Hello everyone!

We are so excited that the Winter Tea is almost here! Please consider taking some time off of work this Friday December 13th to join your kiddo for this special Sunset Ridge tradition. The gym will be transformed into a winter wonderland and students show off their artwork to family while enjoying cookies and punch.

We still need help! We realize this is a busy time of year for everyone, but cookie donations and volunteering at the event allow this tradition to remain a success. Thank you in advance for helping make this be a memorable day for Sunset Ridge students and their families!

- We still need over 50 dozen cookies to cover all of the classrooms! Sign up here:

SSR Families: Cookie Donations for Winter Tea & Art Showcase

- We have MANY open volunteering slots to help with decorating, refilling cookie stations, serving punch, and cleaning up. Consider signing up for a shift before or after your kiddo's tea grade slot. Sign up here: SSR Families: Volunteer Sign Up Winter Tea & Art Showcase

*Important note for those who are donating cookies* - NEW this year there are no home-made cookies allowed. The new district policy requires that cookies must be store-bought and in the original packaging. You can drop off cookies in the school front entryway either Thursday 12/12 or before 8:30am on Friday 12/13.

A note from The Art Teacher Ms. Sutter: "The students have been working so hard this year on their artwork and are so excited to show off their masterpieces to their family. You will find amazing self-portraits, creative clay sculptures, beautiful winter art, and more."

Please see the Winter Tea Gymnasium Map so you know what to expect when you arrive in the winter wonderland! You enter the gym in the bottom left portion of the image.

Dear Sunset Ridge Families, 

A few thoughts for this week;

Act 20 & Reading Screening - Act 20, the law focused on literacy that resulted in MCPASD selecting a new literacy curriculum, also has some other requirements that will impact students. In January, we'll be starting the mandated screening of students' early literacy skills in grades K-3 and those reports will be sent home. For any student who scores below the 25th percentile (so, on average, one out of every 4 students), we are required to conduct diagnostic testing within the next 10 days and then develop a "Reading Plan," share it with families, and then provide progress monitoring updates until the next assessment window (which will be Fall, Winter, Spring moving forward).  

While our teachers are going through rigorous training in the teaching of foundational literacy skills (LETRS), and are improving in their teaching skills, the statistical nature of using percentile norms means some kids will be in the bottom quartile. 

Related to that, our district is refining its Portrait of a Graduate.  A Portrait of a Graduate is a vision for the skills and dispositions that we want all high school graduates to have to prepare them for a successful future.  Here are some examples. One thing that is notable in many examples is that academic achievement isn't explicitly called out so much as it's coded in terms like "Lifelong Learner" or "Skilled Problem Solver."  

One thing that was interesting as the team of us started the Portrait of a Graduate work was, when we were prompted to describe our own academic trajectories in K-12, many of us said things like, "I was pretty social and academically disinterested until later in life." I certainly was! Said another way, some of us might have been those kids in the bottom quartile.  

Related to that, David Brooks wrote the cover story in the November issue of The Atlantic in November in which he was pretty severely critical of education writ large and its prioritization of a few academic skills (math and reading), ignoring other "non-cognitive" skills like creativity, collaboration, or passion (here's a summary of the article). The professor Scott Galloway makes a compelling case for storytelling as the most important skill for success. If you have access to The Atlantic, it's an interesting read. Regardless of your perspective on David Brooks or his article, I am confident in saying that Sunset Ridge teachers see kids as more than just test scores.  

Finally, I am super inspired by the potential of artificial intelligence to support learning! I'm reading the book Brave New Words by Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. It has been fascinating to learn about how ChatGPT's founders saw it as having potential for education (and put in place safeguards for privacy and appropriate content) and shared it early on with his team, resulting in them designing Khanmigo, which blends ChatGPT's AI capacity with Khan Academy's focus on tutoring to create an AI tutor for kids.  

I know there are "yeah-buts" with technology (screen time, privacy, cheating), and rather than address those here, I'll share a vision of engaged, self-directed learners who think things like, "I didn't get that lesson on ___ the way the teacher explained it. I could use ChatGPT to explain to me how to do it based on my interests (like "Teach me how this concept can be used in soccer" or I could use Khanmigo to act more like a tutor, asking questions like, "Well, what do you understand about ___ so far?"). I can imagine a fundamental shift in education in which the student is not so passive, with the teacher responsible for identifying gaps in knowledge and attempting to fill them, but an active agent in their own learning. 

Connecting these threads together is this long article about the impact of artificial intelligence on literacy instruction. It is both critical of our current literacy assessments, writing, "Tragically, item-based comprehension kinds of tests remain a proxy for literacy, a cheap and lazy way to put a number on literacy performance," and that "traditional literacy pedagogy ... diminishes the agency of learners" before recommending something I'm becoming more accustomed to as I use ChatGPT to get me started on everything from summarizing books to share in these newsletters to creating a scope and sequence for the district for teaching about AI to our students. The authors describe it this way; "Cyber-social literacy learning is the complementary relationship between a human writer and a machine in the production of writing." 

Brave new words, indeed.

We had our November Sunny’s Way assemblies! Last month students were focused on being respectful. Congratulations to our students of the month who exemplified the Sunny Way through their respectful words and actions: 

Kindergarten Lions of The Month: Amelia, Harper, Callan, Beau, Jackson, Remy, Elliot and Mitsuki

1st Grade Lions of The Month: Ryan, Lyla, Theron, Kiara, Beau, Lucia, Elena, Grant, Lainey, Preslynn, Connor and Rakinah

2nd Grade Lions of The Month: Lucy, Elliot, Keegan, Ben, Leo, Finn, Jacob, Yuvaan, Hazel, Derek, Andi, Byron, Blake, Charlie, Liam and Vianney

3rd Grade Lions of The Month: Ky, Levi, Avery, Louise, Henry, Kam, Riaan, Toby, Christine, Hannah, Sofia, Elise, Delaney and Jacob

4th Grade Lions of The Month: Makenzie, Kaari, Eliana, Vivian, Charlie, Albie, Solomon, Oliver, Raymond, Mason, Lauren, Lily, Ashlynn, Bentley, Daphne and Hunter

Links to The Lunch and Breakfast Menus

Breakfast Menu

Lunch Menu

Salad Bar

Weekend Food Sign Up:

Weekend Food Sign Ups

Lunch Times

Visit us anytime to volunteer in the lunch room!

K - 10:40-11:00

1st - 11:00-11:20

2nd - 11:30-11:50

3rd - 11:50-12:10

4th - 12:00-12:20