Happy weekend and Happy belated Veterans Day to all of the veterans and service members in our community!
We had a great week of learning, which ended with a celebration of World Kindness Day. This fits perfectly with our Character Trait/ Skill focus for November of Encouragement and Gratitude. Our teachers and students are spending time this month to notice acts of kindness and helpfulness in order to encourage more of these to happen. Yesterday we had a special announcement where students from each class shared an idea about kindness. Students from kindergarten to third grade did a great job speaking over the loudspeaker to the whole school! Some of our kindergarten and first grade students did a random act of kindness by leaving kind notes on the lockers of students from other classes. Third grade students responded by making thank you hearts and placing them on the lockers of the younger students. This is a perfect example of how kindness spreads and has a positive impact on the community. Ask your child what acts of kindness they are going to do next week. Winter Weather: As we move toward colder weather and snow, there may be days where snow makes it dangerous to travel to school. Since our school falls within the boundaries of the Homer School District, we will close our building if the Homer Schools Close their building. There may be times when conditions in Truxton require us to close the building even if Homer does not close. When our building is closed, it will be announced on Spectrum school closings. If you live in a school district that is closed and we are not, transportation will not be provided by your school district of residence. If you are able to safely transport your child to school, we ask that you do so. If conditions make it so that it is not safe for you to transport your child, this will count as an excused absence. Please always err on the side of safety. Students will continue to go outside for recess and learning times in the winter weather, please reach out if you need help getting appropriate winter gear for your child. Holiday Food and Gift Baskets from the local Truxton church: The local church in Truxton 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 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! 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) Upcoming Dates: 11/16- 11/24- School Spirit Week 11/18- Parent teacher conference day (No All School Meeting or Virtual Spanish) 11/25- 11/27- Thanksgiving Holiday: No School Updates from the classrooms: Mrs. Francis' Class Kindergarten had a fun week finishing up our senses unit in science. We tried lots of different foods to better understand the different flavors. At the end of the week we had opportunities to go outside for science and use our 5 senses. Then on Friday we had popcorn and talked about how it activates all 5 of our senses. In ELA the kindergarteners worked on their "How to" books and served as editors for a partner. We also continued to practice blending sounds in order to read CVC words using the letters we have looked at closely. In math we worked on one to one correspondence with numbers less than 10. We also sorted buttons and then sorted students by various attributes (hair color, eye color, spot in the classroom). We used our results to compare numbers using more than and less than. Have a great weekend! Ms. Jess's Class Our students enjoyed learning time outside at the beginning of this week! They practiced writing their sight words with sidewalk chalk. They made number lines they used to jump from 0- 20 and created addition sentences. They used connecting blocks to build numbers up to 20 under the pergola. We continued our hard work on short vowel sounds to blend words together and produced two final writing pieces on kindness to celebrate World Kindness Day. In science students finished up their unit on senses by doing a taste test. They should all be very proud of how well they are taking care of themselves, others and materials. Keep up the great work! Ms. Smith's Class In our class, we have started our reading group rotations. We are working on sounding out words that we don't know! In writing our class is making a three page story book! They are asked to think of a moment in their life they want to share, then find out what happened first, next and last and then draw pictures to go with each sentence! When they are finished they will read their stories out loud to the class! For phonics we are creating the "H Brothers" to help us remember our digraphs! These H Brother paper models will be displayed in our classroom to help us when we need it! In Math, students are working on subtraction with number lines! In Science, we have just wrapped up our 5 senses unit and had a great time using our sense of taste! Ask your kiddo which food was bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and umami! Ms Sol's Class Continuing with 2D and 3D shapes, students worked with partners to draw mystery 3D shapes of faces and then their partners had to guess which 3D shapes they had drawn. They practiced drawing 3D structures they had built and were introduced to perspective drawing. We also talked about how a 2D drawing can become 3D. This sparked the students interest in sewing to convert their 2D drawings into objects and we did some hand sewing with felt. To connect to Spanish and expand their understanding of language, we made connections between names of polygons and spanish words for example octagon and ocho plus octopus and quadrilateral and cuadrado etc. In Social Studies we started Ancient Civilizations and talked about the nomadic life of the people in the area of the Fertile Crescent and how villages and later cities formed in the land between the two rivers: the Tigris and Euphrates. Since the week was particularly warm we went outdoors to make our own large scale fertile crescent with an oil pan, water and sand from the sandbox. We recreated the two rivers in Mesopotamia then we talked about irrigation and made canals to get water to the dry spots. We demonstrated river flooding too. We drew a shaduf and this sparked interest in the students wanting to build our own shaduf. The shaduf was one of the earliest farm machines used for irrigation. We talked about how our ancestors were just as curious about their world and how they invented what they needed and as they learn to crochet and sew they are following in the footsteps of their ancestors learning how to make things for themselves and others. Mrs. Hull's Class This week in third grade, students worked together to complete their important work. We finished our fairytale murals and collaborated to create marketing for our Truxton Academy Beefy Burrito Bar entry into the TopCut Beef Contest sponsored by NY Ag in the Classroom. We are also challenging ourselves by learning how to measure to the nearest inch and half inch and record the data we collect. We learned about the history of Veteran's Day and wrote about the ways we are thankful for Veterans. Information on our at-home fire safety PBL was sent home on Monday. Third graders are beginning a new PBL in class to explore the genre of mystery books which will culminate in writing their own mystery stories to share with the younger students in the school. Have a great weekend! PE This week in PE 2 & 3 grade challenged each other in pickle ball! Kindergarten & first grade finished their gymnastics unit! And in honor of Veteran's Day, we did a boot camp video to see what military members go through as they become soldiers. Spanish In-person second and third grade continued to add vocabulary resources to their interactive notebook this week! In-person kindergarten and first grade learned a song titled "Diez Gatitos" ("Ten Kittens") and made finger puppets to help them sing along with it. Both virtual classes started to learn the days of the week in Spanish and are learning a song to go along with it. 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! Sara and the Truxton Academy Team
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