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  • Sara Petit-McClure

Update from our Head of School - April 16, 2021

Hello Families and Supporters,


What an exciting week we had with a walking field lesson and lots of visitors! The cutest of our visitors were baby goats from Frosty Morning Farm who came to visit this morning! The students all did a great job and received compliments from the humans who accompanied the goats for being so gentle. Thanks to Karl Frost and Kelly Meehan for arranging this learning opportunity for our students! Be sure to check out our facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/truxtonacademy) for some pictures of this experience coming soon.

Earlier this week, we said good-bye to our trout friends as we helped stock the fish population of the Tioughnioga River through our partnership with SUNY Morrisville with the Trout in the Classroom Program. The students learned about the fish life cycles, habitat needs, and anatomy through this project. Our third grade students in Mrs. Hull's class became teachers and taught the other classes about the trout.

April is "Kids Gardening Month" and this past Wednesday was National Gardening Day. In All-School Meeting, we talked about gardens and how plants need pollinators to make seeds and reproduce. We read the book, Flower Talk: How plants use color to communicate by Sara Levine and learned that certain flower colors attract certain pollinators. Afterwards, the kindergarten and first grade students learned about the parts of a flower and then used materials of their choice to make their own flower. The second and third graders learned about what pollinators are attracted to which flower and played a game matching up flowers to their pollinators. Gardening teaches so many important skills and pieces of information. If you garden with your children, or want to start, check out this contest they can enter. https://kidsgardening.org/kids-garden-month-2021/?mc_cid=7c2bfe5542&mc_eid=77df440ec9 2021-2022 Application and Enrollment Our application period has officially ended, and we still have spots open in some grades. Please continue to spread the word about our school and encourage interested families to apply. If you know of any interested families, please encourage them to apply for their children to attend our school next year. Applications can be found at our website, www.truxtonacademy.org.

Ways to Help Our School Amazon Amazon Smile is a division of amazon that donates a portion of sales from many items to a variety of charities and nonprofits. Truxton Academy is one of those nonprofits. If you are purchasing items from amazon, please go to https://smile.amazon.com/ and choose Truxton Academy as your charity of choice. Purchases you are making anyway will benefit our school. Bottle and Can Collection: Our partnership with T&T Redemption in Riverside Plaza is active! Spread the word that people can drop off bottles and cans, let them know it's for Truxton Academy Charter School, and we'll get the credit! Donations: Monetary donations are always welcomed through our website www.truxtonacademy.org. To make a monetary donation, go to our website and click the Donate Now button if you want to make a contribution. From the PTO: Hola familias! If you are still waiting for your popcorn, you shouldn't have to wait much longer, it should be en route. Thank you so much for your patience and for supporting the Truxton Academy PTO, we hope to see you at our next meeting! Topic: Truxton Academy PTO meeting Time: May 6, 2021 05:30 PM Eastern Time Upcoming Dates: 4/20- Third Grade ELA Assessment 4/21- Purple up for Military Child Month: Wear purple to honor the children of our military service providers in our community 4/22- Earth Day Walking Field Lesson to clean up trash: Parents, please return the permission slip by Tuesday 4/20. 4/23- 3rd Quarter Report Cards sent home 4/30- In-house Field Lesson with animal visits Updates from the classrooms: Mrs. Francis' Class The Kindergarteners have worked hard this week at practicing their sight words, learning the sight words "at" and "an", reading CVC words, unscrambling mixed up sentences, and reading in their reading groups as well as adding words to their independent writing. They have been increasing their reading fluency and comprehension during reading groups as well. They work very hard when reading with me and are showing great growth! In Math we played a game called "Double Compare" in which the kids draw two cards and see how much they have all together and then compare their total with a partner's total to see who has more. We also brought Racing Bears back as a way to practice counting and dividing numbers into two smaller groups. We worked on our understanding of teen numbers as well this week focusing on the number 12 to reinforce "teen" numbers as a group of 10 and some ones. In science we asked what happens when wood gets wet? We used droppers to see how small amounts of water can either absorb or bead on different types of wood. Then we noticed how different woods sink (plywood) or float (pine and cedar) after being left in a container of water for 2 days. We also made predictions of how many paper clips we could attach to a piece of basswood before it sunk. Predictions ranged from 6 or 7 to 10, 20, and even 1,000,000 (that's a lot of paper clips!). The results of the experiment showed us that between 14 and 22 paper clips can submerge a wood raft. Lastly we had a fun time on our walking field trip to release the trout into a bigger, better habitat. We will miss you, Popcorn, Flash, Creeper 1, Creeper 2, Fish, Pizza, Ice cream, Goldie, and Stinko!!! Enjoy the river! Ms. Jess' Class What a fun learning week we had in K/1! We had many special learning opportunities this week. We started with one of our SUNY Cortland Practicum students teaching a read aloud activity about family. We had presentations about how to stay safe from the Cortland Advocacy Center. Wednesday we released our trout and had wonderful activities presented by the third graders. Friday we learned about baby goats and were able to meet and pet them! During our regularly scheduled learning time we started learning about fractions and parts of a plant. We are continuing our phonics review, reading skills and our "News Reporting" writing. Awesome work this week kiddos! Ms. Smith's Class This week in phonics we learned about r-controlled vowels. The spelling pattern "ar" says ‘arrr’ like a pirate! We make an ‘o’ with our mouths when we say, "or". The patterns for "ir," "er," and "ur," all say "er" as if we are mad. Feel free to quiz your kids on the different sounds of controlling r! We started reading our first chapter book together during snack; Junie B. Jones! In Math, we are finishing up our unit on measurement! Students have been using different items to create things that are longer and shorter. We also learned about the ruler and spent time outside measuring different objects! We had a great time learning about trout from the third graders and releasing them in their natural habitat! In Science, we have finished making our chicken coops and have them in display in our hallway! Thanks to one of our virtual families, we were introduced to baby chicks over the computer. For the rest of the year we will be watching chicks hatch and grow! Also, on Friday, we were so excited to see the baby goats that came to visit our school! Ms. Sol's Class This week in Second/ Third grade we have been finding out what great progress each of us have made as we have completed our 3rd marking period assessments. We continued our read aloud of Mother West Wind Why Stories followed by written/ oral narrations. We started a readers theatre outdoors in the gazebo. In math we continued reviewing borrowing and started working with repeated addition to prepare for multiplication. In math we continued with skip counting 2's 3's 4's 5's 10's. In science we started reading and discussing the States of Matter: solids, liquids, and gasses. Mrs. Hull's Class This week in third grade, we learned a lot about trout! We planned lessons and activities for the other classes and taught about trout after we released them Wednesday morning. In science, we are learning about reducing, reusing, and recycling our waste. We designed a way to measure how much food we waste at school each day and planning ways to reduce our food waste. We also had a guest teacher, Priscilla from the Phillips Free Library. She invited us to be a part of a new collaborative writing experience that will be archived at the Phillips Free Library. Priscilla led a writing workshop to get us started writing about our experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Any one in the community can participate in this writing project and you may find more information about it on the library's website https://www.phillipsfreelibrary.org/ Have a great weekend! PE We just finished up our second week of TEAM BUILDING, and I can't believe how well everyone worked together. Students were fantastic problem solvers while listening to each other, encouraging teammates, and taking turns. I think their favorite was "Cat & Mouse" tag while using the parachute! Next week we will be heading outside for baseball. Spanish In K/1, students began to learn about los animales de la granja - farm animals! We listened to a song, "Mi Tio tiene una Granja" to practice our animales and are making our own book on farm animals! In second grade, students continued to learn about insectos! They made flashcards to take home and practice. We also played memory and matching games to practice our vocabulary. Students also began to learn about human subjects such as "Yo" (I), "Tu" (you), "el" (he), and "ella" (she). In third grade, students continued to learn about comidas y bebidas as well as subject pronouns! We added a picture dictionary to our interactive notebooks and played a memory game to test our vocabulary knowledge! In virtual third grade, we are continuing to learn about lugares y transportation as well as subject pronouns! We also had a mini-lesson on accents and played a jeopardy style game to learn our vocabulary! Sigue con en buen trabajo! Keep up the good work! As a reminder, we have a public facebook page where we share many pictures and stories of our students learning. Please check it out to see some of the wonderful work our teachers and students are doing every day! (https://www.facebook.com/truxtonacademy) Feel free to share our posts to spread the word about our school! Additionally, the PTO has a parent specific facebook group. If you are a parent and wish to join this group, you can find it at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/truxtonacademycharterschool Thank you for your continued support, Sara and the Truxton Academy Team

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