Hello Families and Supporters, Happy Friday and Happy (belated) Earth Day! Yesterday's weather postponed our Earth Day trash clean-up, but classes got outside today to clean up our school grounds and parts of the town of Truxton. Thanks for the community encouragement our students received from some community members as they cleaned up trash along the roadside between our school and the creek. And thanks to our students and teachers for keeping the earth clean and helping out the Town of Truxton. We had a mixed week with changes in weather and students learning both remotely and in-person as quite a few of our students were quarantined after an exposure to COVID-19. As usual, our teachers and students rolled with the changes and made sure that students continued learning. Way to go Truxton Academy School Family! On Wednesday, we recognized children of military families by wearing purple. 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. See the attachment for more information about how to sign up for Amazon Smile. 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. Makerspace Donations: We would gladly accept the following items as donations for our makerspace and art room. Please make sure all donations are clean before dropping them off at the school. - empty paper towel rolls, - cereal or snack boxes, - bottle caps, - crayons, - colored pencils, - kids' scissors, - acrylic or tempera paints, - wood quality paint brushes, - watercolor paper, - canvas paper ***At this time, please no more egg cartons, yarn, or construction paper. We have all we need for now. Upcoming Dates: 4/23- 3rd Quarter Report Cards sent home 4/27- Third Grade ELA Assessment 4/30- In-house Field Lesson with animal visits Updates from the classrooms: Mrs. Francis' Class This week in Kindergarten we learned all about ways we can help the Earth to celebrate Earth Day. We read about recycling and reusing, saving water, and picking up litter. On Friday we headed out to make a difference by cleaning up our little piece of the planet. We found so many things to pick up! We also ran into several community members who thanked us for our hard work. We had a blast being Earth helpers! In ELA we read the book Bunny Cakes this week and practiced identifying characters, the setting, the problem and solution, and sequencing to retell the story. In phonics we worked on reading CVC words, finding rhymes, and practicing our sight words. We played Toss a Chip in Math and practiced recording our results (how many times it turned up red or yellow) using a math sentence. We will keep practicing putting groups together and separating groups as we learn more about addition and subtraction. In science we asked how we can change the shape of wood? We talked about ways to do that and then opted to use sandpaper instead of chainsaws like the kiddos wanted(!) to see changes in our pine samples. We also compared sawdust to other wood shavings and saw similarities and differences. It was a fun week in Kindergarten with our small group, but we missed our friends who were learning remotely and can't wait for our class to be whole again! Ms. Jess' Class This week in K/1 we learned a lot about Earth Day! We started new reading groups this week and read about how and why we have to take care of our earth. Our writing and math workshops were also all about Earth Day. We did a nature walk to observe all the things that are so important to us on earth. We wrote and drew about all the ways we can take care of nature. In math we finished up our unit on fractions by making fraction pizzas. In Science we learned how roots work by leaving celery in colored water. We made hypotheses' and then observations the next day to see if our hypotheses were proved correct or incorrect. The students are creating different games for us to play so we can practice our phonics skills in fun, new ways. Friday we walked down through Truxton to the baseball field to pick up litter and help take care of our community and earth. Ms. Smith's Class This week we practiced reading words with the controlling r! We did some fun word sorts, we read passages with ar and or and we loved watching our silly video about the controlling r! We also wrote in our journals about ways that we can keep the Earth safe in celebration of Earth Day! We are working very hard to write the whole time, to use capitals and punctuation, and use spaces between our words so we can read what we have written! We are also on chapter 6 of our Junie B Jones chapter book and loving it! In Math, we have been working very hard on doing Math word problems! Our class has been doing an amazing job and working very hard! We also had our SUNY Cortland practicum students give a virtual lesson on Coins! Here is the poem that we had so much fun reciting in our class! *Penny, penny, easily spent; Copper brown and worth one cent! *Nickel nickel thick and fat; You're worth 5 cents, I know that! *Dime, dime little and thin; I remember you're worth 10! *Quarter quarter, big and bold; You're worth 25 I'm told! In Science we have had our third-grade teacher, Ms. Hull, visit to help us with our Earth day project! Students walked around the school to find things that they noticed were hurting the Earth. They then brainstormed ways they could help the Earth! We have decided to create posters to ask people to help us clean up on our Earth Day clean-up day and we have also made signs that ask people to please close their lockers so animals from outside don't come into our school! We are very proud of our work as advocates for the Earth and are excited to inspire others to make a change! Ms. Sol's Class Second / Third grade this week continued the read aloud, Mother West Wind Why Stories followed by oral and written narrations. We continue to do the word riddles of the day where they make as many words as possible from the scrambled letter and find out the words of the day. In math we are working with numbers of the day, borrowing with subtraction, repeated addition preparing for multiplication and today we worked with mirrors & symmetry. This week we had morning circle and mindfulness activities. Mrs. Hull's Class Third graders learned remotely this week. We have had a lot of fun connecting with our friends online in Zoom meetings, breakout rooms, and in Google Meet. It's amazing how flexible we are as we transition from in-person learning to remote learning and back again. In honor of Earth Day this week, we read "The Night of the Grizzlies," which offered us the message to respect our earth and care for all the creatures on it. We can all do little things to protect our environment, like properly disposing of our garbage instead of littering or dumping trash. On Thursday, we attended a virtual field trip to a wool farm and learned a lot about how to harvest and use wool. Have a great weekend! PE Since I haven't been teaching in person this, students are enjoying a free week of choice activities at school in addition to learning the basics of Kickball. For our 3rd grade and virtual students have been answering questions in Google Classroom for P.E. which makes me oh, so happy to see their interactions! They have been racing and running (in place and around the house) with our virtual classes with our "Save the Planet" and "Sonic" videos. Third and Virtual students have also learned the basics of Kickball which will help them as we head into the baseball unit next week. Spanish In K/1, students continued to learn about los animales de la granja! They created our own picture dictionaries to help us visualize los animales and sang songs to help us remember the words. We also started a book to help us listen for our vocabulario. In second grade, students continued to learn about insectos! We played a matching memory game, matching the words to our pictures as well as "Insectos Bingo"! Second grade is continuing to learn more human sujetos (subjects) such as "él" (he), "ella" (she), and "Usted" (you). In third grade, students did great work in learning more and more about grammar and comidas y bebidas! We continued to practice learning about all of our human subjects and began to learn about infinitives. We also visited "Senorita Jasmine's Restaurante" to practice our vocabulary words. In virtual third grade, students continue learning about lugares y transportation as well as a bunch of grammar! We learned about infinitives and how to start conjugating our words in the present tense. Keep up the good work, chicos y chicas! 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 of our school family! Have a great weekend! - Sara and the Truxton Academy Team
- Sara Petit-McClure