• Family Ice-skating event CANCELED

  Please note that PALS will be issuing refunds to those who've purchased tickets in the next few days.
  

  
  

• Night in Tokyo - Middle School Dance - Friday, April 29th at Markell Hall from 6:00 - 9:00 PM
• The last day to purchase tickets is Wednesday, April 20.
• The price is $5.
• Purchase tickets at the student store.

Welcome back! We hope you had a lovely, restful Spring Break. We are barreling towards the end of the school year, so it is time to let you know about some important library dates coming up. And don’t worry, we will remind you of these a million more times! ;)

May 4th: Franklin Academy Day at Village Books! Purchases both in person and online that day will give our school libraries proceeds towards new, in demand books. More details on that soon!

May 26th: Last day to check out library books for the school year.

May 31st: Mrs. Samuel and Mrs. Snyder start inundating your student with book due date reminders!

June 4th: Used Book Sale at Holly Hall from 9-3. We have three years of discarded and donated used books to sell! Proceeds go towards more books for our school libraries.

June 6th: All school library books due! Any books still out after this day will be considered lost and you will receive a replacement request.

If you have any questions or concerns, let us know. More information on each of these library dates will be coming up in future articles.

Happy Reading,

Mrs. Samuel

PALS is partnering with the Mahler family (mom Liza is from Ukraine) to raise money and collect items to ship to Ukraine beginning Wednesday, April 13th. Liza is working with great organizations on the ground in Ukraine and has up-to-date lists of their needs. For a complete list of tangible items click here: Ukraine Relief Items Needed

We will be collecting via the PALS website for the month of April, OR you can donate tangible goods at the blue/yellow Ukraine display and box at Markell Hall. Liza will work with Direct Relief to get these goods and money where they are most-needed at the end of April.

https://ukraine-relief.square.site

If you have any questions, please contact Liza at liza@lizamahler.com.

The beautiful artwork was done by Liza's niece, who graduated from Franklin Academy a few years ago :)

Thank you in advance for supporting Ukraine and all the refugees and their families.

PALS

Download here: Summer Camp Registration Form

Have Questions? Please contact Violet Lord, vlord@thefranklin.academy

Happy Friday to you all! Today was lots of fun for our class! We got up to some very fun egg themed festivities. We kicked off the day by completing a color sorting worksheet, and then we did our egg drop with Mrs. Bucsko and the rest of the school!

The class was very inventive in picking out what we wanted to wrap our egg in. We started with bubble wrap, and then wrapped the bubble-wrapped egg in tissue paper. We then put our wrapped egg in a small box, and wrapped the box in tape and string. We attached our box to a plastic bag filled with balloons to act as a "parachute". When Mrs. Bucsko dropped our egg from the roof, the class went wild! Out of the 13 friends who were in class today, 11 thought our egg would survive the fall, and 2 thought it wouldn't. Drumroll please............................... OUR EGG SURVIVED!!!!!!!!!

We enjoyed a super fun egg hunt at Peabody Plaza with the help of our awesome room parents! Thank you again to Caitlin and Amy for helping us hide eggs, and thank you to everyone who brought eggs to share with the class.

We checked up on our Bouncy Egg experiment today and saw that our eggshell has dissolved even more after sitting in the vinegar potion for a few days. The eggs that we dyed on Wednesday turned out very colorful, and we will send them home on Monday!

Science
Our school, as a whole, participated in the Franklin Egg Drop. We designed two containers to keep our egg safe, while it was dropped from the roof of our school. As a class we made predictions about what would keep our egg safe, and voted on two designs we came up with.

We learned about the various parts of an egg on Monday. During science we placed two eggs in a vinegar solution. Our egg lost its shell, but also grew in size. We learned that this happened because some of the vinegar soaked into the egg.

Our science project on Tuesday was to place an egg in a vase with paper, which we lit on fire. The fire pulled the oxygen out of the vase, and this pulled the egg down in the vase.

Math

Using our math skills we baked Easter rolls in class on Thursday.

We enjoyed a fun game of roll and cover on Friday. We are developing our number recognition skills.

Literacy

It is hard to believe that we are almost to the end of the alphabet in school. Our letter this week was the letter W, and we met Willie the Weasel. In class we created the letter W with legos, shape blocks, and popsicle sticks.

We are learning letter sounds, and this week we worked on matching sounds with lowercase letters.

Gross Motor

Friday is one of our favorite days at school because it is when we have P.E. This week we played many fun games, and learned how to throw scarves.

We had a 'hoppin' good time today during our Easter Egg Hunt and Egg Drop! Thank you so much for providing all of the Easter Eggs and for helping out with hiding them.

Here's what else we have been up to:

-Letter Ee how it looks, writes, sounds, and signs

-Super Sight Word on, as in "we're going on an egg hunt"

-Sight Word Egg Hunt, I placed hidden eggs with sight words on them around the classroom and the kiddos recorded them as they found them.

-All About Number 17, handwriting, tallies, base ten+, number lines, and number word

-Counted eggs, counted spots on eggs, counted to 100 by ones and tens, shape review

-Performed an 'Eggciting Density' science experiment. Raw eggs sink in water, float in salt water, and are suspended in the middle of salt water and water! Cool!

-Operation Egg Drop: Today Mrs. Buckso dropped our engineered creations from the roof to see if we could keep our egg Pinky Peeptastic safe. WE WERE SUCCESSFUL in our efforts in keeping Pinky safe!! YAY!!! We had so many clever ideas! The most important being that things needed to stay light and soft. We used a cup, easter grass, peeps, lots of rubber bands, pipe cleaners, string, a plastic bag, a hole puncher, and a raw egg colored pink, hence Pinky Peeptastic.

-Created our Easter bags, bunny ears, paper bunny crafts, bunny handprints, and our favorite cottontail eggs

-Learned the bunny hop classic dance, see if your kiddo can teach it to you. We also practiced our bunny moves with Jack Hartmann and did our 'egg'ercises.

Prompt: What do you think would grow if you planted jelly beans?

Cana "a sunflower"

Dafni "strawberries"

Ella "a jelly bean castle"

Ezra "walnuts"

Hailey "my favorite strawberries"

Keke "a jelly bean gingerbread house"

Lilly "a butterfly"

Nadia "the Easter bunny"

Parker "an Easter egg for hunting"

What a fun day! Celebrating Easter today was the highlight of the day. All of today’s activities were about Easter.

We started by talking about our STEM “eggs-periment” (Rubbery Egg) and talked if their predictions were right. Eggs were soaked in vinegar for a couple of days. Acid in the vinegar started to eat the eggshell away causing it to become soft and rubbery.

Everybody enjoyed hunting the plastic eggs and then we used them as an opportunity to do math by counting, sorting, and adding.

Mrs. Bucsko led the “Egg-drop Challenge” from the roof of Robin Hall. The kids were more interested in how she got up there than in what happened to the eggs when they hit the ground. But that didn’t stop them from getting an idea of gravity and motion and what happens to eggs dropped from about 30 feet up.

Back in the classroom we dyed eggs by wrapping them in a paper towel then dipping a Q-tip into food coloring to dab color on the egg through the towel. A quick spray of vinegar locked the colors to the eggshell.

At the end of the day, we sat down and shared Easter snacks. Thank you so much for the food you sent for the class. It made our celebration “eggs-tra” special!

Here is our Daily News:

“I had a great Easter celebration because…”

Knox: “I got to hunt Easter eggs.”

Owen: “I got to do challenges in P.E.”

Lola: “our eggs-periment turned into rubbery eggs.”

Toby: “I got to count my eggs in math.”

Jena: “I got to touch the bouncy white egg.”

Samara: “I really liked eating the cupcake that Toby brought.”

Xia-Mari: “my teacher said eggsperiment.”

Caden: “I watched Mrs. Bucsko drop

This week was super fun and focused on Easter! We had our awesome school wide STEM challenge - The Egg Drop! Our kiddos had a lot of fun building their egg insulation. We only had one egg break in the classroom. And FIVE of our eggs survived the drop off the roof!!! Congratulations Brooks, Aapie, Connor, Hazel, and Astrid! We ALL did the chicken dance for fun afterwards.

HUGE THANK YOU to our awesome families stepping up to whip together a party and plastic eggs for the egg hunt for the kiddos! They had a blast searching for eggs and discovering their treats/prizes. We ate all the things today and will even have some left over for next week!

We started our new math unit this week - Flat and Solid Shapes. The kids are doing really well so far. We took a little break the last two days to do some fun EGGcelent Addition and Subtraction. The kids had to open easter eggs to discover a math problem. SO Fun!

In literature we are discussing digraphs - two letters that join together to make a completely different sound. This week we talked about TH. Our sight words this week were he, she, and egg. We also did some super cute art projects - eggs and chicks!

In Music, we learned the call of another bird that "says its name". We know about the chickadee and the killdeer. We got to fly around the room at Music, singing about the cuckoo bird! Then we all settled behind a tree and sang the rest of the song. Since the "tree" was a classmate, and we were making a line and bending from side to side to see around the tree, this was a pretty lively forest!

We had a chance to start on our Easter Rhythms, writing down the pattern we like, using Spring words and either eighth or quarter notes to match the syllables of the Spring words. We'll finish next time!

Back in class, we categorized our mammals, birds, reptiles, and others. We read in our Bunny pages. We wrote numbers on the plastic eggs we had brought. And we anticipated and anticipated... because what we REALLY were ready to do is CREATE! So we did. We took the afternoon and we built and plotted and rearranged... Some of our best plans had to be changed when we got a model egg to put into our design! OH dear.... several eggs wouldn't fit! Several eggs needed to move into safer parts of the design! Hurray for masking tape!

We attached our parachutes, and then we could wait no longer! In the lunchroom, we sat at tables and exchanged the plastic eggs for real hard-boiled eggs. With help from the parents who had come to stuff our plastic eggs, we got the real eggs installed, and traipsed out to the courtyard for THE LAUNCH. Amazingly, there was a 60% success rate among our students! WOW! Not bad at all for a first flight! We still have until 10:00 tomorrow to make adjustments and fix to our heart's content. Then, at 10:00, listen at your window and you will hear the mighty cheer as Mrs. Bucsko, undaunted by the height, drops our designs off the top of Franklin Academy's roof!

This was such a fun week! One of the highlights was the building-wide Egg Drop Challenge today. The kids were pretty pumped up about seeing Mrs. Bucsko on the roof to drop the eggs! Our whole class worked together on making one egg drop container. They worked so well together as a team! I'm happy to report that our egg (that the kids named Humpty Dumpty. Ha!) made the huge drop without even a crack. Way to go first grade engineers!

Here are some other things we were up to this week:

-the students have finished publishing their polar animal writing. The next steps are to pick pictures and then bind them into books!

-we wrote in our journals about where we think the Easter bunny lives and what it is like there. Students are working on doing their own "COPS" check on their writing each time. We also reviewed compound words and previously learned phonics patterns.

-in math we are still working on measurement. This week we worked on two hands-on measurement projects. First, we made a treasure map where places on the map had to be certain distances apart in inches. This gave the students good practice with using a ruler to measure out and mark lengths in inches. The second project was a culminating project for learning about area. We learned that area is the amount of space in a shape in square units. Students then made area robots! They had to draw a paper robot on grid paper, then find the area of each robot part and the total area. Picture attached! We are also continuing to practice subtraction facts for fluency.

-we also did another STEM challenge today: to build a nest for a Peep to keep the Peep safely off the ground! First we reviewed the steps in the engineering design process: ask, imagine, plan, create, test, improve, share. Students then worked in partners to plan and build their nest. The nests turned out great and the best part was the strong teamwork and communication.

-we did an Easter bunny art project. Check out the picture of our funny bunnies!

We had such a fantastic week together after our spring break! I am so thankful that every family participated in bringing eggs to our hunt! We had a wonderful time this morning at our Holly Hall play yard collecting eggs and enjoying our treats! Huge thank you to our amazing "bunnies" who hid our eggs and set up our treats for us to enjoy! I'm attaching some pictures below.

We had such a fantastic week together after our spring break! I am so thankful that every family participated in bringing eggs to our hunt! We had a wonderful time this morning at our Holly Hall play yard collecting eggs and enjoying our treats! Huge thank you to our amazing "bunnies" who hid our eggs and set up our treats for us to enjoy! I'm attaching some pictures below.

We covered a lot of curriculum in second grade this week:

Math:

We started our new math unit on "Money and Time" this week. We learned the various coins and their values and how to count up using coins. We also learned about the various dollar bills and their values. Feel free to practice counting coins and dollar bills over the weekend!

Writer's Workshop:

We utilized our April writing menu to write about the following topics:

*How to dye Easter eggs

*Write a story about a rainy day

*Why is it important to recycle?

*How can you motivate your friends and family to start recycling and helping the earth?

*What is your favorite sport to play?

*Write a poem about peace in the world.

*If you had a talent show at your school, what would your performance be?

*Write a letter telling why YOU should be the Easter bunny this year!

*Write a news article about Earth Day

*Write a how to for creating a spring garden

*Write an Earth Day poem

Literacy/Daily 5:

This week we focused on the reading strategies "Back up and reread," "Compare and contrast" and "Adjust your reading rate depending on the text".

Our word work reviewed long vowel patterns.

Students read individually, listen to reading, reading with partners and participating in small reading groups. In groups, students have begun book clubs. They work together, read and discuss a chapter book at their level. This week, students read the second Magic Treehouse Book: The Knight at Dawn. Partners have now begun reading Scholastic News in pairs and answering questions related to the text.

Social Studies:

This week during our discussion of "Why People Work", we learned about buying and selling across the world. We talked about trade and read about how a rose grown in Kenya, Africa would be purchased in New York City! So interesting! Students then focused on designing their own nation and determining the raw materials their nation would produce and how they would be traded. We created topographic maps of our nations and named them. We then determined who would purchase the raw materials that our nation produced and how they would be processed. This was our culminating project for our unit on "Why People Work" and the students did a fantastic job on these! Our "Why People Work" journals will be coming home in red folders today.

Wishing you all a fabulous weekend! Happy Easter!

Mrs. Belmont

To view all the amazing "Once Upon a Parsnip" art click on the image.

In Art class, we discussed what kinds of healthy foods you can find in a market or a grocery store, such as fruits and vegetables. We worked on our own drawings with oil pastels onto black paper, in a similar style to local famous artist Ben Mann. Students loved the idea of sharing their favorite stories in this special way.

The book Once Upon a Parsnip was written by Barbara Jean Hicks and Kevin R. Wood, and illustrated by Ben Mann. #BeKindLetsShine ~ Miss Rachel Simpson

To view all the creative mixed media art "Jean Michel Basquiat Storytelling" click on the image.

We began these in February, during the Black History month, and completed them in March. Students chose a story to tell in their pieces, (such as Briar Rabbit or Jack and the Beanstalk) with a focus on the main character, using text to describe/represent it, and a scene or landscape to place the story.

We had a variety of art materials to use & choose from: Pallet of Watercolors, Colored Pencils, Oil Pastels, Liquid Watercolors, and Black Sharpie Markers. I just love how each of our students, made each of their art - their own and included stories to share. #BeKindLetsShine ~ Miss Rachel Simpson