Dear Mr. Ellis:
On behalf of our staff, students and parents, I would like to thank you for the wonderful job you did last week at our school!
Your large group presentations were excellent. You demonstrated knowledge of our curriculum at each grade level and reinforced concepts and skills that our students are learning. You integrated science, social studies, and language arts in a way that was meaningful and very exciting to the children.
Our staff was especially impressed with your ability to teach and to involve the children in your lessons. Your classroom management skills were excellent and greatly enhanced the learning for all children. Your understanding of how learning occurs was evident as you used a variety of strategies to help students understand, process and retain information.
In addition to your classroom visits and grade-level assemblies, we appreciated your willingness to work with our families. Thank you for involving our families in preserving their family heritage by offering two district-wide "Family Nights." I have personally heard many positive comments from parents and children who attended one of your evening workshops. One of the most telling comments was heard repeatedly, "We just had to come tonight because our child has talked non-stop about Mr. Ellis' visit to his/her classroom!"
Thank you again! We are looking forward to the opportunity for a return visit.
Sincerely,
Jeri K. Mifflin
Principal at Bennett Woods Elementary School
Okemos, MI
Dear Mr. Ellis:
I want to take this opportunity to thank you for coming to Heyworth Elementary School. Our students really enjoyed having you spend the whole day with us. I thought the staff in-service went very well too. I received lots of positive feedback from my teachers.
Thank you again!
Sincerely,
Brian Bradshaw
Principal at Heyworth Elementary School
Heyworth, IL
Dear Mr. Ellis:
The artist in residency program which you provided for our students in grades K-5 was a great success. Your entertaining storytelling and enthusiastic coaching of our students were both stimulating and motivating. Parents and teachers observed continuous excitement among the students throughout the week. Parents told me how difficult it was to get the children to bed at night. They wanted to stay up and continue to develop, write and rehearse their stories. I found your sessions to be well constructed, incorporating methods which tapped all learning modalities, while being interesting and entertaining at the same time. Of equal importance was the way in which the activities drew upon the higher order thinking skills of the students. This was a valuable experience. I hope that we have the opportunity to work with you again. In the mean time, I wish you continued success in your work.
Sincerely,
John McCormick
Principal at Elm School
Burr Ridge, IL
Dear Brian "Fox" Ellis,
I would like to take this time to thank you for sharing your talents and expertise with our staff and students. It is important for you to know the tremendous impact that you have had on our school motivating the teachers to enhance and rethink their instructional approach to science.
I was so pleased to hear the excited chatter and feed back from many of my staff members immediately following your Professional Development Inservice. After a lengthy day of instruction in the classroom coupled with the trials and tribulations of daily survival late in the school year, asking teachers to sit through an after school staff development can be asking for a miracle.
Through your animated disposition, you successfully provided meaningful, actively engaging and usable information for teachers at all grade levels, kindergarten through sixth grade. I was so pleased to see the staff members laughing and listening to your stories spellbound. The teachers were motivated and anxious to use your techniques in their instruction the following day. I was even more amazed to see staff members actually try their hands at story telling the next day with their students. What a feat. You reiterated how important it was to use new strategies within a 48 hours period and your wisdom and enthusiasm motivated my teachers to do just that.
I am looking forward in seeing how they springboard off of what they learned from you and how they integrate the materials we purchased which you created. I have already had several teachers ask to use the materials.
Please know that you have a powerful program filled with developmentally and age appropriate strategies for bringing science alive in the classroom. Your way of seamlessly integrating oral and written communication skills with vocabulary and difficult concepts is incredible.
We hope to have you return to our school in the future. I will be honored to share our experience with other schools throughout my district and highly recommend your program to other educators in the future.
I hope that you will continue to motivate teachers to enhance their instruction to help children be excited about what they are learning. You truly have a gift; it is so wonderful that you are willing to share it.
Sincerely,
Beth Yankee
Principal at The Woodward School for Technology & Research
Kalamazoo, MI
Dear Mr. Ellis,
From the very first moment I saw you at the ANJEE Conference the previous week, I knew you were going to warm the hearts and engage the minds of our students. Your program accommodated our every need as the Family and Environment magnet school. Your stories beautifully wove those themes together.
The first presentation was geared toward the Kindergarten through second grades. You brilliantly engaged them from the moment they walked into the large performance room be beating a rhythm in which the children repeat. As you proceeded to share the first story, students clung to every word. They laughed and listened. Our teachers were also engaged in the story and were impressed with your ability to relate to this age group so appropriately. The second story allowed students to actively participate in the storytelling process. The students were then given a most appropriate homework assignment - to go home and share one of these stories with their families. What better way to remember the story than by telling it!
For our older grades, you summed up our entire science curriculum by showing the interconnectedness of life on earth even before we realized there was life and an earth. The story included specific examples of what the students in grades 3 - 5 were learning about in their science classes. They too were listening attentively and wondering.
To complete the day, you conducted a workshop for our teachers that integrated the writing process with science. The main message, "science is doing", was obvious. As you engaged us in the act of doing science we were able to practice observation skills, recall, retelling. This combination of skills was then applied to creating samples of poetry. Our teachers are among the best in this school district. We all learned something valuable from you that day. Teachers began implementing some of your recommendations the very next day!
We are looking forward to your return to our area next year. Furthermore, because of your incredible knack to relate to students and teachers, we will recommend your programs to our district science coordinator, so that you may be able to work with more teachers from our district.
Susan Bartol,
Technology and Environmental Magnet Coordinator,
Montclair, NJ
