Annual School Report

Play DATES

Once again, our dynamic PTSA hosted play dates on our school playground over the summer months. These events were greatly appreciated by our newest families, allowing them to become more familiar with our school, our staff members, and potential classmates prior to the start of the school year. We also opened our school library for students to hear fun stories read by staff members and for our new families to use this beautiful space. Our librarian made these summer library hours fun for all.

Meet THE TEACHER

The Pack is Back!  Prior to the first day of school, families were able to visit their children’s classrooms to meet their teachers and drop off their school supplies. Students showed their families around our school using a little scavenger hunt that highlighted some of our key locations and staff throughout our building. While visiting each location, they got a part of a Wolf.  Upon completing the scavenger hunt tour, the students had pieces that were put together to make a wolf.  The wolves were displayed in our entryway hallway for the beginning of the school year to share our united Wolf Pack.

veterans day assembly

We hosted our annual Veteran’s Day Assembly where we honored the family members of our community that served our country. Our 5th graders led us through this event and students sang songs including “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Everyday Heros”.  Each grade level took turns singing a Military Branch song and we concluded with a memorable video compilation of community and family members who have served, or are active duty, in the US Military. Our honored guests, the Veterans, shared that they thoroughly enjoyed this moving experience!

Issaquah schools foundation (ISF) MATH CLUB

This year, we received ISF funds to run a math club before school that would support our students that are approaching standard.  This club was run prior to our end of year state and district testing to help boost students’ confidence and math skills. Our teachers were excited to support our students in this special way.  Our students reported that this club did boost their confidence in math which we count as a BIG win!  Our data shows that the students that participated in the math club did show gains in their math scores, which is another BIG celebration!

SENSORY ROOM AND REGULATION STATIONS

Our Occupational Therapist (OT) continued to work with our PTSA (Parent Teacher Student Association) to help fund our super successful Sensory Room, a place where students could access resources to help them stay regulated throughout their school day. Throughout our school, we teach the Zones of Regulations. This space helps our students return to "green" (baseline). We look forward to introducing this space to more and more students in the coming years.

Our OT also built Regulation Stations on the 2nd and 3rd floors.  A Regulation Station is a place that students can go to take a quick quiet break and then return to class.  The hope is it can also be a place where a student who may be eloping can go to rather than roaming the building unsupervised. Teachers worked to build this into students’ daily schedules as needed.

ART DOCENT PROGRAM

Our parent Art Docents continue to share their art knowledge with our students. They come to school regularly to teach our students about different artists and different styles of artwork. The students especially loved creating clay projects. This year, students got to create super cool clay WOLVES.  The art can be seen throughout the school hallways all year. We appreciate our Art Docents!

FESTIVAL OF CULTURES

Cedar Trails Elementary hosted its annual Festival of Cultures event on March 28. Families were invited to share their cultural heritage with us, and in turn learn about, explore, and celebrate other families’ cultures from different parts of the world. Students earned "stamps" in their passports as they made their way to the various countries’ booths. Guests learned about important aspects of a culture, participated in art projects and even sampled some cultural delicacies. The Festival of Cultures also featured wonderful entertainment, including dancers from China, Mexico, and India. Thanks to the Cedar Trails PTSA and our dedicated volunteers for putting on this informative and special event! It's a favorite among our school community.

READ ACROSS AMERICA

We had a blast during our Read Across America week, where we encouraged lots of positive reading experiences. Our theme was "Be the Hero of Your Own Story" this year.  Throughout the week students were invited to wear fun shirts for “Read My Shirt Day”, bring a stuffed animal for our annual Stuffed Animal Sleepover, come with their family to our after school Bedtime Stories event, visit our Story Walk, and finally end the week with "Dress Like Your Hero" day.   Our PTSA sponsored not one, but two in-person author visits. Authors and illustrators Aron Steinke and Ellie Peterson had the students engaged and entertained throughout their fun presentations.

STEAM FAIR - WAITING ON MORE INFO...

We hosted a "Wolf Week" at the beginning of the school year to remind our students of our school-wide expectations.

ART WALK

The PTSA presented our first Cedar Trails Art Walk on May 30th.  At this event, our school community got to experience student artwork that was showcased, hands-on art activities and show appreciation for our art docents. We had student piano players greeting guests as they entered this beautiful event.

WOLF WEDNESDAYS

In response to our staff's request that our Wolf P.A.C.K. values be reinforced more frequently throughout the school year, we transitioned from our twice-yearly Wolf Week model to a weekly "Wolf Wednesday" intervention. We created a school-wide calendar where each week, students were encouraged to focus on showing a specific value in a specific location—e.g. "Accountable on the Bus" or "Kind on the Playground." Teachers were provided with a number of resources they could use in order to provide instruction on the week's focus to their students, including choice-boards with different activities and prepared thought exercises such as, "What does being a problem-solver in the classroom look like, sound like, and feel like?"

ISD Breakfast PROGRAM

Cedar Trails offers breakfast each morning in the commons, serving between 30-50 students daily.  This program offers hot breakfast a couple days a week, with cold breakfast choices offered daily.

student-led clubs

New this year, and with the help of the Issaquah Schools Foundation and our district leaders, we introduced four student-led after-school clubs. This was so popular that we needed to select the groups by lottery! The four groups selected were: Anime Club, Animal Club, Card Club and Chess Club. The groups met after school, supervised by a Cedar Trails teacher/advisor.

cedar trails at the park

Our PTSA hosted a “winning” event for our families and staff to cheer on our local Mariners (Pro-Baseball Team) and build school community.  We did this in the fall and again in the spring.

nuthtown

In the month of May, the students in Mrs. Nuth’s class work on their economics unit learning about needs and wants, consumers and producers, hometown community helpers and how to run a business. To end this unit, the students build businesses with their business partners and make products to sell with pretend money to their customers (the rest of the school community and district leaders from around the district). These businesses go through and decide what their products are going to be and how to make them out of recycled goods. They construct a store front and come up with a business model on how they will sell their items, for what price, and how they can keep track of their goods.

The students work so hard on their projects and are always very excited to share their hard work with the guests that visit their stores!

The entire student body gets to come through Nuth Town to work “jobs” to earn Nuth Town money to shop at the stores.  This is an exciting event for everyone that experiences it!

Professional Development (PD)

Staff participated in monthly professional development learning opportunities where we increased our capacity around growing our strong literacy instruction through focusing on reading, this was especially more significant this year as we embraced our new literacy curriculum, Benchmark. All grade levels worked together to create common goals around reading and then selected three different reading assessments to track ongoing student progress. The individual grade-level goals supported our School Improvement Plan (SIP) in Reading. Our PD also focused on how to support, as a system, students who need additional support, either academically, behaviorally or both.  We learned more about UDL (Universal Design of Learning (see more details below) to support our vision of inclusion at Cedar Trails.

udl (universal design of learning)

This year, our district offered a class called IGNITE where teachers could sign up for additional learning about UDL.  We had the following school team members join this optional learning opportunity where they attended a summer session on UDL, continued learning throughout the year followed by being LAB classrooms for teachers to observe UDL in their classroom settings: A kindergarten, third grade and 4th grade classroom teacher, our Benchmark Implementation Specialist, and our Educational Technology Lead.  Our Cedar Trails team is in our year four of the five-year UDL plan.  This year, the IGNITE team took the reins on our UDL teaching/learning experience by offering regular UDL newsletters with helpful UDL tips, reminders and classroom highlights of UDL strategies observed throughout Cedar Trails classrooms.  This team also created a bulletin board in the staff room with a variety of visuals of UDL strategies that can be used in the classrooms.

Success Blocks

We built our entire building schedule around our Success Blocks. As a title school, we had half-time academic interventionists who helped support our most struggling readers. Once COVID mitigation protocols lifted a bit in the spring, we were able to increase our Success Blocks to the grade level teams where one teacher from each grade level supported the next group of learners that needed additional support in their foundational reading skills.  Since being identified as a Title School, we have been able to expand our Success Blocks by including two Intervention Specialist teachers (one is full time, and one is half time).  We routinely review data to determine who needs this support most in reading and math.  Once identified, our students get supported by one of the interventionists or the classroom teacher that supports the smaller success block group with the intervention curriculum.

Intervention Areas

When building our school, we included three intervention areas in each hallway. These areas include a rainbow table with a teacher chair in the middle and student stools around the other side of the table. These areas also include a dry-erase board easel and a 3-tiered cart for quick teacher tools. It’s fun to see how these spaces are used throughout our school day to support students at all levels.