Incoming Kindergarten Orientation for Parents
Families with a child turning five years old on or before December 1, 2024 are invited to attend our Kindergarten Orientation, held at KES on Wednesday, March 6, 2024, at 7 p.m. Snow Date: Monday, March 11. Information about Kindergarten Registration will be provided. This evening presentation is for parents/caregivers only.
March is Women's History Month
We will honor Women's History Month with a focus on the contributions that women have made to the United States and recognizing the specific achievements of women over the course of American history in a variety of fields.
Students will be learning about Women's History in their homeroom during Morning Meeting as well as in Art, Music and Physical Education classes with a focus on women artists, musicians and athletes.
Buddy Morning Meetings
Each month, classes are partnered with a Buddy Class and spend a Morning Meeting together. Here's some pictures from February's Buddy Morning Meetings!
Students seem to really enjoy these opportunities to get to know and socialize with students from different classes and grades, and the teachers do too!!!
Each month, we provide curriculum highlights from each grade level. Please know that these are snapshots and do not reflect all the curriculum and learning taking place in the classroom.
Students in kindergarten will continue to work toward accuracy as they practice sliding through the sounds in words to read. Children will also start to practice blending and segmenting words using digraphs. Kindergarteners will learn to identify story elements, including the setting, characters, actions, and events. Understanding story structure gives the reader a framework to organize their thoughts about a text. In their writerly life, kindergartners will explore the genre of informative writing. They will choose topics of expertise and then tell, draw, and write to teach others. In math, children will continue to work with addition and subtraction. They will build fluency with both operations within 5, as well as exploring ways to make 10. Next, the counting sequence will continue with a focus on numbers from 11 to 20, including multiple ways to represent this series of numbers. In science, kindergarteners will delve more deeply into our unit on Forces and Motion. Using an inquiry process, they will figure out how to design a pinball machine!
Students in first grade will become the boss of their reading throughout our next unit. Students will learn monitoring strategies that will help them notice when there is a problem in their reading and fix it with their phonics knowledge. Students will also monitor their reading comprehension as they learn the importance of understanding what they are reading. In writing, students will work on their self-portrait diagrams as the final project for the identity books. Our next writing unit will have our writers expressing their opinions with supporting reasons and details. Our math work will focus on recognizing tens and ones in numbers to 120. In science, students will continue their exploration of light and sound. We are looking forward to Rocking Through the 120th Day of School on March 15! Our first grade rockstars will spend the day building, writing, and creating things all around the number 120.
Students in second grade are looking forward to new learning in March. We are excited to jump back into nonfiction reading and writing. In reading workshop, we will be using nonfiction text features to help us learn about insects. While taking notes, we will learn how to find interesting facts and put them into our own words. Our awesome reading skills will help us with this goal! In writing workshop, the 2nd graders will be become nonfiction authors as they write chapter books focused on the world of bugs. This cross-curricular reading/writing project is a new for 2nd grade and we can’t wait to get started! In math, we will be deepening our understanding of place value leading up to triple digit addition and subtraction. As scientists, we will be putting together all our learning about erosion and landforms. Exploring maps and how important they are to geologists will also be a focus. And, of course, it wouldn’t be March at KES without PARP! We can’t wait to pick some reading partners and enjoy books all month!
Students in third grade will begin the reading and writing test prep units. In addition to preparation for the NYS ELA Test, these units will provide opportunities to learn and practice skills that keep students on the trajectory of becoming life-long, confident readers and writers. Character study will be an important area of focus, including describing characters’ feelings and traits, the relationship between characters, character motivations, and the problem and the solution. In math, third graders will begin working with fractions. Students will learn to read and write fractions for equal-sized parts of a region, use a fraction to represent multiple copies of a unit, as well as represent fractions less and greater than 1 on a number line. Third graders will revisit their Identity Webs that were created back in the fall. They will think about experiences this year that have impacted the way they think about themselves and each other. In Science, third graders will begin the unit on Environments and Survival. Students will explore traits in organisms impacting survival in different environments and study how they adapt to changes. They'll become biomimicry engineers studying grove snails for real-world biology and engineering applications.
Students in fourth grade will begin an ELA unit on reading and writing strategies in preparation for state test in April. Students will be reading fiction and non-fiction passages and practicing inferencing skills, supporting their claims with text evidence, comparing texts, and applying their essay skills to answer extended response questions. In math, students will continue their work with fractions. They will learn adding and subtracting fractions and mixed numbers with like denominators. Mathematicians in fourth grade will multiply fractions by whole numbers and use the four operations to solve time problems. In social studies, fourth graders are learning about the causes that led to the American Revolution. Students are using a variety of sources to research specific events and will be creating their own illustrated timeline books to teach others about the causes of the American Revolution. In mid-March, students will be concluding their study of Vision and Light, after learning through digital simulations, live animal demonstrations, and non-fiction research. Students have learned so much about how animals use vision to process and interpret information, and how animals use their senses to survive!
Students in fifth grade will be engaged in several new units. When finished with the Literary Essay unit, the fifth graders will commence an ELA unit on reading and writing strategies in preparation for state test in April. Students will be reading fiction and non-fiction passages and practicing inferencing skills, supporting their claims with text evidence, comparing texts, and applying their essay skills to answer extended response questions.In math, fifth graders will be multiplying and dividing fractions, and solving more complex word problems. The students will also be continuing their science unit on Matter, taking on the role of food scientists to discover the properties of atoms and molecules. In social studies, fifth graders will continue to study government and how a bill becomes a law. March is PARP (Parents as Reading Partners) and fifth graders are encouraged to read a book with their parents.
Advancing Early Literacy Parent Workshop with Danny Wagner on March 14 at 9:30am @ KES
Focus on Grades K-2; however all parents are welcome!
Danny Wagner has been a New York City teacher for years and has recently begun working at Teachers College Advancing Literacy, supporting schools in New York City and beyond with foundational literacy instruction. With a background in special education and deep interest in phonics, Danny has been helping teachers consider their instructional choices for all learners at various levels of development, especially when it comes to their transfer of skills in phonics to reading and writing. Most recently, Danny has been thinking about ways that the home and school connection can be continuously supporting this work that students are engaging in when developing their foundational literacy skills. Relying on best practices and knowledge of how our brains truly learn to develop literacy skills is essential in this work.
