East Read-Away for East Rockaway!

A message from the Reading Team-

From East to East Rockaway!

We are thrilled to report that once again, East School has done an outstanding job in helping their neighbors!   

East Read-Away for East Rockaway was a Read-A-Thon to raise money for RhameAvenue Elementary Schoolin East Rockaway, NY.  Rhame Avenue Elementary was badly damaged during Hurricane Sandy and many classrooms lost their libraries.  Our students read as much as they could for four weeks and were pledged by their families for each minute read.  During each week of the Read-a-Thon, East had a goal for the number of minutes to be read.  Many individual classrooms set their own goals and competed with other classrooms for most minutes read. A few classrooms even had 100% participation!  Many parents shared stories of how their children were suddenly reading before school, in the car, at restaurants and with flashlights under the covers!   Along with the at-home reading and pledges, we also collected gently used books to go directly to Rhame Avenue Elementary classrooms. 

In all, we collected more than 22 heavy boxes of books for Rhame's various classrooms and they were hand delivered by our reading and writing team.  The Read-A-Thon concluded with more than 340,000 minutes read by our students and staff and over $7,300 collected, going towards new books for Rhame Avenue Elementary.  That amount far exceeded our goal and the teachers in East Rockaway are thrilled with the generosity and passion of our readers and their families.  

   

*** Special thanks to our East literacy team - Karen Abramson, Robin Collins, Pamela Cullinan, and Jennifer Valiante - for all of their time, energy, and inspiration as they coordinated and led the East Community in this work. Thanks too to our ICT specialist, Rob Polley, for the technology links that kept the reading minutes coming in!

Español

For this latest entry of the East blog, we are excited to share with you a posting from Senora Roth and Senora Rizzuti, our FLES teachers at East … Read on!

¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás?  Bien gracias.  

These are some of the phrases you may hear in the halls. The Fles (foreign language in the elementary school) program is flourishing at East School! This is the fourth year of the program and it has become an integral part of our culture. Not only is the curriculum based on social studies and science units but we also collaborate with art, music, P.E. and computers.

Based on our immersion style language instruction, students have class 3, 4 or 5 times each week depending on the grade level. In a typical FLES session, students participate in a developmentally-appropriate routine which includes: greetings, calendar and weather. Then they are engaged in curriculum related instruction. All classes make use of a variety of student groupings including whole group, pair and individual work, and at the older levels students keep a journal with written work. There are many songs and chants (which you may have heard around the house) that help the students gain confidence with the language and have fun!

Many of you have asked how you can extend the language learning at home. Right here on the East School web page there is a Spanish link. On this link you will find games that allow students to practice skills learned at school. Another way is to observe all the places you hear and see Spanish in the community. These are great ways to make real life connections and experience the language on a whole different level.

As always, we are grateful for your support and the opportunity to teach your children.

What a month!

From Science Fair to STEaM Night ... it has been a very busy February month at East School!

We saw more than 130 young scientists proudly displaying their experiments, research, and more at our East School Science Fair during the first weekend of the month. There was plenty of excitement, enthusiasm, and learning all around - from solar system models (Is Pluto a planet or a moon?) to diapers (Do you know which brand can absorb the most?), from making bread rise to the ever-popular erupting volcano (one of the favorite of my 4-year old son who was eager to accompany me at the Fair)! Thanks to all who participated and to those who came to view the work.  And a special thank you to Mr. Bothe for all of his work behind-the-scenes to support our young scientists throughout the year, to inspire curiosity in our students, and to make this annual event such a success!

And just a few days later, we filled the halls of East School with young mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and artists as part of our STEaM Night 2013. STEaM brings together Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics with integrated experiences and real-world connections. There was web design with some familiar faces popping up on new magazine covers. There was marshmallow-building (also a very engaging snow-day activity for all ages, as we soon learned in the Woleck household when we were homebound during the blizzard) and airplane design too. And there was also the creative-engineering challenge - "How can you make a piece of art that has at least one moving part?" What children (and adults) can do with paper, brads, metal rings, paper clips, string, and hole punchers is quite remarkable. Special thanks to Mrs. Main to make this evening happen for us!

I am thrilled to capture the memory of these wonderful February events (quickly becoming favorite traditions at East) here in the blog because writing about them brings a smile . . . these are the events that bring our East community together and remind us of the pure joy young children find in all kinds of learning. Thanks for being a part of this!

Take care,
Kris

Celebrating Our Community

Celebrating our community

It seems like an appropriate time to celebrate the community that we are both at here East and in New Canaan. Our first grade classes spent time this fall studying communities and our town of New Canaan as part of their social studies curriculum. As a culminating, authentic learning experience to their unit of study, each classroom collaborated as a community of learners to take on the role of park planners in our community. Their task was to suggest ways to create a playground at Irwin Park that could be used and enjoyed by the New Canaan community.

There were many problem solving opportunities embedded in this park-planning experience.  There were plenty of decisions to be made in the planning and the careful thought given to these decisions by these first graders was evident. For instance, the entrance to the park in one plan was carefully placed with parking a fair distance from where children would be playing on the swings and slides in order to ensure safety. The parks included trash cans, snack bars, bike paths, and more. The classes also included “rules” for different parts of their park, recognizing the role that such rules play in maintaining the safety of all citizens in a community. 

All of this work was undertaken with the goal to give the community a place to enjoy time and friends. Here’s to more of this wonderful learning in the year ahead!

Happy 2013!

Take care,

Kris