Weekly Newsletter
April 28, 2022
News from Principal Emma Liebowitz
Teacher Appreciation Week
Billie has arrived!
Events/Calendar
Friday, April 29 - Fifth Grade MCAS
May 2 - 6: Teacher Appreciation Week
Tuesday, May 3: Sixth Grade MCAS
Wednesday, May 4: 1:50 Dismissal
Thursday, May 5: Sixth Grade MCAS
May 9 -13: Fifth and Sixth Grade to Camp Keewaydin
Tuesday, May 10: Third Grade MCAS
Wednesday, May 11: 1:50 Dismissal
Wednesday, May 11: School Committee at 6:30
Thursday, May 12: Third Grade MCAS
Monday, May 16: LEC at 3:15
Tuesday, May 17: Fourth Grade MCAS
Wednesday, May 18: 1:50 Dismissal
Thursday, May 19: Fifth Grade MCAS
Thursday, May 20: First Grade to Fish Way
Thursday, May 20: Fifth Grade MCAS
Tuesday, May 24: Fourth Grade MCAS
Wednesday, May 25: 1:50 Dismissal
Thursday, May 26: Berkshire Hills Music Academy Performance at 2:00 (all grades)
Friday, May 27: Mosquito Presentation at 1:30 (grades 3-6)
Monday, May 30: No School
Link to Sanderson Academy calendar.
Health Office News from Nurse Loranna
With the weather getting warmer there are now more opportunities for play and sports outside, hooray! With the increased activities there is also an increased risk of injury; this week I wanted to touch briefly on head injuries. Children need to play- outdoors especially- take risks and be active to best support their growth and development. So avoiding activities is definitely not advised, and may in fact increase the risk of injuries. Accidental injuries are more common when there is little or less active play, so we certainly need to support our children’s development by giving them lots of opportunities to play and develop those skills. Prevention can help decrease injuries substantially. Wearing a helmet is an essential way we can protect our children’s developing brain- children should wear a well fitting helmet (that covers the forehead) when bicycling, scootering, dirt biking, four wheeling as well as for certain sports. Children tend to notice what adults do, so modeling wearing a helmet as a parent goes a long way. Wearing a seatbelt at all times when in a vehicle, as well as being sure your child is in the proper car seat, saves lives; children are especially vulnerable in a car due to their smaller size. Head injuries can sometimes lead to a concussion; thankfully recognition and treatment of concussions has increased greatly in the past years. Common symptoms of a concussion are dizziness, headache, nausea, light or sound sensitivity, feeling “spacey” and fatigue or confusion. Treatment of a concussion mainly is focused on rest- avoiding screens, reading, writing and stopping an activity if it brings on symptoms. If you ever wonder if your child has sustained a concussion, reach out to their pediatrician for guidance.
Library News from Ms. Wilson
This Friday, we will bring our focus on National Poetry Month to a close by celebrating “Poem in Your Pocket Day''. Poem in Your Pocket Day was established in New York City in 2002. This day strives to “celebrate the beauty of poetry and the impact it has on our lives and communities.” On Friday, each student will be given a poem that they can read, trade, share, and keep in their pockets or backpacks. Perhaps a poem will be shared with you at home!
This week in the Library, students will also be invited to take part in creating paper May Day flowers for elders in our community. We hope this gesture will spread some joy and tidings of spring.
Preschool News from Ms. Freeman
Preschoolers are happy to be back at school and with their friends. They are noticing new things in our classroom, including a new friend. We welcome Beau, and are happy to help him learn about our classroom and show him some of our favorite things to do at school.
This week we are fortunate to have fertilized chicken eggs from Ms. Katie and have placed them in an incubator. We talked about how the incubator will act like a mother hen, keeping the eggs warm and safe while they develop. The egg turner inside the incubator will help the baby chicks move and exercise while they grow. We are so excited to try to hatch baby chicks!
We are also observing frog eggs. We discovered the eggs in the vernal pool just before vacation and gathered a few this week to keep in our science center. We noticed the frog eggs were different from the chicken eggs, they were soft and squishy like jelly, not hard with a shell. We are excited to see what happens to these eggs as well!
The photo shows frog eggs in the vernal pool.
Preschool News from Ms. Melanie
We have two new visitors to our science table–baby chickens! They are warm and cozy in a clear tub–just right for looking through. We can watch them come out from under their brooder and snack on their food and water. We can hear them peeping as we go about our day. We have begun drawing them in our daily journals, watching for changes and noticing new things. We have been learning about the life cycle of a chicken–and trying out new words like: hatch, incubator, brooder, egg tooth, pip, rooster, hen, and chick. What a lovely addition to our indoor classroom!
Kindergarten News from Ms. Sarah
This week was all about reconnecting with our class community, re-establishing our routines (with some spring updates), and introducing some new unit of study for the spring! We opened this week by sharing what we hope to do at school this spring and we discussed how our class promise (to take care of ourselves, each other, and our school) will help all of our hopes to be possible. We also played a game to re-activate our muscle memory response to our attention-getting signals. We are so happy to welcome two new classmates to our kindergarten community!
First Grade News from Ms. Wyckoff
Welcome back from April vacation! We hope you all had a restful and enjoyable break. Just before April vacation first graders met up with their sixth grade buddies to take part in the all-school clean up that happened on Friday 4/15. Sixth graders were so incredibly kind, helpful and set the example of what a leader looks like. Buddies took turns digging holes for flowers, locating trash and talking about their upcoming vacation. Thank you sixth graders for all the kindness you show first graders, they just love having you as their big buddies and look forward to their next activity with you! As we return from break, we are revisiting classroom rules and expectations for the different parts of our day. On Monday we did some sharing. One first grader shared a story of his foxtail toy getting stuck in a tree and then needed to toss other items up to retrieve it. ONe first grader said “This reminds me of a story!” Mrs. Morey said “I know that book!”, so as a class we read Stuck by Oliver Jeffers where a boy named Floyed gets his kite stuck in a tree. This then led to kids thinking about what would happen next in the story. First graders are now writing their own ending to this very silly story! There are always connections happening all around us!
Second Grade News from Ms. Robertson
We welcomed everyone back from our April break by sharing small moment memories of our vacation time. Many of our small moment memories included spending time with family, from watching a movie or a play together to helping out with yard work and clearing bike trails. Other small moment memories told of playing with siblings or friends and of special visits with grandparents. Easter egg hunts, special trips to the city, and special surprises were also shared. Our small moment memories then served as a springboard for our writing. Prior to beginning our writing, we revisited the “sandwich method” (top bun – beginning sentence, cheese/meat/veggies – detail sentences, bottom bun – ending sentence) that was introduced earlier in the year as a tool for organizing our writing. The sandwich method was then utilized to keep our details focused on the memory we chose to write about and to develop our idea with several sentences. Our next steps will include editing our writing, writing a final draft, and making an illustration.
Our work with place value continues during our math block, but we are now moving our focus from two-digit numbers to three-digit numbers. Our lessons started off with a read aloud called How Much, How Many, How Far, How Heavy, How Long, How Tall is 1000? by Helen Nolan. We then looked at a tub filled with popsicle sticks and estimated how many sticks we thought were in the tub. Next, we counted the sticks, putting them into groups of tens and ones. We completed the activity by taking everyone’s groups of tens to see how many hundreds we could make and taking everyone’s ones to see how many tens we could make. Our final count revealed that we had a group total of 887 popsicle sticks, which we expressed in expanded form as 887=800+80+7.
Third Grade News from Ms. Carole
Third graders were happy to be back with their friends this week. The first thing we did on Monday was learn about everyone’s highlights from the week of vacation. It sounds like many of you had wonderful weeks!
We worked with our buddies this week to decorate their outdoor classroom. Each third grader helped his/her buddy create a mobile using natural materials which is now hung in their beautiful outdoor space.
We also spent some time this week exploring the Vernal Pool. With buddies, nets, and buckets, students were able to capture many different early-spring creatures which we will watch and learn about for a few days in our classroom tank. We will revisit the Vernal Pool in a few weeks and notice the difference in populations. In gearing up for our planting time, each third grader learned about one of the types of seeds we will be planting. They did research online and created a card for our Seed Museum which is set up in the windows of the school lobby. Come check it out when you get a minute.
This Friday we are excited to be heading to Hancock Shaker Village as a class trip.
Fourth Grade News from Ms. Lagoy
Fourth graders have finished the first quadrant of our book The City of Ember. At the end of the quadrant, students used three of our anchor charts to write a retell summary of the quadrant. In the second quadrant, they will use comprehension strategies to get to deeper thinking, recognize key repeated words and phrases, and start to think about possible lines of thinking. Our line of thinking is what we think the author’s message is. In the third quadrant, we will look for evidence to support our line of thinking.
In geography, students are finishing their study of the Southwest Region. In their scrapbooks, they have to designate a place they’d like to visit. Be sure to ask your kiddo what they chose. Our final region is the West. Mrs. Upright will begin this unit of study in the next couple of days.
Fifth Grade News from Ms. Johnson
Fifth grade has been working on research based argument writing. As a class, we researched the pros and cons of chocolate milk being served in schools and took notes. We learned about the structure of a five paragraph essay. We learned about thesis statements, too. We wrote a thesis statement for why chocolate milk should be served in schools. We started paragraphs for each of the arguments based on the notes we took. We also learned about various hooks to start an essay off with and came up with some for each type of hook we learned about. Now students have picked their own topics and are researching both the pros and cons for the topic they chose. They are taking notes and recording their sources. Some of the topics students are writing about are homework amounts and whether esports should be considered sports.
Sixth Grade News from Ms.Lilly
I hope everyone enjoyed their April vacation; we are in the home stretch of sixth grade now! We are still doubling down on math this week and next with math MCAS next Tuesday, May 3rd and Thursday, May 5th. We also had an exciting visit from Mrs. Ruggeri, one of the middle school guidance counselors from Mohawk. The sixth graders had many questions about what their day will look like next year. They were curious what clubs are offered, how long classes are, what time school starts and ends?
News from Ms. Prew
I hope you all had a wonderful April break! This week I am going to share a fun puzzle with you. You might see puzzles like this one shared in Sanderson classrooms as a "warm-up" or a way to get our brains ready for mathematical thinking. Can you find the value of each symbol as well as the question mark? Send me your thoughts! :) aprew@mtrsd.org
Welcome back to school, I hope everyone had a wonderful spring break week! I am hoping the weather will start to show us more signs of spring…Happy Earth Day…which was officially last week, but isn’t everyday earth day?
The students in ALL grades did a wonderful job creating these growing, blooming flowers with words that describe all the things that we each need in life to help us grow! Keep growing Sanderson families!
FIshing Derby Information
Summer Opportunities
About Us
Email: eliebowitz@mtrsd.org
Website: https://sanderson.mohawktrailschools.org/
Location: 808 Cape Street, Ashfield, MA, USA
Phone: (413) 628-4404
Facebook: facebook.com/SandersonAcademy