Dingess Vision Statement

Vision Statement:

Dingess Elementary Core Beliefs are that education involves and includes everyone. We guarantee a high quality instructional program that contains a rigorous and vertically curriculum, effective teaching and ongoing assessments. We aim to establish, ensure and maintain learning environments that are safe, orderly, and free of bullying as well as fostering a nurturing, healthy, structured, and sustainable, clean, environment designed to stimulate the creativity and innovation of each learner. We believe that every child is unique and important and with this in mind, we provide higher levels of rigor with differentiated instruction for all students. As well as interventions for students who are not proficient, so that every

According to last year’s smarter balance summative test, Dingess 4th grade met the state standard in English Language Arts. The third grade did not met the state standard pertaining to English Language Arts. The third grade was at 43% and the 4th grade was at 52%. The data from STAR 360 suggest that our students need improvement on text complexity, vocabulary, phonics, prefix, suffixes, and segmenting and blending of words. Dingess Elementary has been participating in Specific Personal Learning (SPL) since 2010 with the focus being the five components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. We also target writing skills, and math skills. The kindergarten students study phonemic awareness activities from Phonemic Awareness in Young Children. Students in grades 1st and 2nd are given a spelling inventory from Words Your Way and students are placed in groups according to the skills they lack. 3rd and 4th grade students are placed in groups to deal with their weakness on STAR 360 and the WV Summative Test. The students are in groups working on text complexity, writing, and comprehension skills. Because of systematic SPL over the years, our students have successfully improved their accuracy scores at it pertains to reading and reading fluency. Gains in accuracy continue to improve because of proper placement and class

With greatest indication from third and fourth grade teachers who have shown evidence that these standards are being implemented more consistently through the delivery of more project based, inquiry based instruction in these classrooms. It is clear that kindergarten through second grade teachers are struggling with the implementing writing into the curriculum as reflected in principal and Instructional Coaches’ observational notes and logs. Teachers in all grades kindergarten through fourth are in considerable need of training and proper implementation of high quality literacy centers that can pinpoint specific skill deficits for students in the area of Reading Language Arts and quality centers that promote writing across the curriculum. Teachers also need to be using data more efficiently to drive their classroom instruction and create differentiated instruction for those students who are in need of