Greetings Marvista Families,

We have successfully completed the first month of school! Thank you Marvista community for your steadfast efforts in keeping our students and staff safe.  We appreciate your diligence and your integrity as you monitor symptoms and make decisions when to keep your children at home. We also appreciate your continued teaching on the importance of safety protocols, including mask wearing and social distancing. Because of these efforts, our amazing teaching team has been able to continue delivering high quality and rigorous learning experiences for our kids! I am so humbled and proud of these acts of collectiveness.  It truly takes our whole community! 

Moving into October, I thought it might be helpful to let you know of some of our fall happenings.

Student Assessments in October

Many of our students will be participating in state required testing this month.  These assessments are designed to monitor student learning and to help our teaching teams make informed decisions on what to teach next to our students.  Our fourth and fifth graders will be participating in the Smarter Balanced Assessments (SBA), our second and third graders will be participating in highly capable screening and our students in grades first through fifth will be completing the iReady benchmark assessments. To lower stress levels, we always encourage our students to use these assessment times to show us what they know so that we know how to better teach them.  We never encourage perfection and instead focus on effort and engagement in the activity. Our students are hard workers and so capable of demonstrating their knowledge—we believe in them!  Teachers will be communicating directly to you with specific assessment details, including testing days.

Rain and Playing Outside

Each day, our students have two designated recess times. Our students learn so much in this space about friendship, sportsmanship, and imaginative play.  They go outside to play with their peers whenever possible, including times of drizzle and light rain. As the weather begins to get cooler and the rain begins to settle in, please send your child to school with appropriate outerwear, such as a rain jacket.

I am closing out my message this week with sincere admiration for our community--thank you!  Thank you for all that you have done and for all that you continue to do to support Marvista Elementary. If you have any questions, you are always welcome to call our main office at 206-631-4200.  Our team will work to connect you with the appropriate support staff.

Sincerely,

Maggie Heater
Interim Principal
Marvista Elementary