Hello Families and Supporters,
Happy December and Happy Friday! We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, as different as it may have been. We are gearing up for winter weather and winter holidays here at Truxton Academy. We have a Christmas tree outside donated by Steve Leet with a sturdy stand. (Thank you!!!) The students are excited to make edible ornaments for our bird friends to decorate this tree! Throughout this month we will be learning about a variety of winter holidays that people celebrate in addition to all of the other wonderful learning our teachers and students do every day. Our students are looking forward to more snow to explore and play in. December Character Trait and Skill: December's Focus Skill is composure and the Character Trait that aligns to this is Integrity. We are continuing to focus on Kindness and Encouragement and also adding Composure and Integrity to these skills. Composure is about remaining calm in the face of frustration. This doesn't mean that we don't get upset or feel the negative emotions that we are feeling. It means that when we feel these negative emotions, we have strategies for handling them positively. STAR breathing is one strategy that is great for both children and adults. STAR breathing stands for Smile, Take a breath, AND Relax. This, along with Balloon Breaths, and the other breathing techniques, will be taught and practiced with our students this month. Integrity means showing our best selves to the world. This doesn't mean we are always perfect. This means that we work hard to always be our best selves. Having strategies to deal with negative emotions helps adults and children alike be their best selves and live their lives with integrity. Composure is highly connected to compassion. When our students are upset, we approach it with compassion to first help them calm down using breathing or other strategies. Once they are calm and able to process information, then we take the steps to help them reflect on their behavior and teach them the skills they need in order to learn from their mistakes. This month's focus on Composure will help teach them the skills they need to do those first steps of calming down. Holiday Food and Gift Baskets from the local Truxton church: The local East Homer- Truxton Methodist Church is putting together food baskets and gifts for families who might have a happier holiday season with this help. They would love to help out families from our school. If it would help your family to receive one of these baskets, please let Leaf or Sara know by sending us an email and we will connect you with the Pastor Kim from the church. 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. Additionally, our teachers have put together a wishlist for items from amazon that would be helpful in the classrooms and school. If you would like to help our school by purchasing items on this list, please first log into amazon smile and choose Truxton Academy as your charity of choice. Then click the following link from this email to see the items on the wish list: https://a.co/e54qzMg Thank you to those of you who have already purchased items for our school. We appreciate your generosity! Parent Group Jumpstart: We will be hosting a meeting via zoom to jumpstart our PTO for this school year. The current health situation makes things challenging for everyone, but we are looking forward to partnering with our parents to make this school year great! We hope to see you all on zoom on Tuesday! Wednesday All-School Meeting Breakout Room Volunteers: We invite parents to be Wednesday All-School Meeting Breakout Room discussion leaders. If you are interested and available between 11:00 and 12:00, please email Ms. Petit-McClure (sara.petitmcclure@truxtonacademy.org). Wednesday All School meetings will resume in December. Upcoming Dates: 12/14: Board of Trustees Meeting 7:00 PM (In-person and via zoom: link to come) 12/23- 1/3: Winter Holiday Recess (School Closed) Updates from the classrooms: Mrs. Francis' Class This week in Kindergarten we learned how to use our reading and writing superpowers! In reading we practiced our power of super focus during reading time. We also practiced pointer power and have begun to point to words when reading sentences to notice 1:1 correspondence. We used our writing super power of super stretching to stretch out words and then use our super hearing to practice listening closely to all the sounds we hear in a word. For math we have worked hard to take our time to count objects in a group, represent that group by making a like group, and then representing that group. This is tricky because there are many steps to remember and lots of counting and double checking to be done. We will keep practicing this key kindergarten skill using numbers within 10. In science we wrapped up initial learning about the various habitats in our world. We will spend the next week learning about the cool adaptations which help animals (and plants) live in their habitats. It was another great week in Kindergarten! Ms. Jess' Class This week K/1 students were reading and writing rockstars! We started new reading groups ELA rotations. The first graders are using their reading strategies to read texts and complete a writer's response. The kindergartners are making short vowel books and reading CVC stories. In math the students are adding up to 20 using number lines, ten frames, hundreds charts and pictures. We played a new math game this week called Double Compare. In science we are continuing our unit on animal habitats. We read The Great Kapok Tree and learned about why it is important to protect our animal habitats. We had some third graders come help us with this! We also had fun reading different holiday books this week. Great work kiddos! Ms. Smith's Class In ELA our students have been working on, in-class, rotations. For their writing rotation, the students have been working on creating sentences that have a capital at the beginning and a period at the end. We have also been working on editing our handwriting. I ask students to go back after they are done and try to make all the letters the same size. For phonics, we have been focusing on short vowel sounds. We have had so much fun with a few silly songs. Ask your kids to sing the Ten in the Bed song about the short sound e! We have also been singing versions of, Mary had a Little Lamb, and, Ba Ba Black Sheep for the short vowels, i, and e. For reading, our students are working on taking their time and using their strategies to help sound out difficult words. Our class is beginning to realize that practice helps us to become better readers! In Math, we are continuing to learn about addition and subtraction word problems, as well as starting a unit on shapes. Our students have learned the names of all 2D shapes and are being introduced to 3D shapes. We have such fun listening to the Jack Hartman song on shapes where we have to guess the shape before he sings it! In Science, we are continuing to learn about habitats and have had some fun with salt dough making animals from different habitats. Ms Sol's Class This week and last, our second and third graders in Ms. Sol's class have some new students join them. We are excited to welcome these new students to our school family! Ms. Sol's students have begun working on word problems in math. Some students are focused on addition and subtraction while others are doing those and multiplication word problems. The students are continuing their study of ancient civilizations in Social Studies and are learning the names of bones through their creation of skeletons in Science. Our students are reading books at their independent level every day and are showing such great comprehension skills! Mrs. Hull's Class This week third graders are getting very serious about writing their own mystery stories. We have spent some time responding to mystery writing prompts and are coming up with our own ideas about a mystery to write. We are also preparing to do our first book talks to introduce a mystery book that we have read. Third graders are learning how to use Google Slides to present their learning to others. We have progressed from preparing presentations about topics that interest us to using Google Slides to present a planet from our Solar System to the class. In math, we are working hard to find strategies to add and subtract two and three digit numbers. Whew! In the words of a third grader, "Subtracting is hard work!" In the midst of all this hard work, we are also thinking about winter holidays and fire safety. Have a great weekend! PE In PE this week we began our chasing, fleeing and dodging unit along with reaction time games and activity. Tag games are a favorite among the students! Spanish In Spanish, the K/1 students are wrapping up learning their days of the week! Virtual K/1 students also started learning the shapes in Spanish along with how to ask how many sides a shape has and how to answer that. 2/3 students are continuing to learn about emotions in Spanish! They did a puzzle activity where they worked in groups to match the Spanish word, it's English translation, and the picture that best matched that emotion! As a reminder, we have a public facebook page where we share many pictures 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! Enjoy the weekend! We are grateful for you and for your support of your child's education and our school. Thank you, Sara and the Truxton Academy Team