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.