Hello Families and Supporters,
Happy Saturday! We hope you have all enjoyed the nice weather this week as much as we have. On Thursday, our students spent much of the day outside for National Outdoor Classroom Day. A huge THANK YOU to Kathie Arnold of Twin Oaks Dairy who came out on Thursday and helped our students plant potatoes, onions, and carrots!
This week we said good-bye to Chef Brigette. She will continue to work part time to fulfill the state requirements for us to be part of the National School Lunch Program and we are very grateful for that along with all of the work she has put into our school cafeteria since last year. Patty Dawson will be taking over in the cafeteria temporarily. We thank her for stepping up! We would still appreciate volunteers to help out. We need volunteers Tuesday and Thursday this upcoming week. If you are able to volunteer, please sign up here: Cafeteria Volunteer Sign-up
Update on School Calendar:
Thanks to all the families who replied to the survey about May 28th. We will not have school on May 28th because we did not use all of our snow days this year. 76% of families said they would prefer for school to be closed. 24% of families said they would like a regular school day.
2021-2022 Application and Enrollment Our application period has officially ended, and we still have a few spots open in 1st grade and 4th grade. 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 Smile 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! Donation Requests: Classroom Donations: - Electronic Wipes: Our teachers would love electronic wipes for the smartboards in the classroom to help keep them clean as they are used by multiple students throughout the day. - Glue Sticks: Our classrooms are running low on glue sticks. Please send in some if you can. - Clean, Empty Plastic Bottles: We are doing a project with 4H next week which requires plastic bottles. If you have clean plastic soda or water bottles, please send them in with your child. 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, large cardboard boxes, or construction paper. We have all we need for now. Upcoming Dates: May 24- May 28: MAP Assessments (all grade levels) May 27th: Project with 4H (Please send in clean plastic bottle before this date) May 28th- May 31st: Memorial Day Weekend- No School June 1st: Cortland County Dairy Parade June 3rd: Last 4H project of the year June 11th: Field Day (Rain date June 18th) Updates from the classrooms: Mrs. Francis' Class The Kindergarteners enjoyed a week full of learning! We took advantage of the beautiful weather and headed outside for reading, writing, math, and science throughout the week. We also had fun teaching Ms. Smith's K/1 class about how you prepare and plant potatoes. Then we got the opportunity to plant our potatoes on Outdoor Classroom Day. The kids have made amazing progress with their sight words and reading and writing CVC words. We are reading up a storm! In math we continue to practice adding and also spent time working on the tricky teen numbers this week. Later in the week we moved on to early subtraction with the game Build and Remove. In science we asked several questions about paper, including, which type of paper is best for writing on using a variety of writing tools, which type of paper is easiest to fold, and what happens to different papers when they get wet? The 10 paper samples went home with the students, you can ask them the paper's name and use and be surprised at all they have learned already about paper! Ms. Jess' Class K/1 enjoyed all our outdoor learning spaces this week! The students were thrilled to teach the second and third graders about planting onions, carrots and potatoes! We cut potatoes to cure them for planting. Thursday, we enjoyed Outdoor Classroom Day by planting our school garden and making wastepaper seed balls as part of our science study of gardening. Students are Math Review Rockstars working on greater than, less than, measurement, ways to make 10 and addition strategies. In phonics students worked with -ed, -ing, and -s endings. In reading groups students worked on main idea and supporting details, cause and effect relationships and modeled reading strategies to other groups. Ms. Smith's Class This week in our K-1 class we have been reading passages with digraphs and working on our writing skills! A fun game that we have is picking a sight word and coming up with a silly sentence using that word. Students have been trying to remember to write using capitals, punctuation, and spacing when writing their sentences! During snack, we finished our second Junie B. Jones book and are starting our next adventure book, The MagicTreehouse, Knight at Dawn! In Math we are switching to subtraction word problems! We have been using fun hand signals to help us remember if we are adding or subtracting! In Science, we have started our Engineering unit. Our problem is that we need to drop an egg and have it land safely on the ground. Our kiddos have been working on building a contraption that protects their eggs from breaking! We had our trial on Friday and will be using what we learned to make our designs even better! On Wednesday, we received our baby chicks! Their names are Fluffy and Ms. Frizzle Vampire! They will be staying in our classroom for about a week! Our kiddos are very excited to have them as classroom pets! Again, shout out to the Harrington’s for making this happen! On Thursday, it was National Outdoor Day! We spent time planting vegetables in our garden. Special thanks to Kathie Arnold and the kindergarten class for being such great leaders and teaching us how to plant our veggies! We also spent time outside doing Math problems and enjoying the sunshine! Enjoy the sunshine! Ms. Sol's Class This week, we have been working on reading comprehension. The students are pretty good at answering direct questions in texts and we are working on inferencing questions. We have been practicing writing daily. Students wrote about what they want to be when they grow up. We are focusing on writing longer pieces with complete sentences and proper capitalization and punctuation. In Math, we worked on reviewing geometry. We also worked with math word problems, odd & even numbers, skip counting. We are increasing independent reading time and also started a new read aloud called The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Mrs. Hull's Class Third graders enjoyed a busy week filled with sunshine and warmer weather. We took advantage of the weather to write outside this week. The students who were learning in person also planned and put in rows for the school's garden. We thank Ms. Jess's class for teaching us how far to space the rows and vegetables within the row. Fractions become less of a mystery as we took apart and put together fractions of various sizes. We also discovered many ways to make a whole with different sized fractions. Next, we will look at equivalent fractions on a number line. In science, we discovered through trial and error the purpose of a balance. We will use this new tool in our exploration of water. Third graders are also planning a performance of Chicken Little, which we hope to tape and share in the next couple of weeks. What is the lesson of Chicken Little? Ask a third grader but don't believe everything that you hear! Have a great weekend. PE Due to low in-person attendance this week, I have decided to extend the golfing unit into next week so those not here can enjoy some mini golf!! While we are still putting, students will be going on a nature walk and playing some of their favorite P.E. games chosen from the list they have put together. -Ms. Ashley Spanish In K/1 this week, we continued to learn about las estaciones y el tiempo - the seasons and the weather! We read a book all about las estaciones and the fun activities we can do in each. We learned a new poem with movements to help us remember our estaciones as well! K/1 began to work hard on some posters to help us label each estacion! In second grade, we continued to learn about comidas y bebidas - food and drink! We played comidas y bebidas bingo and also made some flashcards to help us practice our words at home! In third grade, we've been working hard on practicing our insectos - insects! The third graders have also been working hard to learn how to conjugate -ar/-er/-ir verbs in the present tense In virtual third grade, we are learning about comidas y bebidas as well! We played comidas y bebidas bingo as well as learning to conjugate -ar/-er/-ir verbs in the present tense. Continua con el buen trabajo Truxton!! Music K/1 During the enrichment program K/1 has been working hard in their music classes! We have been learning songs and musical games from around the world. Students have been singing a silly Spanish song about three fish and a shark called "Tres Pececitos," playing games from Japan and the Philippines along with some English folk tunes. Students have also enjoyed playing percussion instruments and are reading simplified music notation for Ta and Ti-Ti. ELA and Spanish skills are also found in music class within different activities that focus on syllable stress, pronunciation, and rhyming. I look forward to making more music with these students! Grades 2 and 3 The second and third graders have been busy writing their own music! We started off learning how to read musical notation (quarter note, eighth notes and half notes), played games with these rhythms, and composed musical compositions in ternary form. Ternary form is also called ABA form. The students found ternary form/ABA form is easier to understand when compared to a burger or sandwich. The bread is the A part, then the filling is something different/the B part, and another slice of bread is the A part (same as the first slice of bread) making an ABA form. In addition, the groups have also been playing games from around the world and have been enjoying a game from Japan called "Nabe, Nabe." For those who were in person this week, we had many laughs while playing this game! What to know more? Ask a second or third grader what they did with pool noodles in music class! 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!