Elementary School kindergarteners have been practicing gratitude and learning about what it means to be thankful. Since the beginning of the school year, they've been celebrating new friendships and understanding the importance of being thankful. Today, Nov. 25, they celebrated their progress with a Gratitude Walk, enjoying the crisp weather and sunshine with friends....a perfect activity to do during this season of thanksgiving! Plus: Principal Deborah Gallant made sure everyone knew how grateful she was for them by giving them special sparkly stickers to wear on their walk around the bus loop!
THANKSGIVING-THEMED MUSIC FUN!
Cliff Loretto's ES kindergarten music students have been working on keeping a steady beat and using their singing voices to sing simple songs. "Five Fat Turkeys" is a song where they can do both while playing a fun guessing game!
Students take turns being the "cook" and covering their eyes while "five fat turkeys" are selected. When they open their eyes they are tasked with keeping the beat on the bass bar while the class sings the song.
They then go on a "hunt" to find a turkey amongst the group. Once they find a turkey, that student becomes the new "cook" and the game starts again until everyone has had a turn to play the instrument! What a fun, seasonal way for them to learn about steady beats!
The big parade is just a few days away!
Jennifer Levin’s ES second-graders have been learning about how the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade originated! After hearing Melissa Sweet's story “Balloons Over Broadway,” which tells the story of the master puppeteer who invented the first balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, students designed their own parade balloons. These will be used in the creation of their own Thanksgiving Day Parade poster, complete with awesome balloons.
BUZZ! BUZZ! Sally Mankoo's ES kindergarteners, like other district kindergarteners, have been exploring the fascinating process of pollination through a fun and hands-on craft activity.
As part of her class’s studies, students learned how bees play an important role in helping flowers grow by transferring pollen from one flower to another.
To mimic this process, each child was tasked to use his/her imagination to become a “bee.” Using a pipe cleaner "bee," students dipped their “bee” into “pollen” (yellow chalk) and transferred it to another flower.
Students also had the chance the students practiced fine motor skills and they also learned new vocabulary like pollen, nectar, and pollination, and gained a better understanding of how bees help our environment.
Teaching kindergarteners about bees transferring pollen is important because it helps them understand how plants reproduce, the vital role bees play in our ecosystem by pollinating flowers which produce fruits and vegetables we eat, and encourages a sense of environmental stewardship by appreciating the importance of these small creatures for our food supply.
Rodney is the classroom pet of Gemma Lyon’s ES second-graders, and he’s clearly living his best, pampered life in this class!
But Rodney is more than just the class’s tortoise. He’s helping students explore and practice their social-emotional skills in class. Students routinely practice how to stay calm and safe while Rodney moves around on the carpet with them. Who wouldn’t want to have a tortoise hang out with them on the carpet?
Since Rodney is fairly “new” to the classroom, Mrs. Lyon talked with students about the emotions Rodney might be feeling at his new school and how even they can have similar emotions. Then, students spoke about how they can best handle similar emotions should they arise.
At the end of every week,a student gets to take RJ (Rodney Junior, the class stuffed “buddy”) for the weekend!
Tortoises can help develop social-emotional skills by providing a calming presence, fostering a sense of responsibility through caretaking, encouraging gentle interactions, and offering a low-demand companionship that can be beneficial for individuals struggling with anxiety or stress, particularly when used as therapy animals in settings like schools or senior homes. Their slow, predictable movements can also be soothing and help with self-regulation.
November is National Men’s Health Awareness Month! Join us and wear purple attire to help bring awareness to unique health issues of men!
Please join the efforts of the district's Buildings & Grounds team to bring awareness to important men's physical and mental health issues!
November is also "No-Shave November" and "Movember," movements created to encourage conversations about cancer awareness among men.
Call for photos: Share your student's purple attire for a forthcoming photo gallery by emailing to communications@minisink.com by 3 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 22!
GET WINGS and support the Class of 2025!
Buffalo Wild Wings in Middletown will donate 10% of your purchase on Saturday, Nov. 23 to support Class of 2025 initiatives. Make sure you bring this ticket!
District second-graders, like Joseph Ferara’s second-graders, are learning about the concept of place value during their math lessons.
In this recent lesson, students took their knowledge of how three-digit numbers get split into hundreds, tens, and ones and apply that knowledge to learning how to manipulate these numbers.
Here, this lesson teaches them each place value can’t “exceed 9 dots,” and if it does, they have to trade those dots for the next place value. This is really an introduction into the reasoning behind addition with regrouping. Students also learn how to exchange place values to create numbers in their standard form. These are important math skills to know!
When doing this, Mr. Ferara’s students use the word “transport” to show that they’re just moving the dots to a new place value, and not eliminating them all together. Think of it like cashing in 10 ones for 1 ten and 10 tens for 1 hundred!
Imagination and physical education fun: Anthony Licata’s ES physical education students can “bearly” contain their excitement!
Students have been playing "Hibernation Preparation" in physical education class! They’ve been told to pretend they’re bears in a forest trying to stock up on food for the upcoming winter.
There’s an imaginary river down the middle of the gym and the students do “rock, paper, scissors” with a “bear” classmate from the other side of the river. If they win, they take a beanbag “fish” from the river and take it back to their "storage den." But! If they lose, they go to the "workout zone" and do 10 jumping jacks.
Throughout the game the required movements would change. For example, in Round 1, the bears would jump to the river; in Round 2, they’d leap, and in future rounds, they may gallop or jog. The game is designed to help students practice different locomotor and social skills while also being able to use their imagination and have fun!
Here's another great school food drive that will welcome your support: The Elementary School PTO/Intermediate School PTO Food Drive!
Ian Walker’s ES second-graders, like all district second-graders, have spent ELA time reviewing “the long a sound” during phonics lessons.
The "long a sound" in second-grade phonics lessons is crucial because it reinforces a foundational reading skill, allowing students to decode words with different spellings that produce the "long a" sound (like "a" in "cake," "ai" in "rain" or the "ay" in "play") which are commonly encountered in grade-level texts, helping them to read more fluently and accurately.
As part of their review, students paired and played “Roll and Read,” a phonics/reading activity where students have a 6x5 grid with words inside each square. They roll a die and then based on what number they roll, and they read a word from that column. Students also read “Spelling Bee” from their Kids Excel student readers, which was also tied to the phonic skills they’re learning about in class. Partners go back and forth reading words aloud. Working with friends makes phonics lessons fun!
IS/ES families: Missing anything?
IS/ES security aide Kevin Murphy is reminding you to think about this, as he's currently the trusted keeper and safeguarder of a very large selection of sweatshirts and jackets --- as well as other items--- that are missing their owners!
You'll be able to take a firsthand look during the upcoming IS/ES Parent/Teacher Conference days, but check to see what might be missing in your closets now. Once these conferences are completed, any unclaimed items will be donated to those in need.
Lindsey McKernan’s ES kindergarteners have been learning to group numbers by 5 using cubes! Manipulatives, like cubes, allow students to interpret, comprehend, and represent a wide variety of math concepts and can make learning fun! Later, her students used clipboards on the carpet to complete the writing portion of the lesson.
Manipulatives are physical objects that students can touch, move, and play with to help them understand abstract math concepts. They come in many shapes and sizes, and research shows that using them has a positive effect on students' understanding.
CAN YOU HELP?
The High School's FBLA Club is hosting its annual Food Drive, with donations being accepted through Friday, Nov. 22.
Community donations may be delivered to the high school's main entrance, where it will be collected for distribution.
Sally Mankoo’s and Katie Bendykowski's ES kindergarteners recently had the unique experience of learning how pickles can be experienced through each of the five senses! They listened to Rachel Isadora’s “I Hear a Pickle” and learned “all the tea”… rather, “all the dill” more about this humble cucumber and what they could hear, taste, smell, touch, and see! Ask them about this! Then, they recorded their sensory observations in their graphic organizers to capture their experiences. What a fun, crunchy lesson!
In kindergarten, graphic organizers can be used to visually support young learners in organizing information, brainstorming ideas, understanding key details in stories, building vocabulary, and even planning their writing by providing a structured framework to capture their thoughts through simple drawings and key words.
Carmella Sill’s ES kindergarteners have been working in groups to complete challenging puzzles! But, their work was more than just seeing what the completed puzzle looked like.
Working together in groups to complete puzzles is important in kindergarten because it helps children develop crucial social skills like communication, cooperation, and problem-solving by requiring them to work together to achieve a common goal, while also enhancing their cognitive abilities through the puzzle itself, and, of course, fine motor skills practice! What a fun way to practice teamwork and critical thinking in a given time frame!
Good morning! Angela Dombal’s and Bridget Kelly’s ES kindergarteners have been practicing learning how to greet each other, which includes learning about eye contact, handshakes, and saying good morning to a friend! This has helped the students learn each other's names and promotes a feeling of community in the classroom.
Support the Class of 2025 and add to your collection of outstanding Minisink Valley attire! The selections are great to wear for any occasion and for any event in any building!
Karen Ruoti's ES kindergarten students are chaining letters to make, blend and read words as part of their ELA work! Her young students are building words with letter cards. This technique improves phonemic awareness as well as decoding (reading) and encoding (writing) skills.
Kindergarten word chaining is a reading practice that helps students learn to decode words with specific spelling patterns. It involves creating a series of words that differ by one phoneme, or sound, at a time. For example, a word chain might start with "bat" and then continue with "cat", "can", "man", and so on.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Marjori Bobish's transitional kindergarteners are brewing up phonemic awareness in their special Halloween attire! By playing words games using a program called "Heggerty," students practice manipulating sounds in words and develop a magical foundation for future reading skills!
