Oak Grove Elementary School continues to help all students develop the World Class Skills for the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate. We foster this work by creating a positive culture where students have the opportunity to be creative, collaborate, communicate, and use critical thinking skills. We continue to foster this work with our school motto: Be Kind, Work Hard, Be Brave.
Each morning during our Morning Meeting time, students and teachers engaged in discussions and activities that helped them learn ways we can show kindness, work hard to achieve our goals, and be brave by taking risks with our learning. We engaged students with cooperative learning opportunities to work on building their collaboration and problem-solving skills.
We continue to use a gradual release structure to implement our reading, writing, and math instruction. Students are engaged in their learning and provide whole and small group instruction to differentiate their learning. Teachers have worked on creating reading goals for students with specific strategies to help them grow as readers. We hold writing celebrations where students provide positive, specific feedback to help the writers grow. The schoolwide reading program we implement, RED (Read Every Day), has increased our students’ reading volume and their stamina for reading.
As we work hard and strive towards our school vision of empowering each child to design the future, teachers feel the sense of urgency to grow our students towards grade-level expectations in all core subjects. Data meetings, professional learning communities, and other professional development focused on intentional planning, executing meaningful small group, and one-on-one feedback based on students’ goals using multiple sets of data. Teachers continue to track student progress closely and quickly identify students not making adequate progress in order to refer them to our Response to Intervention team. Four of our interventionists have also been serving pre-selected first graders one-on-one through the Reading Recovery initiative.
As a school, we continued to provide students with free breakfast. The students waited patiently each morning at the breakfast cart to fill their bags with some healthy food options. More than half of our student population was fed each day for breakfast. This ensured our students started the day with a full stomach and were ready to learn.
OGES has intentionally been focusing on strengthening family engagement and building supportive relationships between school and home. The school provided two parent/teacher conferences this school year, one in the fall and one in the spring. PTO provided many evening family events such as Spanish Bingo, Fall Festival, Family Reading Night on the Lawn, and PTA Community Spirit Nights. Our school counselors provided help sessions for families on topics of interest.
We continue to keep our families up to date with important events with our weekly newsletter, texts, emails, and social media. Parents have responded positively to our bridging the home and school connection. “OGES is doing great work supporting our student at school and at home. We enjoy the optional homework packet as well as the suggestions in the weekly newsletter.” “Everyone at OGE is ALWAYS so kind and friendly. Continue to welcome parents into the school, to volunteer for events and keep the family atmosphere of Oak Grove. This is one thing I have always enjoyed.”
As always, we are thankful for our wonderful Oak Grove families and their continued support to make it a successful school year as we strive to be kind, work hard, and be brave.
Christy M. Graham, Principal
Stephanie Tucker, SIC Chair
