Maple Elementary School
November Newsletter
November 4, 2022
Dear Maple Families,
October wrapped up with a school assembly, a school-wide career day field trip, the PTO sponsored Fall Festival, and parent teacher conferences. At the October Assembly we celebrated our hard-working school family. Our Fall Festival was a blast and engaged students through stations including inflatables, games, a pumpkin patch, face painting and more. HUGE thanks to our PTO and families for your support in planning and volunteering on this day.
We are excited to celebrate from the district-wide PTO fundraiser. Our rock wall was installed in the gym this week. Three sections of the rock wall were purchased with PTO funds. The ultimate recess with inflatables will take place next Friday, November 11th. The Magic Show is scheduled for December 2nd. We again thank you for all of your support of our students, staff and school.
The Maple Elementary Scholastic Fall Book Fair will run from November 14-18. On Tuesday, November 15, we are hosting a Family Curriculum Night from 5-7 PM. A flyer can be viewed below and is being sent home. An all-you-can-eat pancake and sausage dinner from Chris Cakes of Kansas City will be served at the event and tickets are $6 per person. They can be pre purchased or bought at the event. In addition, families can visit classrooms to participate in literacy and math activities from 5-6 PM and Book BINGO will take place in the gym from 6-7 PM. We hope you will join us!
PTO is collecting gently used books for the Book BINGO winners. If you would like to donate books, they can be dropped off at Maple Elementary by November 14th.
November 23-25 is Thanksgiving break. We send you warm wishes and a very Happy Thanksgiving. May this time be a reminder of the wonderful things in life.
Wishing you well,
Dr. Rena Hawkins, Principal, hawkinsr@smithville.k12.mo.us
Mrs. Ashley Doll, Assistant Principal, dolla@smithville.k12.mo.us
Smithville School District Strategic Planning
We are looking for a wide range of participants that represent various stakeholders in our community. We are limited in the number of participants so we may not be able to accommodate all volunteers.
If interested and available on November 17 and November 18 from 8 am to 12 pm, please enter your name and the stakeholder group(s) you represent below. Thank you so much for your interest in serving and your commitment to the SSD!
Important Upcoming Dates
Nov. 2: Late Start Wednesday, School begins at 9:05 AM, No EC Classes
Nov. 7: Maple PTO meeting at 7 PM
Nov. 9: Late Start Wednesday, School begins at 9:05 AM, No EC Classes
Nov. 11: Veteran’s Day
Nov. 11: Ultimate Recess with Inflatables
Nov. 14-18: Scholastic Fall Book Fair in the Maple Library
Nov. 15: Family Curriculum Night at MES 5:00-7:00 PM (Book Fair will be open.)
Nov. 16: Late Start Wednesday, School begins at 9:05 AM, No EC Classes
Nov. 17: Reed Fall Picture Retakes
Nov. 18: MES Assembly and K-6 Maple GROWS Leaders Activity
Nov. 23-25: Thanksgiving Break-No School
Dec. 2: School-wide Magic Show Assembly
Information from the Counselor, Mrs. Hough
Counseling Focus:
This month’s focus is Empathy. One way to think about Empathy is “understanding and connecting with other people’s feelings.” Empathy is a practice that can help us grow strong relationships. Empathy is 1 of many traits we will focus on throughout the year that helps students be kind. Throughout the school, students will be developing skills like perspective-taking, conflict resolution, and leadership.Family Conversation Starters:
● What does Empathy mean in your own words?
● What is the difference between a big problem and a small problem?
● Why do you think practicing Empathy is important?
● Why do you think it is important to use Empathy when practicing conflict resolution?
Family Activity:
Review Empathy as a family! Remember that Empathy is understanding and connecting with other people’s feelings. Schedule a family movie night so that you can specifically watch for feelings and emotions. Let everyone know that you’d like them to point out how the characters in the show are feeling and that you will pause periodically to discuss Empathy. As emotions are identified, invite one another to Empathize by sharing about a time they felt that way or imagining how they might be feeling in that moment.
Technology and Innovation News with Mrs. Freeman
Please mark your calendars for our Family Coding Night coming up on December 6 from 6-7:30 PM! Hope you and your family will make plans to join us for this fun event!
Kindergarten students have continued to work on engineering and technology projects. They learned how to use the app Chatterpix.
First Grade worked on our maze project all month. We followed the steps of the design process to plan, give feedback to each other, then build our mazes.
Second grade students have started to learn about the vocabulary in our programming unit. We practiced being programmers by writing “code” for our classmates to complete and have started to use block based programs. Next up we will learn how to debug programs.
Third Grade students are working on using the design process to plan and build chain reaction (Rube Goldberg) machines that include simple machines.
Fourth grade students are starting a new design process unit where we will build battlebot armor for our robots. They will test it out in the ring in the upcoming weeks.
Fifth grade students in Mrs. Hensley’s class will wrap up our time together by working on programming in an Olympics style competition.
Sixth grade Programming and Robotics students have just started this week. We kicked things off with a teambuilding networking game! We will jump into projects and start earning badges.
Supplies
We use all kinds of supplies in the Innovation Lab. Please see this flyer for our most used items. If you have items around your house that you would like to send, I have a collection bin outside my room, students can drop it off on their way into school. Thanks for supporting our learning!
You can see more by following our journey on twitter: @sara_freeman, instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mes_tech_and_innovation_lab , facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MESTechandInnovationLab
Maple Library Happenings with Mrs. Cline
This month the library has been busy! Thanks to all the families who helped your students with creating such wonderful book character pumpkins! We had 51 entries this year and they were all terrific! Congratulations to our winning pumpkin designer!
First Place-Dementor
Tied for Second Place-The Pigeon
Tied for Second Place-Pikachu
PreK-2nd grade students continued to study our Missouri Show Me nominee books and practiced selecting just right books. We also introduced Pumpkin Jimmy to our library after reading the book Pumpkin Jack by Will Hubbell. We will follow the process of decomposition with Jimmy and hopefully have new pumpkins next season! It has already been pretty fascinating to follow! We also read the newest Aaron Reynolds book in his Creepy series, Creepy Crayon, which was a big hit!
Students in 3rd-6th grades started a new reading incentive called Genre of the Month, where we featured three genres in our library, two of which were fiction and one nonfiction section. We discussed what made a mystery book mysterious and highlighted scary books. Our 000s and 100s were our featured Dewey section of nonfiction this month. For every book a student read from these three areas, students qualified for a drawing at the end of the month for a basket of goodies. Hopefully, students found a new appreciation for genres they might not have tried otherwise! Our November genre of the month will be historical fiction and the 900s: memoirs and biographies.
Book Fair is coming soon! Mark your calendars for November 14th-18th, and come into the library from 8 am - 4 pm each day to find great books for your families! Books make great holiday presents and stocking stuffers! We will have a special Parent Curriculum Family Night on Tuesday, November 15th, from 5-7 pm for families to come and participate in activities and shop the fair with your kids! You can visit our Scholastic Book Fair homepage to set up your eWallets and preview the fair titles. eWallets make purchasing a breeze for your students (and no cash will get lost on the way to the fair!) We will also have a special All for Books Collection available if you’d like to donate, which helps purchase books for our library!
We’d also love volunteers to help man the cash registers and help students shop at the Book Fair. If you’d be interested in helping, please sign up here or contact Mrs. Cline at clines@smithville.k12.mo.us.
Music with Mr. Kroeger
Second quarter in music has gotten off to a quick start. 6th grade students have started exploring music history in their Music and The World Around us class and will have some really high quality work to show soon! Our 3rd and 4th grade students are preparing for their Christmas music program, The Nutcracker Jr. which will be on December 14th, at the high school PAC at 6PM. There is an information letter that has been sent out, you will continue to get weekly updates as we approach this date. If you have a Kindergartener we have started planning an inaugural field trip to sing Christmas carols at the Smithville Senior center at 12:30PM on December 9th!
Choir has been meeting after school and early in the morning preparing for their first concert on December 7th at the high school PAC at 6PM. They will also be performing songs at the 3/4 grade music program at the high school PAC on December 14th!
PE with Coach Anderson
Our 3-5 students just completed our fitness testing. These activities include our pacer test, push up test, sit up test, and a flexibility test. Each student was able to record their own numbers so we can continue to track our own progress throughout the entire year. We also learned about what realistic vs unrealistic fitness goals may look like as we make progress towards our next testing month (February)
Our 6th grade group started our Warrior Week. Instead of testing, we are completing fitness stations and are also doing this more frequently than the other groups. They are recording these numbers to track their own progress. Every student tried their best and rocked it! I cannot wait to participate with them next time!
Maple Elementary School
Email: hawkinsr@smithville.k12.mo.us
Website: https://www.smithvilleschooldistrict.net/Domain/11
Location: 600 Maple Avenue, Smithville, MO, USA
Phone: (816) 532-0589
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MapleWarriors/
Twitter: @MapleWarriors