September 2015 Happenings
Searingtown School
Welcome to the September 2015 issue of The Searingtown Happenings!
Message From the Principal
SearReads Book of the Month
We continue to remind students to espouse the terrific tenets of good character: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. Through various character education initiatives throughout the year, students are encouraged to be kind to others. One way we do this is through our schoolwide SearReads book of the month. Every month we read a picture book that highlights one of the themes of good character. We began the year with our first SearReads selection, The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spire.
Award-winning author and illustrator Ashley Spires has created a charming picture book about an unnamed girl and her very best friend, who happens to be a dog. The girl has a wonderful idea." She is going to make the most MAGNIFICENT thing! "Easy-peasy!" But making her magnificent thing is anything but easy, and the girl tries and fails, repeatedly. Eventually, the girl gets really, really mad. She is so mad, in fact, that she quits. But after her dog convinces her to take a walk, she comes back to her project with renewed enthusiasm and manages to get it just right. This funny book offers a perfect example of the rewards of perseverance and creativity. (Amazon.com)
It is a great read as we start with new initiatives such as Project Lead the Way, the new elementary schools’ STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) program. I love that it teaches children to try and try again.
Our October SearReads is If Kids Ran the World by Leo and Diane Dillon.
All roads lead to kindness in this powerful final collaboration between Leo and Diane Dillon. In a colorful tree house, a rainbow of children determine the most important needs in our complex world, and following spreads present boys and girls happily helping others. Kids bring abundant food to the hungry; medicine and cheer to the sick; safe housing, education, and religious tolerance to all; and our planet is treated with care. Forgiveness and generosity are seen as essential, because kids know how to share, and they understand the power of love. The book closes with examples of fun ways to help others--along with FDR's "Four Freedoms" and "The Second Bill of Rights," which illuminate these concepts.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20578943-if-kids-ran-the-world
K. Elizabeth Guercin
Principal
Searingtown School
Kindergarten
We are so happy to welcome our new Kindergarten students to SearingtownSchool! Boy, do they all fit right in so nicely! The first days of school are filled with many mixed emotions, but now after 17 days in September, the children are happy, well acclimated and ready to learn! In only a short amount of time, the K-Kids have made new friends, learned the rules and routines of both the class and school, started Reading and Writing Workshop, Fundations and Go Math. They have also painted, participated in imaginative play and block building, as well as having fun playing on our new playground. It has been quite a busy month and we’re looking forward to many more!
First Grade
First grade is off to a FANTASTIC start. We have finally settled into our FIRST FULL WEEK of school and everyone is so excited about the all of the wonderful things we will be learning. Our first graders are already involved in reading workshop! We are working on building our stamina to read for longer periods of time independently and with our partners. Everyone is participating writing workshop when the students get to practice new writing strategies while the teachers’ conference with students individually. We are
also learning about the season of autumn, while using our “Property Words” to describe the changing colors of the leaves, apples and pumpkins. We will be going to White Post Farms in October to celebrate this beautiful season.
First graders have also become fantastic mathematicians with our new math program “GO Math!” and are exploring numbers and addition in many different ways. They love learning new strategies like “counting-on” when adding and using a bar model. We are looking forward to a great year ahead!
Second Grade
Let them navigate
Push them to explore
Watch them discover
Encourage their questions
Allow them to struggle
Support their thinking...
and
Let them fly
Third Grade
The weather has been beautiful and the days off have been plentiful ~ yet our third graders are in full swing! We read and write every day; always striving to improve! We have reviewed what the children learned last year and scaffold upon those skills in order to add to their reading/writing “toolkits”. The children should be reading at home every night in order to build their stamina and practice the strategies we teach in class. Encourage a book chat with your child or just share some quiet reading time together. ☺ Our new Go Math program began with estimation, rounding and compatible numbers. The children are studying different math properties in order to add and subtract mentally and on paper.
Thank you to all of the parents who joined us for Meet the Teacher Night. We love the opportunity to meet you and share some time together. We will continue to emphasize independence and responsibility throughout the year and appreciate all that you do to support the children and us!
The children are very excited about all of our studies so please try to remind them daily of the "5 P's"...Proper Practice Prevents Poor Performance! This approach will help them across many areas of their lives. We are looking forward to a very successful year together!
Fourth Grade
Fourth grade students began the school year with excitement and rigor. We dove right into learning, but also had a bit of fun. We are all super excited about the year ahead of us in science. The district’s new science program, PLTW (Project Lead the Way), is sure to be a fun and engaging way to think critically and creatively about science and the engineering design process. To kick things off, fourth graders all participated in the “Marshmallow/Spaghetti Challenge”. This was a great opportunity to collaborate and problem solve!
We completed our first novel, Because of Winn-Dixie. Our work has been focused on developing theories about characters. Fourth graders have really committed to rasing the level of their thinking and are busy looking for the clues that lead them to solid inferences. We have also been developing better predictions now that we know our characters so well. Now we can predict not just what we think will happen, but how it will happen based on our character’s traits and motivations. This type of thinking encourages the students to envision- make a movie in their head and imagine the next scene.
In writing, we have been collecting many ideas for our fiction stories. We have talked about the work fiction writers do to plan out their stories. Often, a fiction story can be plotted using a “story arc”. This graphic helps the students see that writers have to identify the main problem or turning point in their story and the plan for how the events will lead up to this pivotal moment, and how the story will be resolved.
We also started our study into New York State’s geography and how geography shapes not only culture but history as well. This will weave through our future units about the Native Americans and early colonists.
In math, our focus has been on place value. Students have been using their knowledge of our base-ten system to round numbers, add and subtract numbers, and identify a digit’s value given its place value location in a number. This is extremely valuable work that will facilitate future learning in other math units.
We are all looking forward to an exciting and productive year in fourth grade!
Fifth Grade
SEAR-READS: We begin the year with our first SearReads selection, The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spire. Award-winning author and illustrator Ashley Spires has created a charming picture book about an unnamed girl and her very best friend, who happens to be a dog. The girl has a wonderful idea." She is going to make the most MAGNIFICENT thing! "Easy-peasy!" But making her magnificent thing is anything but easy, and the girl tries and fails, repeatedly. Eventually, the girl gets really, really mad. She is so mad, in fact, that she quits. But after her dog convinces her to take a walk, she comes back to her project with renewed enthusiasm and manages to get it just right. This funny book offers a perfect example of the rewards of perseverance and creativity. (Amazon.com)
It is a great read as we start with new initiatives such as Project Lead the Way. It teaches children to try and try again.
Fifth graders know that a goal without a wish is nothing but a dream. They’re learning to be proactive in their learning by setting SMART goals. These ambitious students are creating goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Creating an action plan to go along with their specific goals will ensure our eager fifth graders success!
Our students are exploring place value in whole numbers, multiplication and expressions. In language arts, they’re delving into a realistic fiction genre learning how to deepen their comprehension through a variety of sophisticated writing responses in their reader’s notebooks. Analyzing author’s choices, themes, elements in realistic fiction bring clarity and depth to these fifth grade readers’ thinking. Students enjoyed a reader’s notebook gallery walk and examined different types of writing entries for their reader’s notebooks. They annotated with their reading partners around character webs, a variety of theories, compared character perspectives and saw how writers demonstrated text evidence in a variety of ways. Pencils are busy as we begin our personal narrative unit in writer’s workshop. Writers learned how to generate ideas and examine the elements of personal narrative. Author’s craft is being introduced to enhance their narratives.
Wow, excitement is in the air with the kickoff of our new science program, called PLTW, or Project Lead the Way. Our scientist, or engineers, received their materials for our upcoming robotic unit in one big case! They had to revert back to their science background and categorize, organize and become familiar with the materials they’ll need for this upcoming exciting unit. Reading our Sear-read, The Most Magnificent Thing, by Ashley Spire, helped to inspire the creative and arduous process of invention. Without a doubt, our fifth graders came away from this book realizing perseverance and determination are a necessary component of scientists.
As if that’s not all enough, our students are busy keeping our school safe. Our fifth graders are fitted in their safety belts and learning all about accountable, responsibility and reaping the benefits of being role models. And we’re off!!!
Speech
September Tip: How to Get Your Child to Speak at Home!
How many times have you asked your child, “What did you do in school today?” only to have them reply, "nothing" or “stuff”. Often the problem is that the question is too general or not being asked at the right time. Here are some pointers to help facilitate these important conversations:
- First, it may be important to give your child a little break before you start a detailed exchange. Try not to ask them questions as soon as they get in the car at dismissal or cross the threshold home after a long day. Let them unwind a little, play outside or have a snack and give them time to let the days events settle in before inquiring about their day.
- Make sure you are ready to really listen and give your child your full attention. Provide a good listening model for your child by maintaining appropriate eye contact, refraining from interrupting or over-correcting, and asking relevant follow-up questions. Remember that your children will model your behaviors more readily than simply following your instructions.
- When you are both ready for a conversation try asking something specific like, "What was the best/worst/funniest thing that happened to you today?" (Open ended questions such as “How was your day?” tend to elicit vague responses like “fine”.) Take turns answering each part of the question, and involve everyone who is present (e.g. mom, dad, other siblings, friends or extended family members). Your child is sharing and so you should too. It gives your child a different perspective and provides a great language model.
Sharing experiences is a bonding activity and can be a great way to build language skills and to keep and the lines of communication open with your children.
Library
After reviewing library procedures with the books Never Let a Ghost Borrow Your Library Book and Shelf Elf, second graders concentrated on how to choose a "Just Right" book. We read the book Goldilocks and the Three Libearians and then discussed the FIVE FINGER RULE. We also discussed the idea that sometimes, even though we can read all the words on a page, we still might not understand what the book is about. Students took a look at a passage from a Harry Potter book to drive the point home.
Third graders are working on continent research in conjunction with their studies in the classroom. Working in continent teams, they began by formulating "I wonder" questions about their continent. After studying satellite images of their continents, students refined their questions and are now gathering the facts to answer their questions.
Fourth and fifth graders are brushing up on their Google Apps skills with Mrs. Forte and will be ready to jump into research shortly!
Art
Harold and his purple crayon visited Searingtown School starting on September 8 in honor of Literacy Day. Harold is a character in a child’s book who uses a purple crayon to draw pictures of all the places Harold’s imagination would like to go.
All Students, faculty and staff were invited to draw, with a purple crayon or any other color of their choice, a picture of where they would like their imaginations to take them. As you can see from the photographs, some people had some very unusual places they wished to be and others just wished to be in any happy place.
The School year otherwise in Art has gone along just as it should. All students have made their beautiful portfolios. All students in the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades have been able to purchase and use their sketch books in class and at home for creative drawing.
Music
3rd Grade Orchestra
4th and 5th Grade Orchestra
Searingtown School Happenings
Written by the faculty of Searingtown School
Published by K. Kliegman
COMING SOON....Be on the lookout for our book character day slideshow on the Searingtown website!