The Moreau Messenger
April 2016
Mrs. Delair's News!
April also brings New York State ELA and Math exams for grades 3-5. This is an exciting time for our students to "show off" what they know! We are working hard to prepare comfortable environments with yummy snacks to help support these hard working students. Test dates for ELA are April 5-7and Math are April 13-15. Moreau is already so proud, but we love to show the state what we can do!
I also want to point out that we have a new television near our main entrance. Here you can see all of the events, pictures and projects we have going on. If you remember, please watch for a few minutes! Mrs. Losaw enjoys keeping us all in the loop through our monitor!
At the end of April, we will break for a week before entering May. I am sure this will be a welcomed break and well deserved for our students.
Have a wonderful month!
Mrs. Delair, Principal
Kindergarten Update
April showers will hopefully bring May Flowers! The children are enjoying the nice weather and really look forward to going outside.
Thank you so… much for participating in PARP. Please be sure to continue reading at home with your child throughout the rest of the year.
Kindergarten will be busy learning about Spring and taking some nature walks to explore and observe the change in weather! Students will be making several observations about seasonal changes and learning about the life cycle of plants and chickens. YES! We will be hatching chickens in our classrooms!
The children were so excited to see The Puppet People. This was a wonderful opportunity to bring the arts to Moreau School. Please be on the look-out for upcoming end of the year field trips!
Spring is an exciting, yet critical time for your Kindergartener. They should be getting more fluent with their reading, sound spelling, and practicing their Sight Words often. At this point, they are expected to have mastered all of the letters and their sounds, as well as, recognizing, writing, and counting the numbers to 50.
During the 3rd trimester, students will have to be able to count to one hundred by ones and tens, as well as, master their addition and subtraction facts to five! If your child has mastered these math skills, you can challenge them by having them skip count by twos and add and subtract to ten. This is part of the Common Core curriculum from New York State. The children are certainly capable of accomplishing these goals. You can do it, Kiddos!
Thanks,
Mrs. Johnson
Mrs. Howk
First Grade Update
Second Grade
Spring has finally sprung! Even though we had a mild winter, our Second Graders are very excited to be able to go outside on a regular basis. We certainly all have Spring Fever!!
Thank you to all parents/guardians who helped their children during PARP. We had a fun month focusing on Dr. Seuss and the importance of reading. Reading with your child at home is so very important and will help foster a love of reading for him/her. Our society is so fast paced now, that taking the time to read together is a wonderful way to bond, slow down and enjoy a great book! Ms. Bresnahan’s class enjoyed No Media Thursday by introducing students to board games that they might not be familiar with. During the last hour of the day on Thursday, we have been playing board games together and learning the importance of taking turns, teamwork, good sportsmanship, and how to be a gracious winner and loser. Getting away from technology for a while can be very refreshing and fun. Hopefully, your family enjoyed No Media Thursday at home! We will continue to play board games, but will switch our day to Friday now that PARP is over. Many students in Mr. Armenio’s class participated in No Media Thursday even though it fell on a Computer Lab day. Some of the students brought books or even did extra work during this time to avoid the computer.
We had a great time at The Hyde Museum. Thank you to our chaperones for helping out. If you didn’t get to chaperone this trip, we will be having another field trip in June where everyone is invited to come!
In class, we have been working very hard in all subject areas. As we wind our way into the last trimester, we have many skills to cover before the end of the year. In E.L.A during the month of April, we will be studying prefixes, suffixes, reviewing homophones, and describing connections between historical events. In Spelling, we will be reviewing r-controlled vowels and ue, as well as blends sl, sm, st, sw, and sp.
For Writing, we are finishing up our poetry unit and will be starting our informational writing unit. This unit focuses on science experiments and writing lab reports. The students will love the science experiments and coming up with hypotheses and conclusions. This unit should be fun and educational for all!
During Math, we continue to work our way through Module 5 and adding and subtracting within 1,000. The students have been exposed to many strategies to use when adding and subtracting 2 and 3 digit numbers. We will be bypassing Module 6 and going right into Module 7 which deals with problem solving with length, money, and data. We will do Module 6 at the end of the year because it mirrors what Third Graders start their year off with, which is multiplication.
This year is flying by! Before we know it, June will be here! Thanks for all of your support so far, and let us know if you have any concerns or questions. In the meantime, get out and enjoy the warmer weather and the sunshine!
Happy Spring,
Mr. Armenio
Ms. Bresnahan
Third Grade
Fourth Grade
Here is what the 4th Graders have been up to!
Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop: We have been reading and writing like historians! All of our students have researched an important person or event from the Revolutionary War. We are currently writing our first draft of a book about that person or event. We are sure you have heard all about the event your child is learning about.
Math: We are knee-deep in our unit on fractions. We are making equivalent fractions, comparing, adding, subtracting and multiplying fractions. Next up, decimals!
SS: In SS class, we are learning about the major battles of the Revolutionary War. We have learned about Lexington and Concord, Ticonderoga and Bunker Hill.
Science: Phases and properties of matter has been our main focus over the last two weeks. Throughout April, we will be learning how to read a ruler in inches. We will also learn about the types of energy and how energy transfers from one type to another.
We loved our trip to the Wood Theater to see “Songs of the Iroquois” on March 20th. It was a wonderful experience!
Fifth Grade
Fifth Graders continue to work along steadily. In April, we will tackle the first of our two state exams. Our Fifth Graders are ready for the challenge!
For Math, we have been studying volume and plane figures. Students have challenged their ability to reason spatially and to think logically. The remainder of the year will be spent learning about the coordinate plane.
During Social Studies, students are currently working on the growth of the United States and how our country came to be. We have focused our attention on the growth of our country, the Oregon Trail and now the Industrial Revolution. Check out our Industrial Revolution Inventors Dioramas on display!!
In Science, we are learning about Earth and space. Students created a scale model of our Solar System. If Earth were 13 cm in size, how far away do you think Pluto would be? We also studied the reasons for seasons, tides, eclipses and more! Our final unit will be a mix of science and engineering. We will learn about Newton’s laws of motion, and use them to help us design and build water bottle rockets. Which Fifth Grader’s rocket will go highest? We can’t wait to find out.
Our writers have been working on personal memoirs in Writing. We have learned what constitutes a memoir, read many samples and are now working to write our own. Our students have so many stories to share!
Iroquois Reading Council’s
Newspapers in Education Winner
Congratulations to Tessa Hogan in Mrs. Cormie’s room! She was selected as a winner in the Iroquois Reading Council’s Newspapers in Education contest. Dylan Cornell, Jayden Fish and David Loftus received Honorable Mentions.
Students in fifth to seventh grades from area schools entered and only eleven winners were selected. There were so many entries and the Iroquois Reading Council’s Board members had a difficult time selecting winners from the many wonderful entries!
The contest topic this year focused on this year’s presidential election. Students were asked to select a presidential candidate and write five interview questions they would like to ask that person.
The winners met at The Chronicle office on April 7th for the afternoon. Mark Frost, the editor of The Chronicle, showed the students how a newspaper is put together and taught them interviewing techniques. They were also able to interview a mystery guest that Mr. Frost had invited. They were given a celebration dinner at the Crandall Library afterwards. Two articles written by the contest winners will appear in the next issue of The Chronicle, along with their picture. Great job to all the students that entered the contest and congratulations to Tessa, Dylan, Jayden, and David!!