Champlain Students Read Aloud Night

October 25, 2013

Dear Families,

Pam Cyr and Joey Adams (teachers at SCS) teach a “Children’s Literature and Expressive Arts” class at Champlain College. We have invited our Champlain students to visit Shelburne Community School on November 4, 2013. The purpose of this visit is to immerse our students into our bountiful resources of literature, and provide them with an opportunity to read aloud literature to children.

We would like to invite your child to join us on November 4th, 6:00-7:00 p.m. at the SCS library.  Our Champlain College students will read aloud picture books to the children, and we will enjoy cookies, apples, and lemonade. Some of our Champlain students have even created math games to play with children!

Please email one of us  by Saturday, November 2nd if your child will be able to join us (jadams@cssu.org or pcyr@cssu.org). We really appreciate your child's participation in this important event for our students.

Warm Regards,

Joey Adams

Hands On Nature

It was great to connect with everyone for parent conferences and share the work your amazing children are doing in Second Grade.  Every student in our classroom has a lot to celebrate with their learning!
We will finish up our unit about closed syllable exceptions next week and will move on to a unit about suffixes in Fundations.  We will also be finishing up our Small Moments writing unit in the next couple of weeks. This week Mrs. Bushey visited our class to teach us more about what powerful writers do.  We will continue to work on our "Tricky Words" unit in Reader's Workshop and will focus on strategies we can use when we come to an unfamiliar word.
Our current math unit will finish up with an assessment of students' understanding of place value.  We will then move into a unit that will focus on addition and subtraction within one hundred.
We will continue with our science unit about the earth, the moon and the night sky.  We began the unit learning about differences between the day and night sky. We will begin to look at changes in the moon next week. 
A huge thank you to our Hands On Nature parents for another fabulous lesson about leaves.  We learned that leaves come in a variety of shapes and sizes but they are all designed to make food
for the plant, using sunlight, water and air and their green pigment, chlorophyll. We had a terrific time making leaf prints and creating leaf creatures.
Congratulations to Lily O'Brien for completing both addition and subtraction in Fastt Math.  Mr. Madden came to our classroom this week to present Lily with her certificates and remind our class of the importance of getting our math facts into long term memory.
Firefly Second grade will be having a "Harvest Party" on the afternoon of October 31st.  We will be enjoying snacks and playing some games.  Please go to the Celebrations sign up on the Firefly webpage if you would like to contribute something for our party.
Picture retakes have been post-poned again due to the fact that photos from our original photo day have just arrived today. Our new re-take date will be November 8th.
Have a wonderful weekend!

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Slideshow design created with Smilebox We continued to learn about good strategies readers use and practiced those strategies through our reading journals this week.  We also learned about authors' intent and did some close reading during Writer's Workshop to learn about what master authors do to make their writing powerful.  Everyone is working very hard on their small moments to use the learning we have gained through our mini-lessons. We continued to work on fact fluency with addition and subtraction during math this week.  We currently have many work stations that reinforce the development of fact fluency.  In addition to that, we have been learning about measurement and have been practicing measuring accurately using unifix cubes.  We have been measuring both length and perimeter. We finished our All About Me/Community unit today with a discussion of how to build unity in our community.  We will begin a new Science unit on Monday about the earth, moon and the night sky. A final reminder to sign up for parent conferences that are scheduled for this Thursday.  The weeks following conference day are very busy and it will be difficult for me to schedule a make up conference. Have a great weekend!

October PTO Meeting Minutes

PTO Minutes– October 8, 2013

Principals Report

▪ UA Curriculum night will take place on October 22nd

▪ Building committee formed to look at upgrades to facility and maintenance of big ticket items. Forum on November 12th

▪ Great attendance by the SKAT program 86 kids attending per week (separate from after school athletics)

▪ Part 2 has 70+ kids after school, starting to increase programming

▪ Professional development: Math Studio for teachers

Treasurers Report

▪ Genevieve fundraiser is behind estimates: estimated 8k net fundraising vs 13k in 2012

▪ Delayed the budget approval until November to adjust Genevieve fundraising numbers

▪ Discussed team donations: should they go through the school directly and not through PTO

▪ Discussed possible reasons why there was a reduced gift wrap sale this year

▪ Don't forget box tops and Hannaford Helps Schools (end Dec 1)

Fundraising Update

▪ Genevieve Gift Wrap – estimated 8k net fundraising vs 13 k in 2012

▪ School Directory Business Listing - has brought in an estimated $1,717.42(plus $750 from Volvo & Health Living still to

come in)

▪ Amazon School Rewards Program - we will be placing a link on the school website where people can click on it, order

things off of Amazon and SCS will earn money off of every $$ that is spent. More information to follow shortly.

▪ Donate Online – you can now donate online to the SCS PTO through Paypal https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?

cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=83QQ22GDZFRLJ

Fund Spending Update

▪ School Directory - Printing Estimate $1400

▪ Visiting Artist Program - we will not be using Jon Gailmor this year and instead we will be doing a program with the

Flynn Theatre and integrating the arts into the classrooms

▪ Fall Grant Committee Meeting – will take place on November 4th

participating in this committee meeting, which awards grants to teachers and staff, is welcome to come.

Mark Your Calendars

▪ Walking Wednesdays - every Wednesday in October (meet at 7:30 at Jaime 2 Coats or the Parade Grounds)

▪ Newberry Cup Bake Sale – October 12th

▪ UA Curriculum Night – October 22nd

▪ Genevieve Gift Wrap Distribution – October 22nd

Help Wanted

▪ Flower Gardens (lisawvt@hotmail.com)

▪ PTO Bulletin Boards (sweeneyrs@gmail.com)

▪ Newberry Cup Bake Sale (amybknight@gmail.com)

▪ CY Mentor Program (aliceandy@myfairpoint.net) - Alice Brown is the new coordinator, a great opportunity to help kids

that can benefit from an extra adult relationship in their life.  Mentoring takes place once a week during the school day

Sign Up to Volunteer Online - you can sign up to volunteer any time online:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlIV5TlL1TUvdDA0MXhsUDNqbnNuYUFNOS1XU1o2TXc#gid=0

Other Business

▪ Parent Education Nights – Amy Buckley, the new SAP Coordinator is working with the Burlington Police to hold a event

to discuss cyber bullying and monitoring. This even will be appropriate for all ages.

▪ Coat Drive – kids and adult’s warm winter gear is still needed. The drop box is right in front of the Front Office

▪ Parent Survey – a survey will be sent out shortly with questions to parents on how to raise funds, what sort of events

people want to see, and where should the money go

▪ After School Programming - Matt Wormser discussed different opportunities for parents to help lead after school

programs, 1, 4, 12 week curriculums? Math club, Spanish, cooking, anything! What sort of after school enrichment can

you help support?

▪ Facebook – be sure to “like” us on Facebook and keep up to date with everything happening at the school

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Shelburne-Community-School-PTO/112842845467209

Thank You’s 5

▪ Genevieve Gift Wrap - Ginger Williamson and Zynnia Seidita for heading this up and Jennifer Cairns, Dawn Fragola,

Lisa Merrill and Jana Cowan for their help getting the sheets reconciled

▪ School Directory – Dawn Fragola and Corinne Levinthal for their help soliciting business listings

▪ PTO Bulletin Board – Rita Daley and Teresa Shuptrine

UA Curriculum Night

Save the date:  October 22, 2013 6:30- 7:30 pm Unified Arts Curriculum Night An opportunity to meet the unified arts teachers, visit the classrooms, and learn about each program through student work, and hands on activities. This evening is for parents and students. More details to follow.

Text to Self Connections

Our Reader's Workshop focused on schema and text to self connections this week.  We spent time using post-it notes to write down our connections to the stories we were reading.  Next week we will talk about visualization as a strategy good readers use.  We have been learning how to edit our work during Writer's Workshop.   We are now using checklists to help guide us through this process.  We are getting our Small Moments ready for our portfolios so we can share those at conferences on October 17th.
This week we focused on place value in Math.  We have been learning about ones, tens and hundreds.  We are playing a variety of games during work stations that reinforce this learning.
We continued to work in groups during our Social Studies Community Unit this week.  This unit is giving us a chance to get to know our first grade Firefly friends better and is also giving us an opportunity to model  teamwork skills for our first grade friends.  We will continue to grow our teamwork skills through this unit as they will be very helpful to us in every part of our lives.
This week's Friday Folder includes book order forms for the month of September, October and November.  If you are interested in ordering please look in this week's Friday Folder for this information.
Please remember to sign up for a conference.  Conferences are coming up quickly on October 17th!

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