Fun at KEEC!
Last week our 5th graders, along with Ms. Sabol and Mr. Sears, spent 5 days at KEEC, the Keewaydin Environmental Education Center at camps Songadeewin and Keewaydin on Lake Dunmore, along with 5th graders from Shoreham, Cornwall, Ripton, Bridport, and Cavendish. For the students, it was a great chance to be outdoors spending time hiking, exploring, and learning; disconnecting from electronics, and having a camp experience. It was the 50th year of KEEC, and it was cool to be a part of it.
Beyond the opportunity for a camp and outdoor experience, and the growth in knowledge and perspective that comes with the environmental education, KEEC also brings together the students from the small elementary schools in ACSD to get to know each other a bit before moving to MUMS in 6th grade, and it's great to watch connections and friendships grow.
Here are few pictures- more are shared directly with families, but as we don't have permission to show other schools' students in our newsletters, and KEEC is such a community-based place, we actually didn't end up with a ton without other kids!
Looking forward to taking next year's 5th grade!
Bike Week!
For our Kindergarteners- 4th graders, it was Bike Week! With the help of our bike trailer of "borrow bikes" from Local Motion, we spent the week riding during recess, PE, and when teachers took students out too. They are a really proficient group of riders, and Bike Week clearly inspires students and families to really get into riding. Even when the week was over, students were here riding bikes until 5:30 in the evening, and other families picked up the bikes and immediately went to do more biking, including at the "pump track" in Middlebury.
Thank you to PE teacher Sierra Thornton, Paraeducator Jessica Hurley, Lili's husband Roger Hill, Supersub Donna Payne, Nurse Haysal Jones and SCS Administrative Assistant Donna Simpson for all their work throughout the week related to Bike Week. Thank you to the students for being so enthusiastic, and thank you to parents for being open to have your students ride around at school. Some injuries do happen over the course of the week, and we thank parents for understanding that there is some risk in the activity, but that the healthy benefits of bike riding, and being able to ride a bike, are life-long positives. And the kids do have a whale of a good time.
Literacy month: Literacy Night and a read-a-thon!
On Thursday, May 23rd we will be holding Family Literacy Night beginning at 5:30.
Our featured guest this year is Matthew Dickerson. Besides writing about hunting and fishing in the Addison Independent, Professor Dickerson (he also teaches at Middlebury College) writes for a wide variety of audiences and ages- including fiction and non-fiction. We are excited to have him come and share his experiences as an outdoorsperson and writer with our community members of all ages.
We will have a dinner (free of charge!) beginning at 5:30, and activities will begin around 6:15. We are planning on having enough food for at least 100 guests, so please come help us eat!
We will have other activities as well, led by members of the SCS faculty. Come make word art, get free books, learn about how we teach about reading and writing, and take part in other fun activities!
Also, please send in your read-a-thon pledge sheets and tracking forms by this Friday!
ACSD and SCS' education around the eclipse is captured in the media!
Along with the excitement of the eclipse can the excitement of learning ABOUT the eclipse, and ACSD and SCS, particularly under the vision and leadership of teacher Amy Clapp, really embraced the eclipse as a wonderful opportunity to engage with science learning. We are VERY proud to share the following media stories about eclipse learning and ACSD. Amy's 3-4 class is heavily featured throughout.
Here are links to the articles: the "buttons" below also contain the links, but they sometimes don't show up on some computers, so you can also click on these:
Link to Education Week article