October 12, 2022

Dear St. Monica Academy Families,

Today you received the results for your child’s beginning of the year iReady assessment. The family report provides you with an overview of your child’s strengths and areas for growth for the school year. Unlike traditional year end assessments iReady provides our teachers with highly specific information that allows them to tailor instruction for your child’s needs. For every child, teachers can review skills from kindergarten through their current grade level to see exactly which skills a child needs support with. We can close gaps and clear up misperceptions providing a stronger and reinforced foundation needed for solid understanding of grade level materials. Parents often ask what they can do to support their child’s learning. Most of the supports are common sense.

• Tell your child that learning in school is important and you expect them to try their very best every day.
• Make sure your child has a specific place to do their homework. The space should be free of clutter and in a quiet location.
• Homework should be done without music or video playing. While most of us feel we can multitask the research tells us our brain needs to focus on one thing at a time. Music and video are always a distraction.
• Talk about school. Ask your child, “What is one thing you are proud of today?”, “What was challenging today?”, “Were you kind to someone today?”, “Tell me something funny that happened.”
• Observe consistent sleep schedules. School age children need about 9-11 hours of sleep each night.
• Support a healthy diet. Focus on fruits, vegetables and unprocessed protein sources for daily breakfast and lunch. Choose low sugar drinks over those with added sugar and artificial colors.  
• If your child does not seem to be learning the way you expect get in touch with their teacher. Let them know you are concerned and would like to discuss your child’s learning and strategies for improvement.

I believe that every child can and should see at least a full year of academic growth every year. Together I am confident that we can make that happen.

I am very pleased to welcome Mr. Brian Weber to our Junior High teaching team. Mr. Weber has a background in engineering and is currently earning his master’s degree in education at North Park University. He has been observing classes and familiarizing himself with our curriculum this week. He will begin teaching sixth through eighth grade math on Monday, October 17. Mr. Weber will send an email to the sixth through eighth grade families introducing himself, and a meet and greet for our families will be planned shortly.

We welcome Mr. Jerry Moore, our new crossing guard, at the Mont Clare and Foster Avenue corner! Mr. Moore provides important safety support for our students who walk to school.

Uniform News: We are pleased to see a robust response to the new zippered sweatshirt for our gym uniform. Please remember the zippered sweatshirt should be worn on gym days and students may not wear the hood inside the building. As we come to the middle of October and the weather is changing it is time to move away from uniform shorts. Beginning October 17 all students should wear full length pants or sweatpants (gym days) to school. Gym shorts can be worn under sweatpants for class.  

All parents who volunteer at SMA must be Virtus trained and certified. The safety of our children is the most important and basic responsibility we have. Please do not ask for exceptions to this requirement. The training is all online and can be completed in less than two hours. The information can be found here.

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