I hope you all had as much fun during The Great Kindness Challenge as I did! Thanks to our wonderful school counselor, Mrs. Hosbach, for organizing our week of activities. Thanks to our PTO for sponsoring the Prismatic Magic Kindness Laser Light Show Assembly on January 25th. And of course, don't forget about the Kindness Dance for grades 3 - 5 scheduled for tonight, Friday, January 27th from 6 - 7:30 PM. You can check out some scenes from this week below, as well as some more features in our grade level updates for the week.

Be sure to check out the featured section below on our Brandt School Spelling Bee, held last Friday. Thanks to Mrs. Della Fave and Mr. Caniglia for organizing the event, and Mr. Panfile for being our Spelling Bee Emcee. Congratulations to our winner, 5th grader Naomi Bacon! She will represent us at the Hudson County Spelling Bee, to be held in Secaucus in February.

Speaking of the PTO, be sure to subscribe to their new newsletter. The link is featured below. It will be a great place to find out information about how you can continue to support our school community by working with our dedicated parent/guardian group. Be sure to save the date of March 24th. That is when we have our Staff vs. Parents Basketball Game scheduled. More information about signing up to participate is forthcoming!

We have a lot of information to share regarding our theater department. On behalf of our friends at Hoboken Middle School, please see the flyer included below for their production of I Hate Valentine's Day. Our very own Brandt School 2nd and 3rd graders will perform for their families on January 30th. Additionally, please be sure to see the letter (and click on the corresponding pdf file) for information about our district musical - SpongeBob. There is also information about mock auditions and a Day of STEAM scheduled for February 25th.

Next week, on February 1st and 2nd, our classes will be visited by the good folks at Hoboken Smile in recognition of National Dental Health Month. They will review the importance of dental hygiene with our students.

In partnership with the Hoboken Public Library, we are also pleased to announce our Pop Up Library initiative! This will take place from February 6th - 9th, and you can find more information in the flyer below my principal's message.

After you peruse all of that new information, don't forget to check out our grade level and subject area updates as we shine a spotlight on our students learning and our teachers teaching!

For this week's Friday Playlist, we went with the three songs we chose for our Kindness Week Music Mornings. Congratulations to Ms. Kontogiannis' homeroom, Mrs. Waag's homeroom, and Mrs. Gant's homeroom for correctly identifying the songs during our morning call-in contest!

Have a great weekend and please safe!

- Mr. Bartlett

Students participated in The Great Kindness Challenge this week. They dressed up and participated in some fun activities to spread some extra kindness. Kindness is cool and something that should be practiced year round!

In ELA, students learned about Folktales. Students looked for the morals/lessons within each folktale story that we read. Students also discussed cause and effect of actions within these stories. They applied cause and effect to their own life as well by thinking about situations where something happened, and thinking about the cause and why the outcome occurred. The phonics focus this week was soft c and soft g.

In math, students are continuing to explore with measurement. Students had a fun time measuring objects around the classroom. They even measured their own feet. Students are comparing two objects of different lengths and finding how much longer or shorter one object is compared to the other. For example: if one fish is 7 inches and the other is 3 inches, then the longer fish is 4 inches longer than the shorter one.

We had a wonderful Kindness Week in 2nd grade! On Wednesday, students got to witness a very fun assembly that included a laser light show!

In social studies, students discussed different ways they can show kindness in school as well as the community. In class we discussed how to be kind to each other and show small acts of kindness throughout the day.

In reading, students reviewed skills learned throughout second grade. We touched on the main idea, retelling and sequencing, and nonfiction text features. Students got to demonstrate their knowledge of these skills by identifying and analyzing these concepts in texts at their reading level.

In writing, students continued to work on personal narratives. Students studied mentor texts and styles of different authors so that they could incorporate their techniques and improve their writing pieces.

In math, students are at the beginning of unit 3 and taking a deeper look at place value, specifically tens and ones. Students are thinking about the patterns they see when breaking down numbers to show all the different combinations of tens and ones they can come up with for 2 digit numbers.

Math: Third graders continued to move through their progress of Unit 3: Travel Stories and Collections. The classes enjoyed practicing games throughout the unit such as Capture 5, Race to 100, and Go Collecting. Students are making connections between double and triple digit addition and subtraction and place value.

ELA: While students continued to follow the journey of Wilbur and Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web, we continued honing our writing skills during our Literary Analysis Tasks (LAT) where we compared two fiction texts. Students reviewed expository text while identifying the main ideas of the text.

Social Studies: This week our third graders learned about Lunar New Year and the year of the Rabbit! Students explored celebrations and traditions in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam.

On Wednesday students enjoyed their assembly for Prismatic Magic! Thank you Brandt PTO!

This week, fourth graders had a blast celebrating Kindness Week while engaging in some exciting lessons and activities!

In Social Studies, fourth-grade students delved into the unit on the Revolutionary War. They discussed why colonists wanted independence from Britain and what events and conflicts led to the first battles of the war.

In ELA, students continued reading What Would She Do?, the story of 25 trailblazing women throughout history. Each student spent this week choosing their own trailblazing woman to begin researching for a new project. In a couple of weeks, students will present a poster, slideshow, or chapter in the style of our book based on the woman of their choice.

In Math, students are finishing up their unit on shapes and symmetry. This week, students explored how to find lines of symmetry and congruence in irregular polygons using various math manipulatives.

As we continue reading Esperanza Rising, we are also writing a compare and contrast essay. Students are asked to compare and contrast three different texts which mainly discuss refugees. Students have been working on crafting a strong thesis sentence as well as detailed body paragraphs. In our readers workshop, we have been continuing reading and adding to anchor charts.

In Math, we just began Unit 4: How many people and teams?, which concentrates on multi-digit multiplication. Students have been practicing through using the box method as well as the standard algorithm method.

In Social Studies, we are finishing up the Before Civil War Unit. Our 5th grade historians spent time this week investigating the different compromises and events happening during the 1800s. As we look ahead, we will be mapping the key events from this unit.

We had an amazing week celebrating The Great Kindness Challenge here at Brandt School. Our students were engaged in a variety of activities that promote kindness, not only in the school building, but also in the community.

Students decorated Brandt stickers with inspiring messages for The Hive coffee shop to attach to their cups each morning. Thanks to the PTO we were treated to an awesome light show promoting anti-bullying and kindness, and the students were dancing and singing along the whole show.

The PTO also donated bracelet kits for us to make friendship bracelets all week! The students loved making bracelets for one another and spreading joy around the building. Take a look at some photos below from the exciting week!

As our recent fitness unit came to its conclusion, the students this week were evaluated for our second round of fitness testing consisting of the pacer, push-up test, and sit-up test. Everyone achieved the goal of completing more reps than the first round back in the beginning of the year!

This week in Mandarin class, the students learned how the world celebrates the Lunar New Year. They had lots of fun watching and learning the lion dance and the dragon parade!

Students from our music classes in Grades 3-5 focused on Broadway, in particular, The Phantom of The Opera. Students got a chance to create masks in the legendary image of the Phantom. Just as the Phantom tells his story, so do we through our musical creativity. We give our regards to Broadway!

Good Day Brandt Family -

Nurse Karoline O'Keeffe recently resigned her position with our school district. We wish her nothing but the best in her new professional endeavor.

Please know that Dr. Cecilia D'Elia (our Director of Special Services) and I have been vetting prospective candidates for our school nurse position, and I am confident we will have a new, permanent nurse on staff soon.

In the meantime, our school's nursing and health needs will be covered and shared by Nurse Renee Banks, Nurse Wendy Lopez, and Nurse Maddie Carroll.

In order to keep needs and communication streamlined, if you have any health concerns or questions, you should send them to Nurse Banks at rbanks@hoboken.k12.nj.us.

I remain at your service should you have any questions.

- Mr. Bartlett