Welcome to the 2015/2016 School Year!

Welcome back!  Can you believe that it's finally here?  I hope everyone had a relaxing, fun-filled summer season.  I definitely did! but let me introduce myself, since I have all new students for this school year:

My name is Laura Stubbs and this year I'm teaching all English 9 classes.  I know that I've had some of my students' older siblings in the past, so not all parents will be brand new to me, but I definitely have a large group of people who have never worked with me before.  Here's a little about me:

• I attended WMU for my undergrad degree and then MSU for my Master's degree.
• I grew up in the Lansing area and so my first teaching job was with the Lansing School District.
• After getting married and working in the LSD for five years, we made the decision to move closer to Detroit for my husband's job, and so I applied and received my forever-job at AHS (I hope).
• This is my 17th year teaching ELA at Airport:  I've taught 9th, 11th and 12th grade English here at the high school.
• I have two sons:  they are now 12 (7th grade) and 14 (9th grade) and go to school in Ann Arbor.  They play sports, sing in choirs, participate in school plays, play in their school bands, and participate with 4-H training llamas, so they're very busy people!  This means that I'm very busy, also, since most days it feels like I have 152 kids:  yours and mine!

That's a general overview of personal information about me, so let's get down to brass tacks, so to speak.  This year will be exciting yet challenging since we're bringing the Engage NY ELA curriculum up to the 9th grade.  Your students were introduced to it last year, but it's all new to me.  I have worked with the middle school teachers a bit, and our curriculum director Greg Roberts, to find out how best to meet the demands of the curriculum in a 55-minute time frame, as well as incorporate Collins Writing and my technology goals into the program.  I spent much of the summer working on this, so hopefully what I've planned for works, though I know from years of experience that the name of the game in education in flexibility.

Other things that have to be considered are the following:

• Advisory Periods:  on Wednesdays and Thursdays our regular hours will be cut short to accommodate these periods into our day.  All students and teachers will be put into groups for advisory times: Wednesdays are for academic help, Thursdays we have a curriculum to follow.
• PSAT - your student will be taking this test in April as mandated by the state.  All 9th and 10th graders will be taking a version of the test  in order to help prepare them for the SAT which is given in the 11th grade year.  We will be working on skills that will help when taking these tests.
• Technology - I have Chromebooks in my room (I received them in January, so they're new to me), and so part of our year will be working with technology and Google Classroom.
• Your Kids are Busy - your students are very busy people, with lots of extra-curricular activities.  I feel that these activities are vital to them and their learning, so I will try not to over-burden them with homework.  I hate busy work so most homework will be for them to either read independently for a project, and/or to finish writing assignments that could not be completed in class time.

I look at this as a partnership between you, your student, and myself.  We all have the same goal:  prepare them for life beyond high school as fully participating, healthy members of society, so please join me in this partnership.  I will update this blog with the week's information, and occasionally I include pictures or video, just to keep you in the loop.  Every week I'll email you the link so that you have easy access to this information.

Please feel free to contact me anytime.  I'm best at answering emails quickly, but also feel free to call the school and leave me a voice message.  I'm so excited to meet both you and your student, and I know this will be a great year!

Welcome to the 2015/2016 School Year! by Laura Stubbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at laurastubbs.blogspot.com.