Oak Grove Elementary School continues to help all students develop the World-Class Skills of 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 30-minute Morning Meeting time, students and teachers engage in discussions and activities that help them learn ways we can show kindness, work hard to achieve our goals and be brave by taking risks with our learning. Not only do we talk about the work, but we also talk about how it feels. Letting students explore and express their feelings and thoughts is important to build a safe and supportive learning environment to grow the whole child.
We continue to use the workshop model 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 work 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 toward our school vision to Empower Each Child to Design the Future, teachers felt the sense of urgency to grow our readers toward grade-level expectations. Data meetings and 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. Two of our interventionists have also been serving pre-selected first graders one-on-one through the Reading Recovery initiative.
As a school, we were able 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.
OGE 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. PTA provided many evening family events such as Spanish Bingo, Fall Festival, Family Reading Night on the Lawn and PTA Community Spirit Nights. 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 home and school connection: “Love the weekly newsletters from the school and the weekly emails from my child’s teachers! Everyone at OGE is ALWAYS so kind and friendly. Continue to communicate with families in advance of activities to give them time for planning. 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.
Christy M. Graham, Principal
Kathryn Swift, SIC Chair
