This past summer I had the chance to visit Mesa Verde National Park in Southwest Colorado.  This Native American civilization is so interesting to me.  They lived in cliff dwellings for hundreds of years.  See a couple of my pictures and a description from the Mesa Verde website.

 

        

The cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde are some of the most notable and best preserved ruins in the North American continent. Sometime during the late 1190s, after primarily living on the mesa top for 600 years, many Ancestral Puebloans began living in pueblos they built beneath the overhanging cliffs. The structures ranged in size from one-room storage units to villages of more than 150 rooms. While still farming the mesa tops, they continued to reside in the alcoves, repairing, remodeling, and constructing new rooms for nearly a century. By the late 1270s, the population began migrating south into present-day New Mexico and Arizona. By 1300, the Ancestral Puebloan occupation of Mesa Verde ended."

 

 

 

I think it's been a really good first full week of school.  One of the goals in my class is for our scholars to become great informational readers.  Meaning that they are able to read texts with non-fiction information and can effectively identify and pull critical facts from them.  As I told my classes, this is a skill that I didn't learn until I was in college and that made for some tough years while earing my degree.  So this week and next we'll be focused on learning some strategies and skills around informational reading.  The link below is to an interesting article about the push for change in core standards that increase crtical thinking skills and not lowering standards to meet basic skills.  I found it interesting and this is the kind of article that makes me want to continue looking for new ways for our scholars to be engaged and learn.  Comment back about this post if you have some thoughts on the article!

 

 

Thanks! 

 

Mr. Thibault 

WELCOME BACK!

 

I can't wait to get this year up and running!  All of the staff has been working hard to get the school ready to go for a great year here at Heights.  I'm so excited to have another year to work with 6th graders in West Dallas.  While I personally believe we met some great goals as a first year school, I'm ready to face and meet more challenging goals this year and to continue our work together to truly prepare the Heights scholars for college.  That is my big goal and the goal of Uplift Education and Heights Peparatory. 

 

SLA was a great chance to see the returning scholars and to meet our new 6th graders and Kindergarteners and now I'm ready to get the year going!  Have a great year!