Horizons at Westminster

Please join us in two weeks on Thursday, July 29 at 1:00 PM in Armour Atrium for a Horizons dance, theatre, and art showcase. The program will last until dismissal so you may take your Horizons student home with you if you choose to. Otherwise, pick up will be at Moylan as usual! Masks will be required on campus! Please contact me at 860-408-3006 with any questions.

The rain was our constant companion this week, but we did not let it dampen our spirits! We journaled and wrote stories, we sharpened our math skills, tried our hand at the keyboard and learned how to center our bodies and minds through yoga. Most importantly, we enjoyed the company of our Horizons community! Today marks the end of week four and we are looking forward to the final two weeks of Horizons 2021!

Week four has been packed with fun filled activities. This week during reading we have been learning about different community helpers and how they support our community. We have also continued our work with our fairy tale STEM challenges. During math we have worked with pattern blocks while learning about attributes of shapes and comparing numbers using our knowledge of place value. Some of our favorite activities include practicing our acting skills in theater and having a challenge to see who could make the longest paper chain. We are hoping to see more nice weather next week so we can do more outside but luckily we had an awesome yoga lesson where we learned about mind, body, and finding peace.

Week four has been a blast! We have enjoyed some fun STEM activities where we learned about capillary action and water movement. We have practiced adding and subtracting numbers to 1000, with regrouping. We have also participated in small group reading lessons to become stronger readers and decoders. In our whole class reading, we have continued our chapter book, The One and Only Ivan, to develop our understanding of the natural world and practice inferring characters' feelings and actions. On our field trip day, we learned about and practiced yoga to reflect on what we were grateful for and connections between the mind and body. We are looking forward to continued sunny weather outside so we can get outdoors! Lastly, we were able to learn about landscapes and make our own plus we explored the artwork of Land Art artist Richard Shilling.

This week, the rain may have shifted our plans but it didn’t stop the fun! In math, third graders practiced division by finding the multiple of a given number and breaking whole numbers into groups. In reading, we’ve started writing our own book using the structure of a narrative. The week wouldn’t be complete without STEAM! Third graders charged BIT and took it for a spin while using specific colors to code the direction of the mini robot-like device. Things got a little messy in the science lab all while discovering that cornstarch is a great ingredient to create the ultimate stretch in slime!

This week was full of fun, exploration, experiments, and yoga! Fourth graders took a virtual field trip to Hawaii and Alaska and visited many of their beautiful national parks, noticing both similarities and differences in climate, habitats, and landforms. We made our own volcanoes using baking soda and vinegar to create a chemical reaction that mimicked the Hawaiian volcanoes! This week, fourth graders also played some friendly team basketball, learned about the power of yoga, and began writing their own dragon themed fictional stories! We ended our week with a nature walk to find rocks, which we will decorate with kindness themed messages and leave sprinkled around Westminster for students and staff to discover when they return to campus!