Happy Friday and happy first day of snow! While people from some other parts of the country may be shocked at snow this early, we know that this is a part of life in Central New York and it doesn't stop us. Our students were very excited today to see the snow as we walked through the town for our Book Character Parade. They were even more excited to see so many people who came out to watch them! Thanks to everyone who came out in the cold and snow flurries to make our parade a success! This week, many of our students turned in and presented their Hispanic Heritage month projects! (2nd and 3rd grade are spreading their presentations into the next 2 weeks.) I have been able to get into some of the kindergarten and 1st grade presentations and learned about Columbia, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Argentina. I was so impressed with the work the students did! Look for pictures of them and their projects on facebook in the upcoming weeks. October Character Trait Wrap-up: This month, our students have been learning about responsibility. All of our classrooms now have classroom jobs. We are working with our students to teach them that we all have shared responsibility for our space. All of our students have been working on keeping their own space in the classroom clean and organizing their things within their space. This month, the 2nd and 3rd graders helped out our school by bringing in items from our outdoor classrooms that cannot stay out over the winter and cleaning them up to be stored. The 2nd graders even did some math as they cleaned up the mats as they counted and divided the mats up equally for carrying them. We ended this month with classroom visits today from Ms. Fran, our custodian. She works to clean or school when the students are not here so many students do not know her. This meeting helped them put a face to the person they share responsibility with for keeping our space clean and safe. Thanks Ms. Fran for all that you do and for coming to meet our students today! Ways to Help Our School 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 Updates from the classrooms: Kindergarten/ First Grade Mrs. Francis' Class: We had a great week in Kindergarten! The students did an amazing job making and presenting their Hispanic Heritage projects. I was so proud of their effort, learning, and excitement over sharing their projects with their classmates. Kudos Kindergarteners! We also did some fun activities in science to explore the sense of smell. We did a scent match up and also painted scratch and sniff pictures. They really liked both of these activities! We continued to write great stories and label ourselves in those stories. We also used non fiction books to learn about the world around us. In math we have worked on sorting Buttons and graphing favorite fall activities. It was a busy week with lots of great learning. Happy weekend! Ms. Jess's Class: We had a great week in K/1 reviewing classroom expectations and creating our own routine. We discussed what learning time looks like and sounds like in K/1. We also began our conversations about taking care of ourselves, others and materials in our classroom. We kicked the week off by celebrating National Pumpkin Day! In ELA we are learning about the middle short vowel sounds in CVC words, finding these words in our reading and using them in our writing. A short list of the short vowel words we read and wrote are cat, man, ten, hen, tin, clip, hop, hut, clap and block. We also are noticing a lot of our words from our 50 sight words list. In math we finished up a unit on shapes by creating pumpkin faces using as many shapes as we could. In science we learned about our sense of touch by carving pumpkins and digging into them to come up with describing words to write in our science journals. Students and their families did an AMAZING job on their Hispanic Heritage Month PBL projects! It was amazing to see the students' brave and confident presentations that showed off so much learning about Hispanic countries! We also had wonderful Wednesday work returned about beavers and their habitats. It was very nice to have some of our remote learners join us virtually in our classroom. Keep up the great work K/1!!! Ms. Smith's Class: This week in class we have been working on procedures and routines that will empower students to become active learners with a growth mindset! As we explore our new classroom, we are personalizing our new learning environment. This week the students voted for their class’s call and response! We use this to refocus ourselves when we are getting too loud. Try it out! Just chant, “Zip it, lock it”, and the kiddos will take it from there! Happy Halloween! Second Grade This week second graders continued with a silent reading routine for 20 minutes and the students took turns reading to the guinea pig. The students are practicing reading and spelling compound words and enjoyed making the words with moveable letters this week. They continued playing the Stamp Game which helps them practice 4-digit addition and forming large numbers in expanded form. The 2nd graders are learning about animal parts for a variety of animals in their new independent science centers. They also began studying the process of weathering and built models to show the impact of this natural phenomenon after reading about it. The students are taking responsibility to clean the guinea pig cage as a class and are composting the guinea pig bedding which will help our garden in upcoming years. They are also practicing responsibility for their new material organization system which is helping them keep all of their supplies and learning materials organized so they can find what they need when they need it. The second graders also picked up the area around the pergola by picking up all the large foam mats and setting the trunks on end, we also wiped down the mats preparing the area for the coming winter snow. We did some math with the mats too. they counted the mats and the trunks then divided the mats and trunks evenly among themselves. Third Grade Third graders have been busy this week! We've welcomed back all our usual in-person students and started a bunch of new projects. Third graders formed groups and chose a fairy tale to create a class mural for. It is a great opportunity for students to collaborate, have fun, and decorate our classroom space. We also began an agricultural science unit about beef cattle. Third graders took a virtual field trip to a cattle farm and are forming questions about beef. We also began learning about collecting, representing, and analyzing data in mathematics. This is a short unit of study that will help us with our science learning this year. Have a great weekend! PE This week in PE in Kindergarten & first grade we worked on our hula hooping skills and learned that you say hula hoop the same in english and spanish. In second & third grade we have worked on our pickleball skills! We also had our first STEM in PE activity of building a bug trap as a team with having to run to get materials one item at a time! Spanish We reviewed our vocabulary at the beginning of each class, but the lessons were more culture based this week than language based. The kids learned about the cultural holiday, Dia de los Muertos! All of the grades read a book with me to learn about the customs and traditions typically done during this holiday, second and third grade reading two books. We then had a discussion about the similarities and differences between the books to show how different people may celebrate the same holiday differently and notice the things that the people celebrate in a similar way. In K/1, we watched a video about the holiday and then we made our own popsicle stick calaveras! 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! Thank you, Sara
- Sara Petit-McClure