I hope everyone has had a wonderful week as we prepare for a lovely weekend. This has been an extremely busy week at Oyster Adams as we saw several visitors come to both campuses to learn from our community of learners and teachers. On Wednesday, several members of the Early Childhood Education department at central office visited Oyster Adams’ Oyster campus to observe our youngest learners in Pre-K 4. The visitors were extremely pleased with the work that Mrs. Gracia and Mr. Serrano are doing. They were here to evaluate our implementation of the new math curriculum, building blocks, that is in its first year of implementation. On a rating scale of 1-4 the team from central office rated our Pre-K team at 3.5. That is quite impressive considering that this is a new curriculum, and we are only about 60% into the school year. Some comments that were shared were; teachers were well planned, the use of data used by teachers to create learning experiences for our students in Pre-K was at an exemplary level and that the level of engagement by students was very high. Awesome job Pre-K team.

On Thursday we had 21 visitors from Baltimore City Public School visit to learn about our Dual Language model. They spent the morning at Oyster and the afternoon at Adams. They all left at the end of the day with many positive experiences and had many great things to say about our teachers and students. They were impressed at how well our students completed complex tasks in all classes visited, how text rich our classrooms were and the level on biliteracy our students displayed, and the level of support given to students to reach those levels of biliteracy.

This year, we are administering CAPE assessment (formerly PARCC) beginning on April 1, 2024. Please see the table below for exact dates for all the assessment administration dates.

4th and 5th grades

• Language Arts English: April 2 - April 4
• Mathematics: April 9 - April 12

6th, 7th, and 8th grades

• Language Arts English: April 30 - May 2
• Mathematics: May 7 - May 9

5th and 8th grade

• Science: April 23 - April 26

3rd grade

• Language Arts English: May 7 - May 9
• Mathematics: May 13 - May 15

All testing will take place in the morning on the dates listed above. Please try to ensure our students are at school and on time on each of the dates. Also, please try not to schedule any appointment on the dates listed above and if you must try to have the appointments occur after lunch. Thanks for your support with this and please remember that these exams play an important role in our school’s rating. We encourage all students to participate in the exams.

We will be experiencing the most significant solar eclipse in over 90 years in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area in over 100 years. The eclipse is estimated to block approximately 90% of the Sun’s light to our region of the Earth. The eclipse is scheduled to begin at around 2:15 and end around 4:30. We will be providing students at both campuses with solar eclipse protective lens and will be taking them out to experience the phenomena. More details about the event will soon follow as we are partnering with the OCC to create a wonderful experience for our community of learners.

Oyster Adams Night at Johnny Pistolas - March 30. The 8th graders are holding a fundraising event at Johnny Pistolas on Saturday, March 30 from 4-7 pm. Families from all grades are welcome (adults and kids)! Come connect with friends and support end of year trips and graduation activities for the class. RSVP and ticket information are included in the Flyer

Chisholm Elementary (formerly known as Tyler Elementary) is excited to host an inaugural Community Ca$h Conference on Saturday, April 27 from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. The "College Gurl," Jessica Brown, will open the event! Then, participants will explore empowering personal finance sessions about budgeting, buying a home, & more! Free childcare and free lunch will be provided to registered participants. Registration is open now at this link. POC: [email protected]

Parent Teacher Conferences (PTC) will be held on Marh 14th, and most should have begun to receive links for the PTC sign-up sheets. All grade level sign-up links should be included in upcoming grade level communications. As a reminder, March 15th schools will be closed for students and teachers.

Wishing you all a great rest of the week.