Weekly Newsletter

Today I would like to share about some library happenings outside of library class. Read on to find out about a February author visit, a free engineering workshop for families, and a book club for grown-ups!

MCBA Book Club: The 4th - 6th grade MCBA Book Club started our second book today, called The Unforgettable Logan Foster, by Shawn Peters, who is from Massachusetts. We just got some great news: Shawn Peters will be visiting all 4th - 6th Sanderson students this February to talk about his book! Today, 20 students showed up to book club! I was thrilled, and once we found enough chairs, so were they. Go, book clubbers!

Engineering: There will be a free “Playful Engineering” workshop during the Resource Fair at Mohawk High School next Wednesday, October 30th. There will also be free books in the library! How can you lose?

Belding Book Club: The Belding Library will be hosting a book group with the theme, “Children, Youth, and Social Media.” They will be reading The Anxious Generation by Dr, Jonathan Haidt. The library has copies of the book, and I also have one in the Sanderson library for anyone to borrow. Book Group Sessions will be held November 6th and 20th, 6:30 - 8:00pm. Check out this extremely relevant and impactful read!

This week we started learning about pumpkins. We looked at many different pumpkins and gourds and used descriptive language to compare them. We then made some predictions about what they would look like inside. When we cut them open we learned that they all had seeds but that they did not all look the same. We also learned that the inside color of the flesh, pulp and seeds often were not the same color as the outside skin color. At calendar time we practiced pattern coundint with our quiet and loud voices.

Preschoolers are continuing to notice and learn about the seasonal changes happening all around. We harvested the last of the small pumpkins and gourds from our school garden. The children noticed that some of the smallest pumpkins did not even change color yet.

On our science table there is an assortment of pumpkins, some orange, green and even a white one. There are many different gourds as well. The children are noticing the subtle differences between the varieties. Some are bumpy, some are smooth, some have stripes and others have two different colors. They are having so much fun making comparisons.

The children have also learned how to play two new fall BINGO games. One game has pumpkins with numbers for the children to find and mark, while the other has fall pictures to match and mark on the board. It has been fun watching the children help each other find the numbers and pictures. What great teamwork!

In our literacy program, we launched our third unit about toys and play with another letter from Ms. Liebowitz. She challenged us to learn more about what kinds of toys children enjoyed long ago and to learn more about the toy preferences of our classmates. After her visit, we started reading a book about toys in history and are doing some activities with photographs of historical toys.

The month of October has been a busy one for first graders! The three highlights from our classroom are mountain day, adopting a cow and building our magnificent things. Mountain day was a huge success! Children enjoyed hiking with their six grade buddies where they enjoyed lunch and fun conversations at Peter Hill. A handful of first graders decided to challenge themselves and hike all the way to the overlook! Once at the overlook everyone enjoyed yummy cookies and the feeling of hiking to the top! Whether children hiked 4 miles or the complete 8, everyone felt proud of their accomplishments and to keep pushing forward even when it felt tough. Awesome job first graders!

Have you ever heard of a class having a cow as a class pet!? Well, here in first grade we are participating in a program put on by Discover dairy and the American dairy foundation called “Adopt a cow” On October 14th first graders were introduced to our baby calf named Spot. She was born on September 12th on Daona Farm in Addison,Vt. She is a Viking Red Crossbred and at birth she weighed 75 pounds and stands 28 inches high. Throughout the year we will receive updates from farmer Courtney telling us about Spot’s height and weight as well as what she has been up to on the farm! Outside our classroom we will have an Adopt a cow wall where we will keep track of her height and weight and add updated pictures. We will also add fun dairy facts to the wall. If you want to follow along as we add updates just visit the wall anytime you happen to be in the prek-1st hallway!

Lastly, first graders are wrapping up the first module in EL (our ELA program) . In the final unit first graders are working on creating something magnificent for our classroom that we need. First graders learned the steps to make their project: plan, craft/work and revise. They planned and gathered materials and now they are ready to create! Some of the projects kids came up with are a book box to hold books kids have made, a racetrack with a tractor to add into our choice time, a mini size of a large house to keep kids monthly shares a secret and a large cow, horse and hamster to decorate our classroom. We will update you on our progress and when complete children will be sharing them during an upcoming all school meeting!

Since our last newsletter, we had a wonderful day of sunshine and fun at Mt. Greylock. We are so grateful to the chaperones who volunteered their day so we could go on that trip.

In math we have continued to practice multi-digit addition. We have learned a variety of strategies for solving these problems, and we are learning how to include labels on answers if it is a word problem. This week we also starting thinking about strategies for finding the answers in problems that involve difference or removal.

In science each student has been assigned a city somewhere in the world to track the weather for the whole year, as a way to cement the learning we did around climatic regions. Ask our child which city they/he/she is studying! Students are welcome to check the weather there at any time using the wunderground website.

With our buddies we have been busy cleaning up the gardens and bringing in the harvest. Last week we brought in a huge basket of apples, and this week we enjoyed applesauce together made from those apples. We also cleaned out a neglected garden and got it ready for wintertime.

This week we spent time with Firefighter Mike to learn about and discuss fire safety. Children were actively engaged in the conversations and stories, and the packets he assigned were quickly completed.

In Language Arts we have broken into three focus groups to learn about a different place in the world and how they overcome challenges in accessing books and learning. We are using this learning to practice writing sentences and paragraphs.

Later this week we are looking forward to our trip to the Corn Maze, and next week’s Sugar Rush is sure to be fun, too.

Fourth graders enjoyed another successful STEM project. In October, students constructed pumpkin candy launchers using craft sticks, straws, pipe cleaners, spoons, 3 oz. cups, and tape. Congratulations to Toby who launched his pumpkin candy 468 inches, an improvement of 353 inches from his first launch. During this project, students really started to embrace the redesign and rebuild aspects of STEM and many students had improvements of at least 100 inches from their first launch!

Fifth grade students have been exploring adding and subtracting fractions using various methods to find common denominators. We also finished our book, Esperanza Rising, in ELA. We will continue to use the book to work on essay writing and to create monologues for some of the characters. In a couple of weeks, we will be making yarn dolls since that was something in the story that kept coming back up. We continue our studies of the American Revolution. We are looking at the events from both the Patriots point of view and the Loyalists. We are using books, textbooks, videos, songs, and activities for our learning.

Click here for advice and resources on the best ways to support your child with learning mathematics. This link comes from Professor Jo Boaler on the youcubed.org site. Let me know what you think! :) aprew@mtrsd.org

Do you ever wonder what you can do to help your child with literacy at home? Colorin Colorado has some Reading Tip Sheets for Parents available here. The tips sheets start with babies, go up through third grade, and are available in multiple languages.

It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know the staff and students at Sanderson Academy, this year! “ Lunch Bunch” groups have been well-attended by the students and have shown to be helpful with socialization techniques. Individual and paired weekly meetings have shown to be popular with the students, and helpful with establishing trust and rapport between students and me. I’ve started a “Restorative Response” for small conflicts between the students. Parents are also involved with this, and it has shown to also be well-received and successful with parents and students. This restores balance between the students and the school. It is a strengths-based, “ win-win” approach to restoring balance and peace between students.