April was a short but exciting month! There was much happening in our small school!

Our Strong Leader's team did a wonderful job organizing the Spring Fling dance which served as a fundraiser for our school ball field. There were over 180 people in attendance and the event raised over $500! A huge shout out to Mrs. Robbins for serving as the advisor for our Strong Leaders team and helping to plan the event, the fantastic DJs (DJ Munneffrey) Ms. Munnell and Ms. Jeffrey for the awesome playlist and cool decor, the many staff that helped decorate and stay to help supervise, and of course to the Strong Leaders Larry, Alexia, Ari, Josh, and Ivy for creating this awesome event to help better our school!

This month we also held our classroom and school spelling bees. Congratulations to the classroom winners:

Fourth Grade: Maddox, Kamdyn, Jack

Fifth Grade: Aiden, Ethan, Iris

Sixth Grade: Kaydenn, Hayden, Alexia

And congratulations to our top three school winners who represent MES in the district spelling bee:

Kaydenn, Aiden, and Maddox

The week before vacation we had a school wide spirt week and door decorating contest. Our halls were bright with spring designs and school spirit was high! Congratulations to our door-decorating contest winners 5th grade and Ms. Jeffrey's 2nd grade!

At our school wide meeting we recognized our April Shout Out recipients, May Artists of the Month, and April Be Your Best Self Award recipients. Congratulations to our Be Your Best Self Award Recipients:

Kindergarten: Knox K, Sage B

1st Grade: Patrick R, Addilyn B

2nd Grade: Ethan B, Liberty M, Noah J, Viggo M

3rd Grade: Alex C, Natalie C

4th Grade: Calla N, Aaliyah F

5th Grade: Ivy B, Aiden M

6th Grade: Josh C, Shae N

Specialists: Carter A, Capri R

Make sure to check out the important event dates below for upcoming events in May!

Warm Regards,

Kat Crosby

Art

Spring is here and preparations are underway for our Arts Night which will be held May 30th from 5:30-7pm. Everyone will have their favorite art piece displayed and will write a short artist's statement to share a little about their process or idea. We are so excited to share the work we've done in art and music classes!

This month's artists of the month are Jacob Melanson, Lenny Burrows, Madison Pozdziak and Keagan Linehan. Congratulations on your great work!

Library

We are reading a "Latte" in the Library! Students are learning about literary genres and the Dewey Decimal System in depth at the Library.

Important dates coming up at the Library:

-May 10th will be the last day students can check out books

-May 24th will be the last day students can return books without the books being considered overdue

PE/Health

This month in PE we have been working on the rules of striking and fielding games such as kickball in grades k-3. In grades 4-6 we have started our lacrosse unit and are working on the skills of cradling, passing, and shooting.

In Health we finished up injury prevention and have moved on to healthy peer and family relationships. We are starting our puberty lessons in grades 5 and 6.

Music

Kindergarten - We worked particularly on adding instruments to a couple songs that we already know. We also have started to have sung “conversations” using nonsense words.

1st Grade - We continued working on songs we previously learned and continued to learn new songs. We have worked on echoing our first written rhythms to create a solid base to add new rhythms to in the future.

2nd Grade - This month we learned a song called “Blow the Man Down.” This is a work song that used to be used on ships where there would be a leader singing a changing part and the rest of the crew would respond with the same line again and again. We also learned a song called “The Boatmen.”

3rd Grade - We spent this month learning about Sir Elton Hercules John. We discovered how he went from a relative failure to a resounding success. It took him a lot of work and a willingness to continue pursuing his dream despite repeated failures. He also had to figure out how to stand out as an artist while being stuck in one spot on stage at his piano. We continued to focus on how to listen for specific things in music.

4th Grade - We spent this month learning about Sir Elton Hercules John. We discovered how he went from a relative failure to a resounding success. It took him a lot of work and a willingness to continue pursuing his dream despite repeated failures. He also had to figure out how to stand out as an artist while being stuck in one spot on stage at his piano. We continued working on our recorder skills and started a new folk dance.

5th Grade - We spent this month learning about Sir Elton Hercules John. We discovered how he went from a relative failure to a resounding success. It took him a lot of work and a willingness to continue pursuing his dream despite repeated failures. He also had to figure out how to stand out as an artist while being stuck in one spot on stage at his piano. We started to work on writing our raps based on the American Revolution and will begin recording them in May.

6th - We spent this month learning about Sir Elton Hercules John. We discovered how he went from a relative failure to a resounding success. It took him a lot of work and a willingness to continue pursuing his dream despite repeated failures. He also had to figure out how to stand out as an artist while being stuck in one spot on stage at his piano. We created and started to share compositions using the samples we learned about last month for a specific purpose.

School Counseling

• Classroom lessons - Students have been learning about how to identify their feelings and physical/emotional regulation through the Zones of Regulation, conflict resolution strategies, and the power of apology and forgiveness.
• Welcoming guest speakers - Thank you to Eric Lofstedt from the NHHEAF Network (New Hampshire Higher Education Assistance Foundation) for presenting some valuable knowledge and showing our grade 6 students options that will be available to them as they grow!
• Strong Leader Team - Completed an awesome service project by organizing a fundraising event to support the ballfield repair! Through gathering student voice, this team understands the importance of this project to our student body. HUGE shout out to the community for supporting this super fun event! There was such a great turnout from students, to families, and from our awesome staff volunteers!
• Community Involvement - getting to meet our incoming families at Kindergarten Registration Day, school team meetings, LEGO Club, MES Spelling Bee judging, spirit week, and quarterly McKinney-Vento meeting have made this an adventure-filled month!
• Upcoming Highlights - The Strong Leaders Team will be getting the School Store up-and-running starting on Friday, May 3! Grade 6 will be enjoying a Career Fair hosted at MES on Tuesday, May 7!