Cliff Loretto’s ES K-2 students are learning a fun longways dance called “Alabama Gal” in preparation for the upcoming ES Family Folk Dance March 21. Take a peek at this group --- they’re having lots of fun learning the steps of the dance so they’re fully prepared to dance with their adult partners.
All students are also learning a mixer dance and a circle dance as well as a warm-up and cool down in preparation for this upcoming big night!
•"Longways," "mixer," and "circle dances" refer to different types of folk dances that can be taught to students, often involving specific formations and movements.
•Longways dance: This dance formation involves two lines of dancers facing each other, with partners standing across from each other.
•Mixer dance: A dance where students move around and change partners, often with a call-and-response or a specific sequence of movements.
•Circle dance: A dance where students stand in a circle, semicircle, or curved line, sometimes with partners, and move together to music.
The co-teach model offers unique instructional opportunities! Take a peek at Angela Dombal’s and Bridget Kelly’s ES kindergarteners busy at work with their Amplify ELA skills lessons! When the classroom’s timer goes off, the groups switch so they can practice both skills.
In this recent lesson, Mrs. Dombal used Amplify picture readers to introduce and teach the new tricky word “down” and later its opposite, “up.” "Down" is considered a tricky word because its pronunciation doesn't fully align with typical phonics rules, meaning a beginner reader might struggle to sound it out based solely on the letter sounds. The "ow" combination doesn't make its usual "ow" sound as in "cow" but instead produces a "doun" sound, making it an irregular spelling pattern that needs to be memorized as a whole.
At the same time, Mrs. Kelly reviewed new digraph sight words and then completed a chaining activity where students manipulated a sound or two within a word to create a new word. A digraph is two letters that work together to make one sound. For example, "ch" in "chin" and "ea" in "bread" are both digraphs.
•Tricky words for kindergarteners are words that don't follow the usual rules of spelling and pronunciation. They can also have unusual spellings or silent letters. Tricky words can be difficult for emergent readers because they haven't learned all the graphemes in the words. They can also be temporarily or permanently tricky. A "grapheme" in phonics is a letter or group of letters that represents a single sound (phoneme) in written language.
•A "chaining activity" in Kindergarten ELA refers to a phonics-based activity where students build a series of words by changing only one sound at a time, essentially creating a "chain" of related words, helping them practice decoding and encoding skills by focusing on letter-sound connections and identifying patterns in spelling while reinforcing phonemic awareness in young learners.
As part of the Elementary School’s ongoing commitment to character education, the ICON Dance Team of New York City visited the school today, March 5, for a high powered and colorful show focusing on music and dance and which included an important conversation on spotting and stopping bullying, respecting yourself and others, taking responsibility for your actions and leading a positive life.
The students were mesmerized with the talent of the dance trio and understood their important messages! Ask your student about today’s assembly and please continue this important conversation!
Like all district first-graders, Meghan Donahue’s ES first-graders have a unit in their science studies focusing on astronomy.
Mrs. Donahue kicked off this unit by showing her students how to create their own eclipses! Students used their Groundhog Day lesson knowledge about shadows and light to help enhance their knowledge and understanding of lunar and solar eclipses.
How fun is this? Her students used Play-Doh to re-create moon and Earth models, using pencils to hold those models in place with additional Play-Doh at the base. Then, they used flashlights to create shadows. Her young students moved their “moons and earths” in an “orbit” to create lunar and solar eclipses. Play-Doh pencil eclipses are a fun hands-on activity that helps children learn about eclipses by seeing how the relative positions of the three celestial bodies create an eclipse.
There was more unique learning fun! Later, students made their own moon rocks using baking soda and water and a little bit of coco powder for color. These rock blobs were frozen overnight. Then, they with the help of a spoon or dropper, they used vinegar to dissolve their moon rocks! What a great activity helping students to learn about space, the scientific process and even how vinegar reacts with baking soda!
Learning how to alphabetize words is important because it helps develop a foundational understanding of sequence and order! Tracey Salinardi’s ES second-graders, like all district second-graders, practice this important skill on a regular basis. Students recently took a list of self-generated random words and then practiced alphabetizing them…. sometimes they needed to go to the third letter in a word to make sure it was alphabetized correctly!
Understanding alphabetical order is crucial for accessing information in dictionaries, encyclopedias, libraries, and other reference materials, making it a key fundamental skill for reading, research, and organization in everyday life Students quickly learn that alphabetizing words allows them to quickly locate specific information by recognizing patterns in the alphabet.
The practice of alphabetizing words originated in ancient times, with the earliest evidence found in Northwest Semitic scribes using the abjad system during the first millennium BCE. Historians note the most notable early example was the library catalog called "Pinakes," created by scholar Callimachus at the Great Library of Alexandria, where scrolls were likely arranged alphabetically by the first letter of the author's name, marking one of the first effective uses of alphabetical order as a cataloging method.
Take a peek at the recent ES Scholastic Book Fair! We bet a lot of students have some great books to read at home! Thank you to the ES PTO for organizing and overseeing this wonderful event!
Book fairs are a fun and engaging way to introduce young children to a wide variety of books, allowing them to choose titles that spark their interest, which can foster a lifelong love of reading while giving them the power to select their own books! Book fairs can help build excitement around reading within the classroom and at home, encouraging family engagement with books. See more photos on the district's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MinisinkValleyCSD
Even the district’s transitional kindergarteners get introduced to what an acronym means! In this instance, Marjori Bobish’s ES transitional kindergarteners learned that someone who has performed better than anyone else, especially in sports, can be considered the “Greatest of All Time!” If you take the first letter of each of those words, you can simplify that phrase by saying “GOAT!”
Mrs. Bobish and her students talked about why gymnast Simone Biles is a “GOAT” as they read their Scholastic readers together, learning about the important attributes of a GOAT!
The term "GOAT" is believed to have originated in hip-hop music in the 1990s and was popularized by rapper and actor LL Cool J.
lana Kaufman's ES kindergarten art students are taking the seasonality of Valentine's Day and creating Alma Thomas-inspired heart paintings, made with tempera paint!
Alma Thomas was a part of the Washington Color School, a 1950s-1970s art movement in response to Abstract Expressionism. These artists used bold colors to form simple, flat shapes, stripes, and fields of color, rather than focusing on emotion, gesture, and movement. Ms Thomas became an important role model for women, African Americans, and older artists. She was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, and she exhibited her paintings at the White House three times.
The Intermediate School’s Kindness Ambassadors were recently “on the road” to visit the Elementary School’s students! Every year to wrap up Kindness Week, these ambassadors visit the younger students to present a lesson on kindness followed by an activity.
During their recent visit, the ambassadors presented a recorded read aloud of Trudy Ludwig’s “The Power of One.” Her book tells the story that when one child reaches out in friendship to a classmate who seems lonely, she begins a chain reaction of kindness that ripples throughout her school and her community. One kind act begets another, small good deeds make way for bigger ones, and eventually the whole neighborhood comes together to build something much greater than the sum of its parts.
Their recording was made possible through the kindness of Kat Hoolan’s High School “Media Production” students, who took the ambassadors’ recording and created a more polished video of the book for them to use. THANK YOU to everyone who played a role in this visit’s success!
The IS kindness ambassadors are a before-school enrichment program for students who want to spread kindness. Ambassadors are involved in many things throughout the school year, including preparing hygiene kits around the holidays for needy families, creating artwork for the building and serving as liaisons to their classrooms to pass along information regarding the current “Valentines for Veterans” drive as well as sharing information about different holidays.
Harlem Wizard John “Big J” Smith visited the Intermediate and Elementary schools and Otisville Elementary today, Feb. 11 to remind students about the upcoming March 12 Harlem Wizards vs. Minisink Valley Faculty/Staff Basketball game!
“Big J,” who stands 6 feet, 8 inches tall, delighted students with his antics and awesome basketball skills as he reminded students the game is a big fundraiser! He’s been a member of the Harlem Wizards since 2011 and in last six years, has played basketball in 25 countries!
Tickets will be on sale soon for the March 12 game! Basketball aficionados will be treated to great skills, teamwork, slick dribbling, alley-oops and crazy slams. The non-hoop fans attending will find out that this is much more than just a basketball game. The night is funny, theatrical, exciting and spectacular and the gym will reverberate with oohs & aahs, laughter, enthusiasm, and much more!
The Harlem Wizards have been dazzling audiences since 1962 and have played many games with members of our faculty and staff over recent years! Watch for tickets and be sure to come out and support the faculty/staff team!
See more photos on the district's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MinisinkValleyCSD
FROSTY PHYSICAL EDUCATION FUN!
ES/IS Physical Education teachers Leyla Johnson and Ross Potter took their students outdoors for snow tubing for their physical education classes today! Students, who dressed for the weather, had fun rides down the hill....and then they needed to get that tube back up for the next rider's run! It was a great workout! The plan is to offer snow tubing opportunities for as many classes as possible, weather conditions permitting!
•Snow tubing originated in the 1820s in Northern America, when people used inflated tire tubes to get around on snow.
•Snow tubing allows for faster speeds than sledding because of the low friction between the snow and the rubber tube.
The ES' "Glowing Up Special Someone Second Grade Dance," held this past Friday, was great evening for everyone who attended. Thank you to everyone who played a role in its success, particularly our awesome ES PTO! Take peek at the fun!
See a photo gallery on the district's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MinisinkValleyCSD
Erin Chase’s ES first-graders are learning about how the Mayans used observatories to look at the sky! As part of their discussion, her little students practiced writing in complete sentences and drew a photo of a Mayan observatory.
The Maya built observatories so that they could examine the nighttime sky to track Earth's journey around the sun, which led to the development of their calendar.
Studying the Maya civilization in first-grade introduces young students to a fascinating ancient culture, exposing them to concepts like different writing systems (hieroglyphics), basic astronomy through their calendar system, and the idea of complex societies with impressive architecture.
Library classes are always the best --- students can take out books and bring them home to read either solo or with a family member! It’s even better when you can take a book that was read to you in class and then use Play-Doh to create your own animal tracks!
That’s what Mia McLean’s ES kindergarten library students had the chance to do! She read them Mia Posada’s “Who Was Here? Discovering Wild Animal Tracks.” The book focuses on the footprints of wild animals from all around the world. For each animal, there's a rhyming verse, followed by the refrain "Who was here?" along with a life-size footprint on the appropriate terrain.
Afterward, students were given cans of Play-Doh so they could create their animal track of choice! A bear, by far, were the most popular animal track choice, followed by a kangaroo! What a great way of connecting a story with some fine motor skill work! Take a peek at these adorable little students proudly showing off their creations!
It’s the perfect time of year for Lindsey McKernan’s ES kindergarteners to read Maureen Wright’s “Sneezy the Snowman” and follow this story up with a sweet project!
The book tells the story of Sneezy, who was very, very cold from being outside and was looking for a drink to warm himself up. But! After drinking a hot cup of cocoa, he melted! With help from some shaving cream and glue, the students’ follow-up project showed what Sneezy looked like after he melted. And, these little ones also got to practice working on their writing and fine motor skills, too!
Physical Education teachers Anthony Pascarelli and Leyla Johnson have been introducing their ES kindergarten students to basketball, and teaching them about the bounce pass and chest pass techniques.
A bounce pass in basketball is a pass where the ball is thrown to the floor and then bounces to a teammate. It's a useful pass when a direct pass might be blocked by a defender. A chest pass in basketball is a pass where the ball is thrown from the chest to another player on the team. It's a fundamental skill that's often used in short or medium distance passes. While they’re not yet working with basketballs, they will as they move up to higher grade levels.
As part of continued Asian Lunar New Year studies district-wide this week, Sally Mankoo’s ES kindergarteners had a fun companion art project: Making their own snakes! (It’s the Year of the Snake, as we know!)
Students created their own snakes, painted them, cut them out and then added eyes and a popsicle stick tongue. This was a great fine motor activity to tie into the Asian Lunar New Year celebration!
•In Chinese culture, the snake is often linked to the element of fire, which signifies passion, energy and transformation. The year itself is considered a time for reflection, deep thought and personal growth.
•People born in the Year of the Snake are believed to be perceptive, intelligent and graceful
ES Physical Education teacher Anthony Pascarelli took some of his second-grade classes out for snowtubing this past Tuesday so they could have some outdoor fun now that temperatures have climbed a bit and before much of the snow disappeared. Students brought their warm snow clothing to school and quickly dressed for a super fun outdoor physical education class!
And, they got a great workout, too, because once they’ve zoomed down the hill….they had to walk back up! Everyone was eager to do as many snowtubing runs as possible before class ended. Plans are to do this with more classes, weather permitting! Thank you to everyone who helped make these physical education sessions so much fun!
Happy Asian Lunar New Year from Carmella Sill's ES kindergarteners! It's the Year of the Snake!
Joseph Ferara’s ES second-graders, like their peers, have been learning about the life cycles of different species as part of their science lessons in recent weeks.
How cool is this: His students used virtual reality to allow them to interact with each stage of a frog’s life cycle! First, they discussed each life cycle and then explored how that life cycle via Merge Cube technology!
A Merge Cube is a small, foam cube that allows users to hold and interact with 3D digital objects using technology which essentially let his students "touch" and manipulate virtual items like they would real objects. It makes learning more engaging and hands-on and often used to explore topics in science, history and more through interactive 3D models. They loved it! Take a look!
This STEM lesson included having students use Chromebooks, iPads, Google Slides and virtual reality to share what they noticed about each stage of the life cycle!
