KES 2024 January Newsletter ☃️

We hope that you had a wonderful time with family and friends over break and are ready for the start of a wonderful new year!

2nd Grade- BOCES Erosion

5th Grade- Caramoor "Becoming Sound: Year of the Dragon"

Designed by Lauren Richel Kelly and Installed by Lauren with the help of Parent Volunteers.

Along with celebrating birthdays, we had a joyful sing-along! Here's a video clip: Walking in the Winter Wonderland

This book was chosen because it can help students understand that kindness is action and words, and demonstrates how you can stand up for yourself while still being kind to others.

At KES, We Choose Kindness!

From Harper Collins Publications

This month, in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr's birthday, students will be learning about his life and legacy of peace, service, and equality.

4th grade students have the honor of highlighting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at our January Sharing Assembly. Throughout the month, they will be creating visual displays illustrating the ways in which MLK led with dignity. At the assembly, they will share their work and encourage the KES community members to consider how they too can follow in his footsteps- by helping the community, standing up for what is right, being fair and treating everyone with kindness.

As a family, you could be reading children's about MLK and the Civil Rights Movement as a way to celebrate Dr. King. See the following links for book selections from Scholastic Parents.

KES students opted to participate in the Animals of Our Area sponsored by KES COMPACT in collaboration with the Katonah Village Library as part of honoring Native American/American Indian Heritage Month.

Native American art traditionally emphasizes nature and often includes images of animals. Animals can symbolize certain traits or characteristics. The art is often marked by use of earth tones, geometric shapes, bold lines and stylized patterns. Students who participated chose a local animal that they found interesting and drew or painted it in a way that was consistent with these themes. Students considered how the characteristics of the animal could be represented and were encouraged to to add background elements inspired by nature, such as trees, mountains, or rivers to enhance the Native American art style.

The students' art is hanging in the Katonah Village Library. Stop by and take a look- you'll be impressed!!!

Before we left for break, we did see an increase in student and adult sickness. New York State reminds us to stay home when sick, stay up-to-date on vaccines, wash hands often with soap and water, cough and sneeze in your elbows, and wear a mask for 5 days when returning from being Covid positive.

As the chilly weather approaches, please be sure your child comes to school in clothing that is appropriate for outdoor play.

If the temperature, including the wind chill, is below forty degrees, students should wear the following:

• Warm coats
• Long pants

On snowy days in order to play in the snow (including sledding) students will also need:

• Snow pants
• Boots
• Hats
• Gloves

Please be aware that if a student is not dressed appropriately, he or she will be unable to attend outdoor activities (including recess). If the temperature, including the wind chill, falls below twenty degrees, the students will stay inside for recess. Dr. Louis A. Corsaro, the school district physician, has advised us in these matters.

We conducted all necessary drills in 2023 and will continue our safety drills in 2024. Specifically, you will be notified when we conduct our required lockdown and evacuation drills.

As part of the Katonah-Lewisboro’s health curriculum, we are using the Second Step: Child Protection Unit in the kindergarten, second and fourth grade classroom. Ms. Fulton, our school social worker and Dr. Zampolin, our school psychologist will be pushing into your child’s class to deliver a specific curriculum based on your child’s grade. They will teach important skills such as:

• Personal Safety. Students will learn important safety rules, such as safety with guns, sharp tools, and fire, and when riding on wheels or in cars. They will also learn ways to help them decide if something is safe or not.

• Touching Safety. Students will learn about safe, unsafe, and unwanted touches, and rules about touching private body parts. They’ll also learn to say no to unsafe or unwanted touches, and to tell an adult if someone breaks rules about touching private body parts.

• Assertiveness. These lessons will also give students a chance to practice asking an adult for help, telling an adult about an unsafe situation and being assertive to get out of unsafe situations.

Your child will bring home ‘Home Links’ to help you understand what is being taught about safety at school and to give your child another chance to practice safety skills.

If you have any questions about the Child Protection Unit or the Second Step program, please contact Ms. Fulton at jfulton@klschools.org.

Thank you for helping us to make our school a safe and supportive place where everyone can learn.

Putnam Northern Westchester BOCES is hosting a virtual workshop about Internet Safety.

Please see details below about how to register if interested.

As per our Response to Intervention District Plan mandated by New York State, benchmarks, or screenings, will begin in mid-January for students in grades K-5. The assessments are administered as a whole group and individually, depending on the grade and subject area. The results of the AIMSweb screening, along with other school data (Running Record, Topic Assessments, etc.) will be reviewed by the KES RTI Team (Principal, School Psychologist, Interventionists, Classroom Teachers). If your child qualifies for services, changes level of services, or exits services based on the criteria outlined across the district, you will receive a parent communication mid-February.

Principal Presentation on New Progress Reports at PTO General Membership Meeting on 1/17.

Classroom Teachers and Special Area Teachers will be completing progress reports for our students. Progress Reports will be made available in February via the Parent Campus. You will receive a Connect Ed message when the reports are available for viewing. The Progress reports were updated and you will see many changes.

The progress report reflects your child’s progress in relation to the current NY State Standards. Student performance is reported on a continuum from beginning to secure for the specified time of year. As the year progresses and as children move from one grade level to the next, schoolwork becomes more challenging, and expectations increase accordingly. Therefore, the assessment indicators –beginning, developing, and secure– may vary as the student moves from semester to semester, or from year to year. Thus, a rating of “secure” may change in a particular area over time. Due to the pacing and/or complexity of the curriculum, some indicators may not be expected at the beginning or middle of the year, therefore, you may see NE, indicating a standard is not expected for that time of year.

The grade reporting system includes information about your child’s approach to learning as a whole (work and study habits), and their progress in academic areas. Within each academic category, there is an ‘At-a-Glance' description of the content area topics that are addressed at that time of year, as well as the standards that are being assessed. Teachers use a variety of methods to determine strengths and areas that require attention and support. The teacher comments section aims to give you a holistic view of your child as a learner and address specific learning goals.

Katonah-Lewisboro values ongoing communication between home and school. While there is one dedicated parent-teacher conference in our school calendar, families and teachers can reach out at any time to set up additional communication. This report may be a resource for helping students set goals as they seek to advance to the next level. We will continue to help all children grow at their own level of ability and readiness. We remain committed to your child’s success and creating a positive elementary school experience.

Each month, we will be providing curriculum highlights from each grade level. Please know that these are snapshots and do not reflect all the curriculum and learning in the classroom.

Students in kindergarten will continue to strengthen their conventional reading skills through decoding CVC words and adding to their knowledge of high frequency words. Kindergarteners will build their reading “powers” as they share and celebrate with new stories and partnerships. In their writerly life, children will think about their own lives and special memories as they explore the personal narrative genre. Children will practice telling their stories using story language and write to develop sentence structure and word choice; checking and revising as they go. In math, kindergartners will be exploring how objects may be classified into groups depending on specific attributes. Students will practice naming and comparing categories, as well as work together to explain their mathematical thinking. As we continue through the month, children will begin to expand their knowledge of addition in a variety of ways. In social studies, students will continue to learn about their identities, families and traditions.

Students in first grade will begin 2024 by exploring nonfiction texts in both reading and writing workshop. Using text sets, students will discover that curious readers read multiple texts to learn more about a topic. Students will continue to learn strategies to decode longer words (part by part), while reading through blends, digraphs, phonograms, and suffix endings to become more efficient in their decoding of genre specific vocabulary. In writing, students will write nonfiction topic books beginning with their experiences in the classroom. By the end of the month, students will write about the topic they know about the most, themselves, as each student will write their own identity book. In math, students will add three numbers and explore the importance of the equal sign. We will wrap up the month with a unit on graphing. In science, students will take on the role of light and sound engineers as we begin our exploration of light and sound.

Students in second grade are looking forward to kicking off a lot of new learning in 2024! In writing, we will be learning how to write strong opinions. Our opinions will be focused on awesome things in our lives like books, fun places and special people! As writers, we will learn to support our opinions with evidence and examples. We'll also be focused on strengthening our reading by adding to our reading strategies tool belt. We know lots of different ways to sound out new words. Our word work will continue to focus on syllable types. Understanding how and why words are spelled the way they are will help support our young readers and writers. The students are excited to apply their latest reading strategies as they tackle longer books. Addition and subtraction of double digits will continue to be the focus in math. In science, we will be exploring how the earth’s surface changes. Looking at different landforms will help strengthen our understanding of how and why the surface of the earth looks the way it does.

Students in third grade return to fiction reading for a close study of characters. They will dig deeper, analyzing characters, and try to understand what motivates them. Students will study the big lessons the characters are learning, and they will look closely at how these lessons are a part of the theme or message of the story. They will come to see that as characters grow and change, and how the problems those characters encounter in the story, evolve. The new unit in writing workshop will enable third graders to make a claim about a text (e.g. “Chloe is unkind.”) and then back that statement up with some specific examples in the text that show the claim is true. Students will include quotes or summaries from the text that fit with their idea/theory about the characters. In math, third graders will focus on reading and making scaled picture and bar graphs that represent data sets. We will also solve problems involving the data represented in the graphs. In Social Studies, we will continue to learn and discuss diversity in the United States; how and why people immigrate to the united States and how people and their cultures around the world are alike and different.

Students in fourth grade will embark on a fiction reading unit, Detail and Synthesis: Close Reading of Fiction, which will draw upon their earlier instruction around character and theme with greater independence. This unit will be taught alongside the writing unit, The Literary Essay: Writing about Fiction. Students will be encouraged to cite text evidence to back up their ideas and to elaborate on details in partnership conversations. Students will plan well-structured essays in which they make and support claims about characters and the theme of the story while annotating and citing textual evidence. In math, students will solve problems involving comparison, and learn to distinguish between multiplication and addition. Students will also be solving multi-step word problems involving all four operations. Fourth graders will be launching a new science unit, Vision and Light, in which students investigate the role that animal senses, primarily vision, play in survival.

Students in fifth grade will discuss Mexico, immigration, and the Great Depression as they read the historical fiction novel Esperanza Rising and participate in book clubs. In writing, students will expand their expository skills and focus on writing literary essays. Division with decimal divisors and dividends, as well as problem solving, will be the focus in math. In science, fifth graders will take on the role of food scientists as they study the properties of matter. In social studies, students will be exploring the United States Government—the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

It was a sweet day when second grade artists sculpted lollipops out of Model Magic clay as a review of color theory concepts. Excited artists mixed primary colors to get secondary colors, learned the coil and twist techniques, and to form canes of clay. What fun they had thinking up names for their lollipops’ “flavors.”

Third grade artists learned about snowflake structure and radial symmetry then, inspired by a fascinating video, experimented with cardboard printing. Students created some beautiful prints using the recycled cardboard and keeping radial symmetry in mind.

Fourth grade artists used “the force within them” to create these dramatic Blown Ink Trees. Students first blew through a straw to move the India ink, forming tree branches, then drew the tree trunk with Sharpie, and finally, painted stunning skies by applying a “watercolor wash” that slid right over the permanent ink. Some wild results are hanging in the halls at KES.

DASA seeks to ensure a safe and supportive environment for all students, free of discrimination, intimidation, harassment, taunting and bullying. If you are aware of an incident or have a concern, please contact one of us listed below.

Cristy Harris, Principal and KES Dignity Act Coordinator 763-7700 or charris@klschools.org

Kweon Stambaugh, Assistant Principal (designee) 763-7705 or kstambaugh@klschools.org

Jessica Fulton, Social Worker (designee) 763-7669 or jfulton@klschools.org.