happy Friday! I hope you had a wonderful week. It was great to so many families at our costume parade yesterday! The costumes were extraordinary –so many creative ideas. Our week ended on positive note – despite the unusual start to our day with school closed! Thank you for your patience and responsiveness as we all navigated the power outages and weather conditions. The Hootenany is on Saturday! Should be a very fun event! See below for details! Reflections From My Office: Today our staff gathered for professional development. It was a valuable day for our teachers as we talked about building our capacity for student engagement. I left the day feeling inspired and uplifted by our staff – there were some powerful and rich conversations. One part of our day compared and how education has changed over the years. From the days of a one-room schoolhouse to modern times – we all agreed that teachers wear many hats to serve students. We also talked about the value of a classroom community – and that many of the activities at Ocean Shore foster a student’s sense of belonging to our school community. POD days are one such example. Yesterday was our first “POD” day. This is one of my favorite things that happen at our school. At Ocean Shore, there is a tradition of having several POD days throughout the year. Students are assigned to a POD or “family” of students represented from each grade level. Each classroom becomes a one-room schoolhouse. Students from kindergarten to 8th grade spend time together with different teachers. Teachers carefully design activities for the students that will be fun and productive across all of the ages. If you were around on campus yesterday, you would have noticed kids working in pairs and small groups, older students helping younger ones. The littlest ones eagerly accepted their guidance as they were in awe of the bigger kids. Each activity had a greater value attached to it because of the quality of collaboration across ages, and the reciprocity of skills being exchanged. Older students gain leadership while younger ones learned from their example of servitude – something that isn’t easily packaged in a book or curriculum – but given with opportunities such as POD days. It is not uncommon to see seasonal celebrations in classrooms. Most schools host such fun activities like building skeletons or creating an art project with fall leaves. What is uncommon is to see the collaborative spirit between these age groups in such a deliberate manner. The laughter exchanged, the memories that were made between the big and little buddies made the activity that much more memorable. The intentionality to give our students such experiences is what sets Ocean Shore apart from other schools. It was fun for me to see our teachers lead a whole group of students across all the grade levels. Our middle school team having fun with the primary grades and vice versa. This also reflects how our teachers are committed to these experiences. Student Podcast! Here all about it in this week’s podcast! Season 2 - Episode 9 Dolphinetly Talks Site Staff Makin' Waves! Look below to meet our Staff of the Week and learn about our team of educators!  Come to the Hootenanny on Saturday!  Weekly Flyers: Comments are closed.
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Jeanne BellingerPrincipal of Ocean Shore. Check back here for weekly updates and messages from the principal. Archives
June 2022
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