PTO FOOD BASKET COLLECTION

PTO FOOD BASKET COLLECTION

Every year the PTO sponsors a special collection of lunch, breakfast, snack and holiday meal foods for local families to enjoy during the holiday vacation break. We are always amazed by the generosity of our school community for this event, and we appreciate it very much. In the past we have asked every student to donate one of the assigned items and we have had plenty to go around. Due to the increase in need, please send in an extra item if you’re able to. In addition, if you are willing to donate laundry detergent, that can be dropped off at the main office. Thank you and enjoy the holiday season. Contact Jan Thabault at jthabault@cssu.org with any questions.

IMPORTANT: Deadline is Tuesday, December 20th

  Team/Classroom – donation item

  Pre –K – cans of soup

  Journey – Boxes of Cereal

  Treehouse - Packaged Cookies

  Firefly – Boxed Snack Food (Granola Bars, Rice Krispie Treats etc.)

  Dragonfly– Cans of Fruits and Vegetables

  Inspire – Boxes of Crackers or Cracker Snacks

  Kaleidoscope – Boxes of Side Dishes (Mashed Potatoes, Stuffing, Rice etc)

  Imagine –Boxes of Macaroni and Cheese or Easy Mac

                        

  Believe – cans of ravioli, spaghettios, etc

  Discover – fruit cups or applesauce

  Endeavor – C. Crowther – Shampoo; P. Baldwin – Hair Conditioner

  Polaris – P. Cyr – jars of jelly; B. Gurwitz – peanut butter

  Voyager - Bags of Bagels or Sandwich Bread

  Alpha – Yogurt and Yogurt Snacks

  Holden – E. Brunvand –Apples; M. O’Toole – Bags of Carrots; R. Halnon –Oranges

Symphony  - C. Bennett – Refrigerated Cookie Dough; D. Morrill –Bricks of Cheese or String                                      Cheese;   D. Southworth – Packaged Sandwich Meat

  Winton – K. Sheerin – Shampoo; M. Harris & L. Phelps – Toothpaste and /or Tooth Brushes

Our Week With Tao Ye

This free photo slideshow made with Smilebox

Tao Ye, a visiting 27 year old Chinese teacher from Lijiang, China spent 3 days with our class this week. She taught the class how to say chinese numbers from 1-10 and also taught them how to write some words in Chinese. Tao spoke to us about her hometown in China. Lijiang is located in the southeast part of China. It has an Old Town and a New Town. She talked about the Old Town which has 800 years of history. Some of the things she shared with us:
-people are protective of the Old Town
-there are 2 wheel wells at the entrance of the town (these are pictured in the slide show)
-there are lots of small rivers located throughout the Old Town
-Si Fang square is the center of the Old Town and at night visitors come and dance with the locals who dress up in costumes
-You can ski in the mountains but to access them you have to ride a Gondola and it's so high that some people need oxygen when they go to the top
-There are no cars allowed in the Old Town
-There are 3 wells located in the town and the 1st one is for drinking water, the second is to wash vegetables, and the third is to wash laundry (this is pictured in the slide show)
-January 23rd is the Chinese New Year and this year it is the Year of the Dragon.
Today we enjoyed Chinese dumplings that Tao, Mrs. Nakhleh and Mrs. KillKelley made last night at Mrs. KillKelley's house.  We had a great time with Tao and learned a lot about China from her visit.

Our new Math Unit is "Exploring Shapes, Symmetry, Area & Number".  We will be observing, describing, sorting and exploring the relationships among many different 3-dimensional shapes during the first part of this unit.  Our new Fundations Unit will focus on open syllables (has only one vowel and it does not have a consonant after it).  We will also be introduced to y as a vowel.

On Thurs., December 22nd the Firefly team will be enjoying a special Holiday snack.  Please email me if you would like to send in a snack for this event.
I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Tao Ye -Visiting Chinese Teacher!

Firefly Second Grade spent this week getting back into the swing of things after our Thanksgiving break.  We finished up our Non-fiction unit in literacy and began talking about editing and conferring during Writer's Workshop.  We will continue to focus on editing and conferring next week and have begun meeting with partners to polish up our writing and make it even better.  Our Readers Workshop will shift from non-fiction to fiction and will focus on story elements in fictional texts.  During Fundations we have been revisiting the "magic e" rule, (vowel-consonant-e syllables).  We will continue with this rule next week and will learn about exceptions to this rule.  We will learn about the suffix ive and will learn more about compound words.
We continued to discover strategies that help us with our math fact fluency in Math this week.  We talked about doubles and neighbors, zero facts, take away tens, counting on and counting back.  We spent some time identifying which facts these strategies work for and then practiced using these strategies to solve them.  We will continue learning more strategies next week.
We look forward to spending time with the SCS visiting Chinese teacher, Tao Ye, next week.  She will be spending a week with the Firefly team teaching us about calligraphy and Chinese culture.  She will be working with Firefly Second Grade on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday during our Reader's Workshop time.

A big thank you to everyone who signed up to help out at the SCS Craft Fair tomorrow.  We have decided not to do the photo booth for several reasons, so we will be selling helium balloons and snow globes made by Firefly students.