What's working at Dixie Elementary?
Setting Reachable
Goals |
At Dixie Elementary, we use individual student goal setting to increase the
self-efficacy of our students. Research shows that students with low
self-efficacy toward a task are more likely to avoid it, while those with high
self-efficacy are not only more likely to attempt the task, but they also will
work harder and persist longer in the face of difficulties. Reachable student
goal setting is effective for two reasons it provides students with a goal to
strive toward and provides a realistic benchmark that helps students recognize
their own growth. We set aside a few minutes each week for students to evaluate
their progress based on their own progress in terms of improvement. (i.e. the
goal is simple and measurable, can you do this more, longer, better than last
week?)
For additional information about the reachable goals program used at Dixie Elementary, please view the strategies page by clicking here (Key II). |
Arts
and Character Education Integration into the Curriculum |
At Dixie, we recognize that students need to learn and be presented with learning
in a variety of ways. Through our partnership with Dr. Benjamin from Arts Now, we are pilot-ing different arts-based strategies across several classrooms at Dixie in the hopes of giving our students more ownership and opportunity to explore within their learning. The more we do these kinds of approaches, the more we move students towards being the active learner that our new standards and evaluation systems are evolving into in the 21st Century. We have always been a magnet school focused on intellect, creativity and character, but along the journey we have realized that we are evolving more than ever into an arts-focused school, because it is what is driving our students to learn and grow more exponentially. I want to invite you to feel free to contact the following for any questions you may have about the program: Rachel Losch (visual arts), Crystal Peters (music), Kim Sword (4th grade) and Hannah Workman (1st grade). Although this is the team who traveled to Atlanta, there are several teachers within Dixie who are piloting these new arts-based approaches to encourage more active student learning. Stephanie Haggard (1st grade) and Amanda Lloyd (K-5 Resource) are both piloting bouncy balls as chairs for students to use when working independently. In Ms. Haggard’s classroom, students are exploring stretching in between activities. Since every child learns differently, taking time to know the needs of our students along with family needs will ensure we are set-ting the stage for learning. Our school continues to look for ways in which to teach across the curriculum, meaning it would not be uncommon to see students counting by 5s in music or social studies to be a focal point in art or art/music/physical education used as a way to cover a concept in the classroom. Dixie continues to work with Dr. Richard Benjamin from Georgia on incorporating more arts-based and character building instructional strategies to use in the classroom, to increase student engagement and learning in the classroom with active hands on minds on learning. Richard Benjamin, Ph.D. is a lifelong educator who has focused on school transformation through Character Development and Arts Integration. Richard has been working for CEP for the past five years as a facilitator for climate and culture development in schools and school systems as well as being a frequent presenter at the CEP Annual Forum. Richard is a retired school superintendent, having served in Ann Arbor MI, Nashville TN, and Cobb County GA. He is an expert, in part, in leading High Yield Arts-Based and Hands-On Strategies for student engagement, deeper understanding, and self-expression. In Hong Kong and Guangzhou China, Richard is doing foundational work to engage educators in CEP’s training with the Eleven Principles Sourcebook for integration of academic content and character development in a School Transformation process. Contact Dixie Staff Members- Rachel Losch, Visual Arts Teacher [email protected] , Crystal Peters, Music [email protected] |
Arts
Enrichment |
The Arts Enrichment Program at Dixie, also known as AEP, offers six weeks of after school arts programs for children in grades K-5. The AEP is sponsored by the Dixie PTA and many community arts groups throughout Lexington. AEP usually begins the second week of February and finishes strong with an arts showcase the Thursday night before Spring Break in March. The showcase is called Arts Night.
AEP classes offered in the past include: BroadwayTheater and Dance with Kelly Fischer Percussion with Crystal Peters Primary Chorus with Crystal Peters Clay Sculpture and Sculpture with Pizzazzz with the Living Arts and Science Center Twirling with Cheri Presley Zumba, Hip Hop and Hip Hop Hula with the YMCA of Central Kentucky Create-a-Play with The Lexington Children’s Theater Capoeira with Cecily Galbreath Chinese KungFu with Yan Wang |
Arts
Night at Dixie |
Arts Night at Dixie is an annual event and brings in almost 1,000 spectators. Our Arts Enrichment students perform what they have learned during AEP. Each group prepares a 3-5 performance showcasing the skills that they have learned in a six week period. If the group is project based, then those students showcase their artwork for the event.
Contact Rachel Losch, Visual Arts Teacher, [email protected] |
Arts
Day at Dixie |
Arts Day is an annual event right before Spring Break. Arts Day runs like a career day for the arts. Artists from the Lexington community come and share their expertise with the students. Students also create, dance, act and sing with the artists throughout the day to keep the activities as hands on as possible.
Contact Rachel Losch, Visual Arts Teacher, [email protected] |
Dixie Chicks
|
The Dixie Chicks Club is for 4th & 5th grade GIRLS ONLY! This group meets regularly to engage in friendship building activities to enhance each girl’s self-esteem. Club members participate in service projects, learn about self-care & hygiene, and work to build a stronger sense of their individual self.
Contact Dixie Staff Members – Rachel Creager,3rd grade teacher, [email protected] Shelby Coons, 5thgrade, [email protected] |
Dixie Dudes
|
The Dixie Dudes Club is for BOYS ONLY! Much like the girls group, Dixie Dudes meets regularly to engage in friendship building activities to enhance self-esteem, leadership and communication skills.
Contact Dixie Staff Members -Blake Bishop 5th grade teacher, bl[email protected] Scott Loschieder, PE Teacher, [email protected] Mackenzie Bales 4th grade teacher, [email protected] |
Career Day
|
At Dixie Magnet Elementary, dozens of possibilities enveloped youngsters during Career Day, which aimed to inspire their dreams. Whether a child longs to be a firefighter, a horse trainer, a banker or an architect, the point was to show students what is possible in today’s job market.
“They get to see a diverse array of different occupations that are available. It’s good to expose them, and it definitely broadens their horizons,” said Kristy Johnson, a registered nurse at Saint Joseph Hospital, who brought along a model heart for her demonstration. Each class rotated on the half-hour through nine stations, hearing about what schooling is required for certain professions and what a typical day might be like. Johnson, for instance, talked about why she wears a protective gown, gloves and mask, quizzed students on the heart’s functions and the amount of blood in the body, and explained the basics of being a “heart nurse.” Down the hall, Waffle House manager Dylon Smith treated each group of students as new employees in his restaurant. He showed them how to put on their uniform hats and how to write up an order. The kids also practiced totaling the bill and welcoming customers. “It reinforces math skills, being sociable with people – the environment itself is what sells it for me. I want them to see you can have fun at work,” said Smith, who came into the food service business later in life. Other sessions featured a travel journal editor, a plant director, a massage therapist, an auto mechanic and an Army sergeant, to name a few. Dixie guidance specialist Monica Eversole and Family Resource Center coordinator Nicole Love lined up the 30 or so volunteers and scheduled the rotations based on age and topics. “We have a mix of parents, friends and community members,” Love said. Presenters spoke of how early interests led them into fields they enjoy and of how circumstances prompted mid-life career changes. They also tried to show how academic courses tie into certain jobs and encouraged the students to apply themselves in school. “We hope they take away some new career possibilities, maybe see some examples of careers they were not familiar with before, and an understanding of what they need to be doing to get to that point – what skills they can be honing,” Love said. “I want them to see the connection between what they’re doing in school right now and how it will make a difference when they become an adult,” added Watson, who noted for example how following a teacher’s directions leads into following an employer’s instructions. “I want every child to come away with a dream of ‘This is possible’ and ‘I can do this,’” she said. “If you don’t have a dream, what are you going to reach for?” If you are interested in being a part of this special day- contact Monica Eversole, Dixie Guidance Specialist [email protected], or Nicole Love, Family Resource Center Coordinator N[email protected]. |
The Harvard Graduate School of Education's Pre K–12 professional education
Last year a team of Dixie teachers and administrators visited Harvard University to attend The Transformative Power of Teacher Teams. As part of the work, our staff has been focusing on four things: building relationships along with developing our school program to be systemic, systematic and intentional. Our work sessions discussing student progress and curriculum have aligned to these four words and we have increased our benchmarks for measuring proficiency from the 50th percentile to the 70thpercentile, raising our expectations for students’ achievement across the building. This also includes the use of weekly team meetings and team planning sessions with weekly shared lesson plans available to all shareholders posted on Share point weekly. Students engage in individual goal setting and have school rewards with the Dixie Hard Work Café, Minute to Win It Prize Wheel, Citizenship Celebrations, Principal’s Advisory Committee, Student of the Week, Student of the Month, and classroom recognitions. Contact : Dixie Staff Members -Stephanie Smith, Intermediate Instructional Coach, [email protected] Charis Gambill, 2nd grade teacher [email protected] , Monica Eversole, Guidance Counselor [email protected] , or Tara Isaacs, Principal [email protected] |
All Pros Dads Breakfast
|
We had a great turnout for our first ‘All Pro Dads Breakfast’ at Dixie. Over 250 students and dads showed up to help strengthen their relationship - way to go, Dads! Chick-fil-A provided a delicious breakfast for everyone to enjoy. Mr. Ora Johnson from Bryan Station High School was our guest speaker. The PTA and FRC plan to host several more of these events throughout the school year.
Contact: James Brown, Dixie PTA Board & Nicole Love, Dixie Family Resource Center Coordinator. [email protected]. |
|
K-Kids is unique because it’s sponsored by a local Kiwanis club and composed of
leading business and professional people of the community. K-Kids is a “student-led” community service organization that operates under school regulations and draws its members from the student body. Contact: [email protected] |
Girls on the Run Lexington is a non-profit prevention program for girls in grades 3-8 that combines training for a 5K run with healthy living education. Programs instill self-esteem through health education, life skills development, mentoring relationships and physical training.
Contact: Holly Uebel at, [email protected] |
Specific Academic Interventions/Accelerations
Number Worlds helps struggling students accelerate math success with a proven Tier 2 research based approach.
It engages students with interactive games, embedded activities, digital resources, and project-based learning. In SRA Number Worlds, math is designed to be fun for all students with engaging games and activities. Every Number Worlds activity is tied to a Key Common Core State Standard, providing the instructional support necessary to get struggling students back on track. Contact: [email protected]or [email protected] |
TouchMath
|
TouchMath is a multisensory program that uses its signature Touch Points to engage students of all abilities and learning styles. The staff was trained by Kim Cooper, Fayette County Special Education Specialist and implemented school wide.
Contact: [email protected] |
Orton-Gillingham
|
The Orton-Gillingham Approach to reading instruction was developed in the early-20th century. It is language-based, multisensory, structured, sequential, cumulative, cognitive, and flexible.The Orton-Gillingham Approach has been in use since the 1930s. An intensive, sequential phonics-based system teaches the basics of word formation before whole meanings. The method accommodates and utilizes the three learning modalities, or pathways, through which people learn—visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Unlike some scripted and rigid reading programs, the Orton-Gillingham Approach is a system that allows for flexibility. The staff was trained by Kim Cooper, Fayette County Special Education Specialist and implemented school wide.
Contact: [email protected] |
Soar to Success
It is a research-based small group reading intervention program. To accelerate students' reading abilities through the instruction of comprehension strategies. Targeted Strategies include: •Predict: Use clues to make a guess about what might happen or what you will learn. •Question : Ask a question that can be answered from what you have read. •Clarify : Make clear the pronunciation or meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, paragraph or passage. •Summarize : Tell in your own words the important events or points you have read Contact: Heather Brooks at, [email protected] |
Conceptual Building Blocks – Central Kentucky Special Education Cooperative with Mark
Helton Description: The Conceptual Building Blocks is a series of three modules designed to build a teacher’s capacity to work with students in various settings. The approach is rooted in a concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) methodology of teaching and develops conceptual understanding along the way to procedural understanding. The areas of focus for the three modules are Addition/Subtraction, Multiplication/Division, and Fractions. The participants should be elementary teachers who work with students across grade levels or as interventionists. The objectives are: 1. To build teacher knowledge around the building blocks of numeracy 2. To provide strategies for teaching content and differentiating instruction 3. To develop a conceptual understanding of the core components of number and operations 4. To catalyze change within the school through coaching sessions Contact: Mark Helton, CKSEC [email protected] |
EERTI (Enacting Effective Response to Intervention) K-3
Several primary teachers participated in an EERTI cohort in Frankfort, KY. This opportunity expanded our teachers’ understanding of early numeracy development and improved their abilities to establish strong foundations for fluently adding and subtracting. As a member of an EERTI cohort, teachers received specialized training from an experienced Math Intervention Teacher including evidence-based strategies and materials from experts in early numeracy development. The EERTI community provided support to each teacher as new strategies and methods are utilized in the classroom. Participants received books, including Teaching Number in the Classroom with 4-8 year olds by Robert J. Wright and Developing Number Concepts series by Kathy Richardson, and instructional materials such as bead racks, linking cubes, numeral tracks, dot cards, printables, etc to create hands on minds on learning in the classroom. If you have additional questions, please contact KCM Assistant Director Meredith Brewer at [email protected] or by phone at 859-572-5976. |
Reading Recovery Reading Intervention for First Graders
We currently have a Reading Recovery Teacher that is servicing 8 First Grade students during the year to increase their reading awareness. Reading Recovery was designed to dramatically reduce the number to first grade students who have extreme difficulty in learning to read and write. Contact: Ashleigh Adkins at [email protected]if you have any questions. |
Read
to Achieve Grant |
The Read to Achieve Grant Program was created to focus on reading diagnostic and intensive reading intervention for struggling readers within the state primary program. Main
Content The Reading Diagnostic and Intervention Grant Program is a competitive program that provides funds to schools to implement research-based reading diagnostic and intervention programs. Currently our school is using, Fountas and Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) as its core short-term intensive one-on-one or small group intervention. Our K-3 students that are serviced have intense reading instruction that provides students with the essential skills necessary for reading proficiency. If you have any additional questions, please contact Heather Brooks at [email protected] |
Governor's Gup and OCOV
|
Governor's Cup
Students compete against other schools in written assessments for Math, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts, Arts and Humanities. There is also a Quick Recall and Future Problem Solving team that competes. Try-outs are held after school. OCOV Students compete against others schools in Math, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts, Arts and Humanities and Practical Living. Students will be divided into groups of 4-6 in order to prepare for competition. The number of students participating will be determined by the number of parents available to coach and/or interest from the students. Students are expected to attend afternoon practice sessions and to compete in the Saturday competitions. (Dates are determined by One Community, One Voice and their sponsors.) There are at least two competitions scheduled each year. For more information please contact Chuck Churchill at ch[email protected] or Katie Grigsby at [email protected] |
Gifted and Talented
|
Our school has a full time Gifted and Talented teacher that meets with students in grades K-5 for reading and math. We have been very fortunate to offer a full time teacher to assist with our gifted and talented students. This full time position allows the teacher to pull several gifted clusters throughout the week. The teacher works closely with grade level teams to enrich classroom instruction, as well as using Des Cartes skills that the groups are currently working on.
For more information please contact Katie Grigsby at [email protected] |