End of Year Message from the Hall Leadership Team!!

Fall Walkathon as seen from above!!

Dear Hall Families,

We hope you are settling into an adventurous yet relaxing summer. As we wind down the year we have had the opportunity to reflect on our shared experiences. This year has been amazing, with both challenges (that we faced together) and great accomplishments. We celebrate our perseverance in the face of adversity as well as our ability to engage in meaningful dialogue and partnership across all facets of our community. As your child has grown and learned from their experiences here, we too have grown and learned with them.

Highlights from the year

• An amazing and inspirational Day One!
• Watching our students make kindness a reality on campus every day.
• Collaborating more with Redwood High School to facilitate a more meaningful transition to high school for 8th graders. Hear stories from the February grade level assemblies co-facilitated by RHS students.
• Whole school gatherings with guest speakers Kevin Laue, Michael Pritchard and Brodie Kaster.
• The Unity Gathering in front of school in February to reassert that everyone belongs at Hall! (Image below)
• The T2 Excellence in Learning Ceremony. Along with honoring students with outstanding GPAs as we had done in the past, we were proud to recognize greatness in student achievement in categories like Best Teammate, Strongest Work Ethic, Most Growth and Unsung Hero. Most importantly, this event included the entire body and almost 200 parents. (Image below)

Unity Gathering – We Are One!!

#TeacherAppreciationWeek Photo Essay (and Thank You Card)

Teachers team up to seek greatness – victory (for kids) is the only option!

It is Teacher Appreciation Week. Let’s press pause on the kinetic bustle of their daily work with 520 energetic adolescents to enumerate all the things that teachers do – and all the ways they make our school, community and society a greater place for ALL.

Teachers are thinkers, dreamers, artists, creators, innovators. (Image courtesy Amy Burvall)

Teachers get into the spirit of whatever the occasion – and they go all out in doing so!

Skyscapes Over Hall, Part III

Each year we like to share some of our favorite moments spent looking upwards to the ever-changing, fascinating and powerful phenomena of the sky. Our classroom is the world – terrestrial and airborne!

Celebrating Diversity and Confronting Adversity with Brodie Kaster!

We were incredibly honored to have presenter Brodie Kaster join us on Monday, February 6 to lead 90-minute grade level gatherings. The themes he addressed including cultivating grit and perseverance to both accomplish our goals and to overcome adversity, while also developing deeper empathy for ourselves and others. The day was made even more special by Redwood High School’s Peer Resource students joining us as co-facilitators for the day.

This is the energy @brodiekaster brings to WARM UP w/@RHSgiants Peer Resource kids for #Diversity/Adversity assemblies today! #schoolculture pic.twitter.com/22tzNgjvCl

— Hall Middle School (@HallMiddle) February 6, 2017

We Are One!

Students gathering around the Kindness Tree in late September.

School Culture Update – by Tenisha Tate, Assistant Principal

Our goal at Hall Middle School is to develop all students both academically and socially. We aim to foster the whole child. As such, we value the development of school culture equally with academic progress. Our approach to building school culture is robust and multi-layered, ranging from a school-wide focus on positive behavior supports to specialized interventions for smaller groups of students. Some examples of the aforementioned include regular student assemblies, student lead discussions/presentations to the entire student body during advisory, systematic implementation of our Cougar Code, including daily opportunities for students to be recognized for implementing the cougar code, student of the month and staff consistently responding if and when student concerns arise. This includes issuing consequences to students for participating in behaviors that counter our Cougar expectations.

Please ask your child about their experience with the following:

• Caught Being Kind or Showing Respect (Aspects of the Cougar Code)
• Advisory Talks
• Student Clubs
• Staff following up when students report concerns
• No Bully System

Kindness Is…

What is kindness? Kindness is a word on our Cougar Code poster – but, more importantly, kindness is an action, an attitude, a state of mind, a way of being. Kindness is something you can see, feel, hear, touch – and when someone shares with you something delicious to eat, it is something you can taste as well!

The theme of our first quarter of school is Kindness. Our amazing Leadership students accepted a challenge posed by administration and created this video in three days, which we debuted at Back To School Night last week:

Leadership students also decided to celebrate staff by going around with a coffee cart last week.

We Step Up and Interrupt Acts of Hate!

Greetings Hall community,

Please view our message about how Hall Middle is responding to the racist graffiti found at neighboring Redwood High School yesterday morning.

All Advisory classes set aside normal activities today to discuss this matter. Please review and reflect on our Advisory discussion with your child at home.