Steere Farm Elementary School

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your loved ones. Trimester 1 flew by and Trimester 2 began on December 1st! Teachers are currently preparing report cards, which will be available for parents via Skyward on December 7th at 3:00 p.m.. Please note, directions for accessing report cards can be found below. In the meantime, please reach out with any questions.

In addition, Steere Farm Elementary continues to prioritize giving back to our greater community. Thank you to all who donated to our Thanksgiving Food Drive. Through your generosity, we were able to provide 8 baskets to SFE families! In addition, SFE staff members are contributing to a "Giving Tree" and in partnership with Between the Cracks, an organization supporting our local families, the Steere Farm PTA has adopted families for the holidays. Thank you for your continued support! SFE is a special place.

As always, the purpose of our newsletter is not only to keep you informed and provide information that is pertinent to your child's success, but also serves to highlight our school's accomplishments and initiatives. Please continue reading to learn more.

Happy Holidays to you and yours!

Courtney Francis

Our School Improvement Team met in October to review our 2023-2024 School Improvement Plan (below) and discuss action steps. Our meeting agenda and minutes can be found below. Our next meeting will take place in January!

School attendance is a powerful predictor of student outcomes. Rhode Island defines chronic absenteeism as the percentage of students who miss 10% or more of school days during the year (or two days per month). As of right now at SFE, we have about 12% of our student population on track to be chronically absent this school year. This is an improvement from last year (down from about 19%)! Let's continue to work together to keep this number under 10%!

Check out the staggering statistics below. Attendance matters!

The dental screening will be conducted on December 5th. If you DO NOT wish for your child to participate in the school dental screening, please provide a note from your dentist office in order for your child to be excluded from the screening.

We are accumulating quite the collection of water bottles, sweatshirts, coats and hats! If your child is missing any items please contact Ms. Tiffany and she will do her best to locate it! Our lost and found is located in the cafeteria. We will be donating all unclaimed items at the end of every month.

Each month SFE recognizes students who have gone above and beyond to show their 3Rs: Respectful, Responsible and Ready to Learn! Students are nominated by their classroom and/or special subject teachers. Congratulations to our November recipients!

Teachers are nominated by students, who were extremely thoughtful about their nominations! Students love celebrating a teacher monthly! Congratulation to Ms. Kut, our November recipient!

We are excited to continue Toodle Tickets this year! Students are invited to fill out a Toodle Ticket to give a special shout out to another student who was kind or helpful. At the end of every month, Toodle Tickets are chosen from grades 2-5. These students are then invited to have a special popsicle with Mrs. Francis. Check out the pictures below from our first Pops with the Principal!

Students continue to participate in a weekly lesson rooted in one of the four Units: Courage, Gratitude, Forgiveness and Compassion in Action; all part of the Choose Love Formula. This month students are continuing to learn all about gratitude.

A copy of the Choose Love calendar was sent home to all families. We hope the calendar is a daily reminder of the small steps we can take daily to Choose Love at home!

This month in the multi-age classroom, we collected all of the donations from our food drive. The students counted the donations and sorted the items into boxes to donate. They are learning to be thankful and giving to others. We also culminated all of our lessons about pumpkins by making pumpkin pies. The students had to locate the ingredients, read a recipe, open all of the ingredients, problem solve how to open things, measured out the ingredients, mixed it together and create the pumpkin pies. To end the day, they were able to enjoy their masterpieces!

Students in grade 2 had the opportunity to see the PPAC ARTS Showcase performance of HANGIN’ WITH THE GIANTS. Hangin’ with the Giants was a fun, high-energy program designed to promote the inclusiveness and accessibility of jazz while highlighting the legacies and music of some of the art form’s central contributors. Staged as a late-night talk show, Hangin’ with the Giants featured animated likenesses of jazz greatest Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Theolonious Monk as show guests and offers numerous opportunities for students to interact and participate!

Third grade had some special guest visitors from the Burrillville Lions Club this month. The Lions generously purchased a personal dictionary for each of our third graders. In case you can't tell, the kids were very excited! Thank you, Lions!

Fourth graders in Mrs. Richards' class have been working on applying learned math skills to application problems using the Read, Draw, Write method! They have been showing great perseverance when working through these challenging tasks. Mrs. Barrs' math classes are working on long division and working towards earning Mcdonal's gift card for french fries!

In science, fourth graders are finishing up their Landforms unit. Students will be designing a community with houses and trees . They will then run an experiment with the focus question : How does erosion and deposition affect the land in our community ?

Grade 5 had a great day at Trinity Rep! They even got the chance to ask the cast questions after the show!

We officially wrapped up our Read-a-thon celebrations with our inflatables and ice cream event ahead of Thanksgiving break. It was a cold day for sure, but the kids still had a blast spending extra time outside bouncing, jumping, and enjoying a special treat! Thank you to the brave teachers and parent volunteers (Amy Fanion, Kerrie Czerwein, Erika Iafrate and Jess Hancock) that weathered the cold with us that day to ensure the day was enjoyed by all! Special shout out to Mrs. Shannon Luttge for chairing the successful fundraiser and special prizes for students and staff!

Grade 2 students listened to the story, Balloons Over Broadway, designed their own balloons, and showed off their creations in the Balloons Over Steere Farm parade!

Back by popular demand, the classroom that brought in the most amount of items for our food drive chose the beard design for some of our male teachers! Kudos to Mrs. Rodger's class for winning and to our teachers for being good sports!

SFE students all contributed to a kindness tree! Each student was given a hand cut out and wrote down acts of kindness they've recently done on each finger. All together it made a beautiful kindness tree proudly displayed in one of our main hallways!

Kudos to Mrs. Detonnancourt and our kindness squad for organizing!

The Steere Farm and Callahan Elementary School choruses combined to provide a holiday concert in downtown Pascoag! This was part of the annual Victorian Holiday event. Our fourth and fifth graders, led by Mr. Latendresse and Mrs. Pearson, brought a lot of holiday cheer to our community and did a wonderful job!

A representatives from the R.I. Department of Education (RIDE) visited Steere Farm last week! We were chosen to be featured for RIDE's RICAS Rockstars Video series given our 14% growth in ELA test scores. They conducted interviews, including one with fifth grader, Cohen Fletcher! They also filmed in Mrs. Detonnancourt's ELA class! We will certainly share the video once it is completed! Go Broncos!

The next PTA meeting will be Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at 6:30pm in person in room 106 or via Zoom.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/2289417724?pwd=RUdZVXhSSzlzYmpreld0QmE4SWZEdz09

Meeting ID: 228 941 7724

Passcode: 4cNchp

We wanted to thank all the volunteers that helped Ms. Adams with the book fair, we could not have done it without you. A special thanks to Kerrie Czerwein for leading the volunteer effort!!

SFE PTA polled classroom teachers about their favorites--food, shop, color, etc.--in an effort to help guide us parents when looking to purchase a gift. You can view the list HERE. This ask was voluntary; if your child's teacher is not listed, and you are looking for some guidance, we suggest contacting your teaching to ask if there is anything in particular their classroom could benefit from.

Once again this year, the SFE PTA has adopted local families this holiday season through our partnership with Between the Cracks. We're delighted to share that all gifts have been claimed through the support of our wonderful PTA members and Steere Farm parents. Although the families needs we're supporting are met for this holiday, there are still unmet needs for other local families. If you have the capacity and would like to help support, please reach out to Principal Francis for information.

We need volunteers to make this event possible. We have over 300 students signed up, and very few volunteers. Please consider volunteering an hour or two of your time so we can make this event run as smoothly as possible. https://www.signupgenius.com/.../8050944ACA822A1F58...

Levy, Steere Farm, and Callahan have teamed up to provide a fun shopping experience for our students! Please register your children to come enjoy a Holiday Shoppe where they can purchase small gifts for their family and friends. Children love the opportunity to pick out their own special gifts for loved ones. The shop will be open on Tuesday 12/5 and Thursday 12/7 from 5-8pm at AT Levy School.

https://www.signupgenius.com/.../8050944ACA822A1F58…

Our next restaurant fundraiser will be at Uno in Smithfield all day on Monday, December 11th. The PTA will receive 20% of your check, so please dine in or pick up dinner on your way home from work! Please see the attached flyer for more details.

The Steere Farm PTA wants to wish all the families and staff of Steere Farm a very happy and healthy holiday season and thank you for your continued support!

12/5: Dental Screening

12/5 & 12/7: Holiday Shoppe @ Levy School

12/8: SFE Holiday Chorus Concert @ BMS 6:00 p.m.

12/12: PTA Meeting @ 6:30 p.m.

12/11: PTA Uno's Restaurant Night

12/13: Student of the Month Family Ceremony @ 8:25 a.m.

12/18-12/21: Holiday Spirit Week!

12/18: Len Cabral Performance

12/20: Holiday Sing-along

12/22-1/1: No School - Holiday Recess
1/2: School Resumes!