Hello Families and Supporters,
Happy Friday and Happy May! We had a busy week of learning here at Truxton Academy this week. Our third graders took their state math assessment. Some of our classes planted some trees that we got donated from the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). The other classes will plant some on Monday. We will then have some Sumac trees towards the back of our property which will be great for pollinators.
May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. On Wednesday in All-School Meeting, we read a book called Maggie's Chopsticks and discussed where chopsticks originated. Students shared about times they have used chopsticks and also about times they have struggled with somelike like the character in the book did.
Afterwards, our kindergarten and first grade students got to do some math by using pencils as chopsticks and trying to move pom poms with them to solve addition and subtraction problems. Students found it challenging, but fun.
Have fun this weekend by trying to eat some Asian food, or any food, with chopsticks!
Community Announcements
The Cortland City Farmer's Market is starting up at a later date (June 1st) than I originally shared due to a change made by the organizers.
The Homer Food Pantry, The Homer Congregational Church, and the Homer First United Methodist Church are sponsoring a Kitchen Gear Giveaway on Saturday May 22nd.
The JM McDonald Complex and the Truxton Community Center are partnering for a summer camp here in Truxton. This camp is open to children entering Kindergarten through 6th grade.
2021-2022 Application and Enrollment Our application period has officially ended, and we still have a few 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 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! Donations: 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. 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. - glue sticks - 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. From the PTO: Hola familias! We are pleased that we will be purchasing a t-shirt for each of the students and all of the staff using money made from fundraising. We will be placing the order for these t-shirts next week. Please fill out this survey letting us know what size shirt you want for your child by Wednesday, May 12, 2021. This will ensure that the order gets placed in time for the students to receive their shirts and wear them for Field Day in June. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HCGPLZS If you want to order any extra shirts for yourself or other family members, you may do so at a cost of $15. Please indicate what you want on the survey and send in a check to the Truxton Academy PTO with your child by Wednesday, May 12th. If you have any questions, you can email us at pto@truxtonacademy.org - Truxton Academy PTO Upcoming Dates: 5/10- Board of Trustees Meeting 7:00 Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/98161711210?pwd=THlYdW5wOGttWnllWE9VU1MvVWxmZz09 Meeting ID: 981 6171 1210 Passcode: SSN9b7 Updates from the classrooms: Mrs. Francis' Class This week in Kindergarten we finished up our unit on wood by learning about another manmade wood, plywood. We compared and contrasted how plywood and particleboard are manufactured and wrote about both in our science journals. We had fun learning about wood and getting to make two different types of wood. The kids are excited to show off the wood they made, please ask them about the materials we needed to make each and the steps that we went through. With lumber prices rising, we might be starting a new Kindergarten business! In math we continue to learn about teen numbers. We decomposed the number 15 and saw that it is one ten and 5 ones, which we then represented in many different ways in our Teen Number Books. We also did several math games and activities this week that helped us to practice counting objects all the way up to 20! Counting these objects slowly and double checking helps us be accurate. In ELA we push ourselves to show stamina by working hard the whole time during our stations. We are adding more labels to our pictures, more words and sounds to our sentences, reading CVC words more fluently, and find more words in our reading. We are also practicing punctuation, knowing when to use capital and lowercase letters, and having spaces to separate our words in a sentence. Go K, go! Ms. Jess' Class This week in K/1 we finished up our Peanut Butter and Cupcake storyboards that we presented to Ms. Smith's class. We retold the story while sharing about the setting, characters, problem and solution. In reading groups we are writing about the main idea and using details from our books that support the main idea. We are also discussing author's purpose and if the author wrote the story to entertain, inform or persuade. In phonics we are learning about double consonants ff, ss, ll and zz at the ends of words. We found lots of these words in our reading! In math we are using our addition and subtraction strategies to solve word problems. We are learning about fact families too. In science we are continuing our Boom Boom Flash PBL by exploring different emotions such as feeling happy, sad, angry, scared and love. Next we will be investigating how we can use sound and light to communicate these feelings. We also said good-bye to our SUNY Cortland practicum students and learned about Cinco de Mayo on Wednesday. Ms. Smith's Class This week we worked on perfecting our fluency of words with blends in them. Additionally, we have been working on reading comprehension and when to use capitalization! In Math, we have been continuing to work on Math word problems and are getting so good at the addition word problems! Students have been working really hard and showing respect for their learning and for their friends. During Snack, we have been getting further in our new Junie B Jones chapter book! On Wednesdays, we have been learning about how chickens hatch and have been tracking our virtual chick pets and seeing how they grow each week! In Science, we have been learning about maps. The kids have been working really hard to make maps of their bedrooms! We also had a lot of fun coming up with different ways to remember N, E, S, and W. Never Eat Smelly Worms! Additionally, we got a special visit from Codie this week! He came to our class and got a tour of our school! Our friends loved seeing him and having him around! Ms. Sol's Class This week the 2nd/ 3rd graders started their math/ ELA boot camp. We are reviewing lots of math and reading comprehension preparing for the MAP test at the end of the month. We planted 2 Sumac trees at the edge of the forest. We made Mother Day's gift. We continue to do daily independent reading time. In Science we read about the "States of Matter" then wrote about it and drew examples of each. We also played a scoot game around the room to review addition & subtraction. They had a lot of fun with the scoot game and creating Mother's Day gifts. Mrs. Hull's Class Third graders continue to work towards the short and long term learning goals this week. We read and wrote about invasive species. We learned rules and strategies for multiplication and division. We enjoyed our Wednesday afternoon enrichment activities. We continued to make plans for teaching others about food waste, while examining the food waste data that we collected so far. Do you know that we waste approximately 25 pounds of food a day just in our small school? Why does this matter? Ask a third grader to find out. Have a great weekend! PE In P.E. students went from learning the fundamentals of throwing, to hitting while finishing our week with a few games of baseball/softball. Spanish For Spanish in K/1, we finished up making our very own granjas and also played a guessing game to practice los animales de la granja! With all the hard work, we finished our animales de la granja unit. Good work, K/1! Keep practicing your espanol! In second grade, students began to learn about comidas y bebidas! We played a pictionary game to guess our vocabulary list and completed a picture dictionary to give us a better visual of our words! We also finished learning all of our sujetos in Spanish! This week we ended with "Nosotros/Nosotras" (we), "Ellos/ellas" (they), and "ustedes" (you all). Buen trabajo chicos! In third grade, we began learning about insectos! We ran around the gym on a "Busqueda de Insectos", a bug hunt, for our words! We also played a memory game to help us remember our words. In virtual third grade, we continued to learn about comidas y bebidas! We played a memory game to help us remember our words and began to learn how to conjugate -er/ir verbs! 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