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Sara Petit-McClure

Update from our Head of School - October 23, 2020

Hello Families Happy Friday!  It is hard to believe that we had such a warm beautiful day this close to the end of October, but we sure are grateful for it.  Our students spent lots of time outside learning and soaking up the sun. Our students are finishing up their Hispanic Heritage month projects at home.  We are excited to see them next week.  Students have been learning about a particular country or topic related to Hispanic Heritage and will be sharing that knowledge in a variety of ways.   Book Character Parade: On Friday October 30th, we will have a costume book character parade at 10:00AM.  We invite all students to dress up as a character from a book and bring the book to school with them to share with their class.  If children want to make their own book to match their costume, they are welcome to.  Children may come dressed in their costume, and will also be required to wear a CDC approved face covering with their costume.   We will walk down through the town of Truxton and invite our neighbors to come outside of their houses and businesses to see the students in their book character costumes.  Parents and community members are invited to stand along the parade route and wave to the children if they wish.  Ways to Help Our School Amazon Smile is a division of amazon that donates a portion of sales from many items to a variety of charities and nonprofits.  Truxton Academy is one of those nonprofits.  If you are purchasing items from amazon, please go to https://smile.amazon.com/ and choose Truxton Academy as your charity of choice.  Purchases you are making anyway will benefit our school. Additionally, our teachers have put together a wishlist for items from amazon that would be helpful in the classrooms and school.  If you would like to help our school by purchasing items on this list, please first log into amazon smile and choose Truxton Academy as your charity of choice.  Then click the following link from this email to see the items on the wish list: https://a.co/e54qzMg Updates from the classrooms: PE In PE this week classes earned their free day on the playground! We have finished our hiking/orienteering unit in second and third grade. They did a great job using a compass to complete a scavenger hunt! These students have also started our pickleball unit. In kindergarten and first grade we started our hula hooping unit! There are some really awesome hula hoopers out there!  Kindergarten/ First Grade ELA: We had another great week in K/1!  During ELA the kindergarteners continued to write amazing stories.  They were introduced to how they can label their pictures to give the reader more information about their stories.  They learned their first sight word, "me", and used it in their writing by labeling a narrative writing piece.  Next week the K's will be moving on to learning lowercase letters and the sound associated with each letter and use this knowledge in their writing. In reading, we practiced rhyming words, read a fall poem, and used our eagle eyes to find letters in the books they are reading during independent reading time.  In first grade, the students made revisions to their first longer narrative work. We also talked about how it is important to make a plan for your writing (both pictures and words) before you start.  They put this to practice when beginning their second narrative story.  During readers' workshop the first graders learned that readers are always thinking, before, during, and after they read a book.  They practiced taking sneak peeks, checking their sneak peeks, and then doing something after they finish a book (reread, think about their favorite part, or add more to the ending- what happens next?).  The first graders will also start to use scientific spelling, which teaches common spelling patterns that will allow them to be more and more accurate when writing unknown words.  Science: In Science the K/1 team learned about the sense of hearing.  They learned that sound is caused by vibrations and that different vibrations make different sounds.  We also talked about how different sounds cause different emotions.  We listened to two very different types of music and made line drawings of them by listening closely and thinking about the colors and types of lines each type of music elicits.  We also listened to different sounds like water moving, traffic, birds, and snoring, to name a few, and then had the students identify the sounds.  This was fun and showed us how different people can hear the same thing, but hear something somewhat different.  We also talked about how people who can not hear navigate the word by reading lips and using sign language.  We even learned some signs!  Students also got to see and hear some instruments and make their own. Math: In 1st grade we did identifying place values again and the kids are working on making and playing go fish but with say it the ten way cards. We started a new game of eye have who has with say it the ten way info. In kindergarten we have been exploring, drawing, and creating shapes.  The students have also been counting sides and corners and finding the pattern (#of sides = # of corners).  Mindfulness: This week in Mindfulness the K/1 students continued sending kind thoughts to each other, friends, family and pets. They have noticed that sending kind thoughts makes themselves and others feel really good! Their mindful breathing practice time has increased from thirty seconds to a minute and a half! They also started learning about body awareness and enjoyed some time outside in nature! Second Grade Math: We introduced four digit addition using the stamp game manipulatives. The students made manipulatives with beads from 1 to 10 to help reinforce understanding of place value and practiced their number sense by building numbers they heard with their number cards. We reviewed money by counting money with our numeral cards in increments of 5 to 100.  The students matched the numeral cards with the coin sums to match. We also reviewed telling time and students showed the time I told them on their clocks. ELA/ Social Studies: The second graders worked with the third graders for much of this week. We continued with our salt dough country project. We painted the country salt doughs for Guatemala and Mexico. They worked on their land and water form books.  They wrote definitions and drew pictures to represent the land & water forms. We started reading some Norse Myths, a short reading called The Northmen Spread to North America and started Olaf and Snoori reading packet both were about the Vikings starting from Prince  Eric, Leif Ericson and Olaf. We also did Readers Theatre and also had an improvised retelling of the Tiger and the Hare with some shadow puppets. Second graders listened to 2 Iktomi tales, started writing a book report and worked on oral and written narration. Third Grade This week in 3rd grade we continue to work towards our learning goals. We learned about the legend of the Loch Ness Monster and students wrote about finding a legendary creature, place, or object. In math, we completed our first unit test on multiplication and division. Whew! It was a doozy, but now we know what we know and what we still need to learn. We also took some time to think about what it means to have confidence and learned some tricks to boost our confidence. We look forward to our regular schedule as all our in-person students return to class. Have a great weekend!   Spanish K/1 is finishing up colors and started on number 1-10. They are learning the lyrics to the song "Los colores".  You can find it on youtube to listen at home.   2/3 Is continuing their practice with colors. They are putting their vocabulary lists into their notebooks and are playing a game to match the color name to it's correct color. As a reminder, we have a public facebook page where we share many pictures of our students learning.  Please check it out to see some of the wonderful work our teachers and students are doing every day!  (https://www.facebook.com/truxtonacademy) Thank you, Sara and the Truxton Academy Team

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