Bay Vista Bulletin

Greetings, Bay Vista Families,

The month of September was a busy one. Our Annual Fundamental Meeting at Lakewood High School was a huge success. In September, all students took their first round of testing for Progress Monitoring Cycle 1. Teachers are using the data from this cycle of testing to plan instruction and begin remediation and acceleration for all students. During our first round of conferences this month, teachers will also review this data with you and offer suggestions for how you can support your student at home. CLEVER also offers several resources for your child to use at home for additional support and practice.

We are still seeing some cars lining up before 7:40 each morning which blocks staff, patrol families, and our R' Club families from getting onto campus. Please do not begin lining up prior to 7:40.

Our morning and afternoon car lines are running smoothly. We are finishing up each day by 2:50! Thank you for working with us to ensure your Jaguars are picked up on time each afternoon!

October Meeting Credit Options and Family Events

There are two calendared opportunities to earn meeting credit for the month of October. Please see the Bay Vista Meeting Schedule below as well as the upcoming dates below in the calendar section. Some options require attendance only and some require a volunteer commitment to earn meeting credit.

Thank you for your continued support of Bay Vista and thank you for your amazing children! Have a wonderful October!!

Donna Hall

Principal

Reminders

Instruction Begins at 8:15

It is important that all students are in their classroom, seated and ready to learn at 8:15 a.m. each morning. Teachers start the day right at 8:15 a.m. and every moment of the instructional day is filled. A few minutes late really does have an impact on your child’s day. Students also need to be picked up no later than 2:50p.m. Our car line has been finishing up no later than 2:50 each day so please plan accordingly. Arriving at/after 8:15 a.m. or picking up later than 2:50 p.m. will result in a tardy. A tardy letter is sent home to families after our tardies. A student is referred to IAC after 6 tardies within a grading cycle.

Absences

If your student is absent, please let your child's teacher or the front office know as soon as you are able so we can properly code the absence. After 5 absences due to illnesses, a doctor's letter should be sent for the absence to be an excused absence. Our Child Study Team (CST) meets bi-weekly to review tardies and absences. The goal is for students to maintain absences below 5% of total days in school. When absence patterns begin to emerge and/or a student's absences exceed 10% of the total days of school, our CST will begin to monitor subsequent absences/tardies closely and send reminders home regarding the importance of being in school each day. If absence trends continue to increase for any student, our Social Worker will visit the home, a conference with CST may be requested, or in extreme cases, a referral to the State Attorney's Office will be made.

Our dear Jaguar, Julian Ali, left us in the summer of 2022. We continue to honor his memory each year near his birthday with our annual Julian's Dream Day. For more information, please check out the flyer below.

He will forever be memorialized at Bay Vista with the friendship bench that was installed last school year. On either side of the bench, our two beautiful trees are thriving with red blooms which were Julian's favorite color.

For years to come, our Jaguars will be able to enjoy Julian's Bench!

Please help your student meet their weekly requirements for Dreambox and Istation. Dreambox is the online program we use to support mathematics and Istation supports reading. Required minutes on Istation vary per student based on their monthly diagnostic assessment. Your child's teacher can share more regarding the required minutes for your student.

Dreambox Weekly Requirements:

• Grades K-2: 3-5 lessons
• Grades 3-5: 10 lessons

Both Dreambox and Istation are adaptive programs which means the work within each program is unique to your student rather than a one-size-fits-all program. Teachers also assign lessons within each program that are specific to your student. Teachers monitor student progress to determine the next steps within the program and in the classroom.

When your student reaches their weekly lessons/minutes, it strongly supports their growth within their current grade level but also helps close gaps with concepts still needed in previous grade-level standards.

For the month of October, Pinellas County Schools is participating in Digital Responsibility Week - October 14 - 18. Digital citizenship is the ability to navigate our digital environments in a way that's safe and responsible and to actively and respectfully engage in these spaces. Ms. Kestenis is teaching lessons in the media center about being safe online.

Bay Vista is participating in Digital Responsibility Week with the following dress-up days:

• Monday, October 14 - Bay Vista is "Super" at staying safe. Wear a superhero shirt with uniform bottoms.
• Tuesday, October 15 - We know about leaving a digital footprint. Wear fun or mismatched socks with your school uniform.
• Wednesday, October 16 - Bay Vista is unplugging and getting active. Wear workout clothes or sweats. (Please no leggings).
• Thursday, October 17 - Bay Vista is too bright to talk to strangers online. Wear bright colors or neon.
• Friday, October 18 - Bay Vista is teaming up against cyberbullying. Wear your team shirts or hats with uniform bottoms.

If your jaguar chooses not to dress up, please have them wear their uniform.

In our Read Aloud stories, students take a deeper dive into story elements as they describe characters by their thoughts and feelings and begin linking those thoughts and feelings to important events. Students also move into oral retelling to enhance their comprehension of familiar texts.

The goal for Reading Instruction is to teach students the structure of stories and to use literary language, vocabulary, and expression. Students work closely with reading partnerships.

In Writing Instruction, the aim will move to teach students to write across pages primarily through their illustrations and labels. Students also work to tell sequenced narratives by using transitional phrases.

In Math, we will be working with numbers to 10. We will be counting, writing the numbers and comparing amounts. We are continuing to work on counting forward and backwards from 20.

In Science, we start with unit 1 Forever Falling -Gravity. Exploring the law of gravity, investigating how things are pulled down unless it's held up.

We end the month with Day and Night. Recognize repeating pattern of Day and night.

In Language Arts, we are learning about the importance of family. We are creating a strong community of readers and writers with an acceptance of diverse families in our classrooms and the world. Students are becoming Reading Detectives by identifying whether the narrator is inside or outside the stories we read. In Writing students are focused on creating small moment stories about experiences they have had with their family members.

In Math, students are learning to use different tools and strategies in addition and subtraction up to 20. The end goal is for students to use algebra to problem solve by finding the unknown numbers in addition and subtraction equations.

In Social Studies, students are understanding how to show respect for our country, the United States of America. Our learners are also discovering the symbols that represent the state of Florida.

In the Science Unit, Our Wonderful World, students will discover that water, rocks, soil and living organisms are found on the Earth’s surface. In the Water, Water, Everywhere Unit, we will discover why water is important and how to stay safe around it. Our First Grade Jaguars are on the move!

Reading: Students deepen their understanding of fiction stories as they use story elements to retell a story. In addition, students build their understanding of characters as they identify how characters respond to major events and use the response to describe a character’s feelings, behaviors, and traits. Students then move into development of their informational reading skills as they learn and practice reading informational texts, exploring context clues, text features, central idea, and author’s purpose.

Writing: Writing for this unit will introduce a new genre to students’ expository writing. Students will shift from writing to tell stories to writing texts that teach about a topic. The first half of the module focuses on developing student knowledge of expository writing as they write about topics that they know a lot about. In the second half of the Module, students use their knowledge of expository writing to write a biography about an immigrant, celebrating this person’s contribution to the United States. This also ties into our social studies lessons.

Science: Students will investigate, observe and describe how water left in an open container evaporates, but water in a closed container does not evaporate. The other focus on this unit is the sun and how it heats the earth, air, and water. Students will also investigate the different seasons and what makes them unique.

Math: As students wrap up the unit on place value, they will begin to explore addition and subtraction. This will include word problems and bar models. Students will also work on finding the unknown number. They will be asked to represent the problem in more than one way. This includes base ten blocks, bar models, drawings, and equations. Students should read each problem 3 times to really dissect what the problem is asking and how they can best model the problem.

ELA: Our third graders have been working hard in Module B on learning all the Informational Elements of Reading and Writing. Students will continue to explore how text features contribute to the meaning of a text and learn to identify the text structures of comparison and cause/effect. Students will also work closely with two informational texts vertically aligned with Writing instruction. During this time, students learn to identify the central idea and author’s purpose in addition to making comparisons between important points and key details found in these two sources. Our word study has focused on synonyms, suffixes, and how authors use word choice, such as alliteration, to create rhythm and engage readers. We will finish up this module by the end of October and take our Module B Portfolio Assessment. We will then move to Module C – Poetry!

Throughout Module C, students learn to identify four types of poetry: free verse, rhymed verse, haiku, and limerick. Students use plot and theme to summarize as well as make inferences about characters' feelings. Also embedded within Module C instruction is the exploration of figurative languages, such as imagery, metaphors, and idioms.

Math: Multiplication and Division – Unit 4, students will use a variety of representations to show multiplication and division situations. Students should recognize whether a problem should be thought of as a multiplication or division situation depending on how it is written and how multiplication and division relate to each other. In Unit 5, students will discover patterns in products and quotients involving the numbers 0, 1, 2, 5, and 10.

Science: Lost Energy – In our last unit in Earth Science, students will learn how the Sun’s energy affects objects on Earth. They will be able to demonstrate that radian energy from the Sun can heat objects and when the Sun is not present, heat may be lost. Next, we will dive into Bouncing Light where students will learn how light interacts with objects. They will identify forms of light and heat energy, demonstrate that light travels in a straight line and that light can be reflected, refracted and absorbed.

ELA-Essay writing has just begun for 4th grade writers. Students are reading and analyzing texts to answer an expository prompt. They read, annotate, synthesize the information, plan, and then write their essay using both evidence and elaboration to support their Main Idea. Expository essays will continue through October. In reading, students will continue reading informational texts through the middle of October. After Module B ends, students will begin Module C which will be switching back to literary texts. Students will be reading fantasy fiction and spend the majority of their time reading Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins.

Social Studies-Fourth graders will be finishing the unit on Civics in the middle of October, which includes learning the difference between Local and State Government. In the 2nd grading period, they will be learning about Florida's history.

Math - In October, 4th grade math will shift from working with place value to patterns in numbers, including the difference between prime and composite numbers. We’ll also be expanding our exploration of multiplication. In class we’ll be modeling multiplication relationships and learning how to multiply multi-digit numbers.

Science-In Science, we’ll be continuing our Earth Science unit by studying the properties of rocks and minerals and examining the similarities and differences between weathering and erosion. We’ll also be learning about Earth’s natural resources and differentiating between renewable and nonrenewable resources. In class, students will participate in demonstrations of how humans impact their environment and what we can do to solve these problems.

Fifth graders have been working hard in all areas!

In Math, they are working on topic B. This is adding and subtracting decimals.

In Science, we are studying rocks and minerals. We are running various tests with these rocks and minerals and learning about the properties! We are also studying weathering and erosion in regard to rocks and minerals!

In Reading, we have moved into Informational texts. This is our science informational unit. We started a shared read about Animals Nobody Loves and have discussed different carnivorous plants! We studied central idea and relevant details and started text structures within these texts. In writing, we have worked on interesting introduction types and did some quick writes. Our ELA teachers went to a writing training last week and learned all new types of things to bring back into the classroom! We will start writing to prompts in the next few weeks.

In Social Studies, we wrapped up our Civics unit with Celebrate Freedom Week. This will continue into the next week due to the hurricane.

• OCTOBER-2 meeting credit opportunities

2 Rainbow Garden closed for lunch with your Jaguars

10* Family Science Night at Bay Vista

• Meeting credit option for attending with your Jaguar!

11 Julian's Dream Day (see above)

14 HURRICANE MAKE-UP DAY! School is in session on this day!

DIGITAL RESPONSIBILITY DRESS-UP WEEK

• Monday, October 14 - Bay Vista is "Super" at staying safe. Wear a superhero shirt with uniform bottoms.
• Tuesday, October 15 - We know about leaving a digital footprint. Wear fun or mismatched socks with your school uniform.
• Wednesday, October 16 - Bay Vista is unplugging and getting active. Wear workout clothes or sweats. (Please no leggings).
• Thursday, October 17 - Bay Vista is too bright to talk to strangers online. Wear bright colors or neon.
• Friday, October 18 - Bay Vista is teaming up against cyberbullying. Wear your team shirts or hats with uniform bottoms.

19 Pinellas County District Application Fair - www.pcsb.org/dap

24 Report Cards Go Home

25 Picture Retakes

CANCELED!!!!!! 25* PTA Fall Festival/Treat Trail (5:30-8:00pm)

• Meeting credit option for volunteers only.

31 PTA $1 Dress Down Day

REMINDER: November and December are combined with only one meeting requirement for November/December

NOVEMBER / DECEMBER-5 meeting credit options (dates marked with a *)

NOVEMBER

4* SAC Meeting via Zoom

• 5:30 pm – No meeting credit if not logged in by 5:45pm

7* Family Literacy Night @ BVF

• 5:30 pm - Please attend with your BVF Jaguar for meeting credit!

13* Great American Teach-In

• Meeting credit option for volunteers/presenters only

14* Teacher/Staff Luncheon

• Meeting credit option for donation of prepared food item

25-29 Thanksgiving Holidays – No school

DECEMBER

6* PTA Family Dinner/Movie Night @ BVF

• 6:00-8:00pm - Meeting credit option for volunteers only

23-31 Winter Holidays – No school

* = General Meeting credited activity

(Some events require volunteer participation for meeting credit, so please see each individual activity’s requirements noted by each event date.)