ACADEMY ADVENTURES MIDTOWN
Building on Strengths and Filling Buckets!
SCHOOL UPDATES!
Happy 2022! We hope that everyone had a fun and relaxing Winter Break. It seemed to fly by here at the school as we prepared for students to return!
A BIG Thank You to our families who took time out of their busy schedules to come participate and donate (goods and their time) for our December Baking Days! It was so much fun to be able to continue our traditions in person! We hope you had as much fun as we did! Check out our December Baking Days photos below! If you have ideas or traditions you would like to share at other times during the school year, please contact Mrs. Angela. We are always willing to make new traditions a part of our school!
We hope you enjoyed the Cookies & Cocoa Holiday Performance! We did stream it live on Facebook if you missed it. You can see the recordings on our Facebook page.
January is a relatively quiet month! We have an Early Release Day & Title I Family Stone Soup Day Event on the 14th and No School on the 17th. Students will continue to have "show what you know" Friday assessments. We will be building in some incentives this semester to continue to encourage the students to do their best.
We are enrolling for all grades. If you know anyone who is interested, please have them call the school. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to educate your child!
We are also looking for full-time parapros to help in the classrooms and after school program. If you know anyone who is interested, please have them contact the school or email us at: info@academyadventuresmidtown.com.
MANDATORY FACE MASKS REQUIRED
Academy Adventures Midtown continues to follow the recommendations and requirements from the local authorities as well as the CDC. It is highly recommended that schools K-12 require masks inside to help slow the spread of the new variant.
If your child or anyone in the household is exposed to someone with Covid, thinks they may have been exposed and/or shows any signs of illness, please keep your child home. Children need to stay home at least 72 hours symptom and medication free. We will be happy to work with you so that your child does not miss out on any instruction, so please reach out to your child's teacher or Mrs. Angela.
Thank you for your continued cooperation and support.
CONGRATULATIONS STUDENTS!!!!
WOW! When our students set their mind to something they succeed! December was the Hour of Code Unruly Splats Let's Get Moving Challenge. Unruly Splats teamed up with NFL Player, Jonathan Jones (Patriots) for this challenge. Students had three (3) opportunities to place: Most Stomps, Most Block Coding or Most Presence in Social Media.
You may remember we won first place in September for most Block Coding in the Go Bananas Back to School Challenge. Students were determined to keep their status and managed to code over 13000 blocks of code to win 1st place! This contest was for all schools in the US and Canada. We were up against "schools" who were actually districts made up of 10 or more schools and we still placed 1st in Block Coding and 4th in Stomping (over 114700 stomps!)!
We could not be more proud of their determination and sportsmanship! Our Jonathan Jones signed Splat will arrive in the next few weeks! Watch for pictures and videos of the unveiling. Not to mention a little "pie" in the face for someone! All in good fun of course!
JOIN US ON JANUARY 14TH!
With the cooler weather, what is better than a nice hot bowl of soup and a piece of cornbread?! Students will be participating in fun Stone Soup activities and we will finish the day off with Stone Soup that the students will get to help with!
We invite our parents/guardians to come join your child for lunch at 11:00 AM. Watch for more details to be sent home and on Class Dojo!
We hope you will be able to join us!
We were so excited to be able to bring back our December Baking Days this year! We missed this tradition last year! Students learned to make Tamales, Lasagna and got to decorate some cookies! It was a lot of fun to the ending of a very productive semester! The students earned the opportunity to have some fun!
A HUGE Thank You to the parents and grandparents who came by and helped out! We could not have done it without you. And a HUGE Thank You to the families who were not able to join but donated items! We are so thankful for everyone's support!
Check out some of the pictures below!
There is nothing more exciting to our staff than when a student tells us how well they did no their Friday assessments! We are so proud of the progress all of the students are making and how much their confidence has risen when it comes to taking a test. It took a little time for the students to understand the process and reasoning behind "show what you know" Friday assessments but you can see the change in their attitude towards them and how hard they work to master the assessment. It is so rewarding to see the students proud of themselves!
The 2nd Benchmark Assessment the students took in December showed how much our students have increased their knowledge and mastered their test taking skills. We will continue to have weekly "show what you know" Fridays to continue to encourage the students to do their best on assessments, as well as prepare the 3rd - 5th grade students for the AzM2 State Testing. This semester, we will be adding in some incentives to help continue to encourage students to do their best.
If you would like to get the weekly assessment results, please contact your child's teacher! We will soon be implementing the parent online portal for Renaissance which will allow you to sign in and see how your child is doing and set up notifications. Watch for that information to be sent out and/or posted in Class Dojo in the next few weeks.
Attendance matters! Every minute matters. Attendance is mandatory by law. Students ages 6-16 are REQUIRED to be at school on days school is in session. Any child who misses 10% or more is considered to have excessive absences by law, which means your child may be administratively withdrawn from school based on their absence rate being over 10%.
The New Year stands before us, like a chapter in a book waiting to be written. We can help write the chapters by setting goals together.
That is exactly what your students and the staff at Academy Adventures Midtown have in mind for the second semester. Together, we have pushed through the new program, the new structure and we have proven to have AMAZING outcomes. From the beginning of this school year until now, there has been great academic, behavioral and inward growth from EVERY student! I cannot thank the students enough for their ability to acclimate and SHOW US WHAT THEY KNOW!
Every Kindergartener can write his or her name. Not only can they write their name, they can spell it verbally. This is beyond impressive! Over the past month, Kinders can now identify the differences between singular and plural nouns, as well as identify parts of a book, such as front and back cover, the author, the illustrator and the title page. Become more aware of the structure of a book, our reading will become smoother! In the upcoming quarter, we are going to hyper focus on our phonemes to help us become more fluent in CVC words and our Sight Words. I have no doubt that the next chapter for Kindergarten will be magical!
Confidence and fluency are the First Graders greatest achievements over the past month. We have spent beautiful time together learning how to speak and/or read out loud. We are becoming more confident in our reading and have mastered not only knowing what the vowels are in the alphabet, but also knowing the difference in short and long vowel sounds. I may or may not have teared up a few times as I watch them blossom into readers. As we move forward in our next chapter, we will continue to focus on reading, as well as writing opinion papers and personal narratives. I am very much looking forward to how those papers turn out.
Our AMAZING second graders are becoming stronger and stronger in their abilities to move through each lesson. As we continue to practice our writing skills, we have identified parts of informational texts that help us understand what we are reading on deeper levels. We have had a few days of practice using the dictionary, as well as fixing spelling of irregular plural nouns. In the Second Grade next chapter, we will continue to work on reading fluency and utilizing the dictionary for definitions and spelling support.
Third grade has ROCKED their abilities to conduct research papers. We have visited and conquered the writing process, researching a topic on the Chromebook, and drafting a final edit to submit with a neatly typed paper. Third grade has researched provided and choice topics, and have written opinions and informational texts to present. I am blown away by their writing abilities! In the upcoming month, we will focus on sentence structures, grammar and identifying and correcting errors.
If one of our Fourth Graders does not become a scientific researcher, I will be EXTREMELY surprised. Fourth Grade learned the writing process and ran with it. They have researched Greek Mythology, historical figures, and have written persuasive papers. Fourth grade was asked to write a persuasive essay to encourage AAM staff to provide more time during recess. Let's just say that these papers definitely allowed them some more time outside. In our class’s next chapter, we will focus on reading fluency, high frequency words, as well as comprehension on our reading.
Just as I thought the Fifth Graders were going to be professional poets, they came in strong with their abilities to conduct research on a topic, and write one to two paragraph essays on their findings. Fifth Grade was asked to research a poem structure, make themselves a ‘cheat sheet’ on the structure of the poem, and then craft that type of poem. Further, the Fifth Graders researched types of cultural cuisine that they would want to prepare for the class. That led into the class writing persuasive papers on changing the lunch menu at our school. Though we could not have Chic-Fil-A or Panda Express everyday, they were proud of their work. Moving into the next class chapter, we will focus on fluency, comprehension with our fictional and informational texts.
The year 2021 definitely had its trials and tribulations, but your students have continued to shape me to be a better teacher, mentor and all around person. If there is a time you want to chat about your student, please do not hesitate to send me a Class Dojo or call me at the school. Thank you for encouraging, supporting and choosing Academy Adventures Midtown for your student!
And just like that, December went by in a flash. We have worked extremely hard these past two quarters and have been able to see our progress improving over these past 5 months. This month all grades focused on reviewing old material while learning good test taking strategies and how to apply our knowledge to the specific questions given. Each and every one of these amazing students did fantastic on their benchmarks this month and I couldn’t be more proud of them!
Kindergarten has continued working on their shapes, finishing up the unit with flat shapes and moving forward into solid shapes. The students are showing great understanding by recognizing the different shapes around us. We’ve walked around the school doing scavenger hunts to try and determine what shapes are associated with what objects. They are phenomenal with applying their prior knowledge of measurements and numbers to what we’re learning now.
First grade has continued finding new strategies to help add and subtract numbers within 20. They’ve found that number lines and tens frames are the most helpful for visualizing the problems and helping recognize how the numbers “count on” and “count back”. They have grown immensely in their confidence with these new numbers and the operations we use with them and I am excited to see them continue to grow.
Second grade has been continuing their use of bar models to represent addition and subtraction problems. We have noticed that the bar models help us visualize what’s happening with the numbers and it helps us determine how much we’re taking away and how much we’re left with. These amazing second graders have also been improving their skills with word problems by recognizing keywords and being able to understand whether we’re adding or subtracting based off those keywords and the bar models we’re given.
Third grade has continued building on their multiplication facts but rather than focusing on the tips and tricks we can use, we’ve been focusing on fact families. We learned that fact families help tell us how multiplication sentences relate to division. These amazing students have continued to surprise me with how quick they grasp these concepts and how we are able to go more in depth as the days go on. Each and every one of them has improved immensely since the school year has begun and I am excited to see what continued growth they’ll show.
Fourth grade has been continuing their fraction unit, and have continued to be rockstars at understanding this new topic and building on their prior knowledge. We’ve worked with adding and subtracting proper fractions, finding out what mixed numbers are, and learning how we can turn mixed numbers into improper fractions and vice versa. The students really excelled when they were asked to draw diagrams of their fractions and were able to use their visuals to help them create mixed numbers and improper fractions. I’m excited to see where they take the rest of this unit and am looking forward to seeing them continue to be amazing.
Fifth grade has continued growing their fraction skills and have grown extremely confident in their ability to multiply and divide fraction. We’ve been focusing on incorporating them into word problems so that we feel confident with deciphering what keywords help us know what to do with the fractions and numbers given in the text. These phenomenal fifth graders are continuing to amaze me and show their strengths every day they come into class and I am excited to see what the new year brings us.
I cannot believe we’ve already gone through half the school year. I’m eager to see what lies ahead with these outstanding students! Thank you again to all you parents, students and staff for all of your hard work this year, wish you all a Happy Holidays. I look forward to the amazing things that are to come! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me!
We have a few openings in all grade levels! What better way to fill the school than to refer your friends and family?! If you know anyone looking for a school, please refer them to our website or have them contact the school.
The After School Enrichment Program is going great! Thank you to Mr. Gilbert and Ms. Lia for the great job they are doing in keeping the children engaged!
A few reminders:
- Behavior expectations are the same after school as they are during school
- The after school program ends at 5:00 PM. Please make sure you are picking up your child(ren) on time
- There is no after school program on early release days
If you have any questions regarding the after school program, please check with your child's teacher.
We know that the more involvement parents have in their child's education, the more successful the child will be! We are always encouraging parents to be involved. Some of the ways that you can be involved include but is not limited to:
- Reading with your child nightly
- Keeping in contact with your child's teacher regarding their progress
- Attending Stone Soup Lunch
- Asking your child specific questions about their day
- Encouraging your child to always do their best
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14, 2022 --> TITLE I FAMILY EVENT: STONE SOUP (11:00 am)
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14, 2022 --> EARLY RELEASE (11:30 AM)
MONDAY, JANUARY 17. 2022 - NO SCHOOL - CIVIL RIGHTS DAY
ACADEMY ADVENTURES MIDTOWN
Email: info@academyadventuresmidtown.com
Website: https://academyadventuresmidtown.com
Location: 3025 North Winstel Boulevard, Tucson, AZ, USA
Phone: (520) 777-3757
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/academyadventuresmidtown