Cheetah Pride Press

Families,

Next week will be very short, with a full day on Monday and an early dismissal on Tuesday. Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate. May you all have a wonderful holiday season, and may it be filled with love and laughter! School will be closed from December 24th – January 2nd. We will be back in session on Monday, January 5th. I’m looking forward to an amazing New Year!

Have a great weekend!

Joey

In an effort to keep everyone healthy before the winter break, we made the difficult decision to cancel our planned Cheetah Pride assemblies today. It’s always disappointing when plans change; however… Pride made a surprise visit ANYWAY, and traveled from room to room. Thanks, Pride, for bringing so many smiles to the faces of our young learners.

Katie Williams, Memorial’s School Nurse, will be transferring to Center School on January 6th. We have appreciated Katie’s service to our school community over the past several years, and she will be missed at Memorial School. Center School will be lucky to have her join their team. Consequently, Memorial School has hired a new nurse. I am pleased to announce that Krista Kardys will begin in our health office on January 5th. Krista is an RN who is coming to us with years of experience in private health offices, hospital, and school settings. We look forward to welcoming her!

Our kindergarten students participated in Traditions Around the World Day! They boarded the plane and took off on a journey across the globe, making stops in Canada, Germany, Russia, the Netherlands, and Australia. At each destination, students explored traditions, music, and symbols unique to each country and created a craft inspired by what they learned. Students also learned about Diwali as a cultural celebration observed in many parts of the world, focusing on traditions such as lights, colors, and community. It was a day packed with first-class learning, hands-on exploration, and smiles from takeoff to landing!

After reading “The Gingerbread Man” story, the Smart Start students baked their own gingerbread people; and one of them got away! They looked all over the building, only to find that it had been hiding in their classroom the whole time!

The Elephant and Piggie series, by Mo Willems, is beloved by young learners; and on Thursday, our grade 1 students were thrilled to go see a live show titled: Elephant and Piggie: We’re In A Play! The performance took place at Playhouse On Park - Literature Alive, in West Hartford.

As we follow our calf, Samantha's growth, we can learn more about animal health. Dairy farming is a way of life for more than 40,000 farm families in the United States. Please enjoy this video as we follow Farmer Caroline around her farm in Pennsylvania and how she cares for their cows. Fun on the Farm-- Cow Care

We are thrilled to announce that Memorial School’s Social Worker, Lauren Kasperowski, has been recognized as the EHPS Employee Of The Month! This is a well-deserved honor for an incredibly hard-working member of the Memorial School community. Lauren’s compassion and positivity make her an invaluable resource for our students, staff, and families. Congratulations, Lauren. You are valued by so many people!

A PAWsitive office referral is submitted when a staff member recognizes a student who is going above and beyond to exemplify one of our three school rules - taking care of others, taking care of self, & taking care of things.

Memorial Models are chosen weekly by their teacher. These students have excelled all week in taking care of themselves, others and things. The recipients will dine at a VIP table during lunch every Friday!

Meet Sean.

His teacher is Miss Cordero.

He is special because he plays soccer.

One of his favorite things is playing his PC.

He wanted to be on cheetah council to make the school a better place.

He loves recess and chrome books best about school.

Cleaning out your child’s books?

The Cheetah Council is accepting gently used children’s books to donate to our book swap and shop.

We are collecting books in the month of January.

The book shop and swap will begin in February. More info on this to come.

*If you have books to donate please bring them to school and leave them in the Book donation boxes in the hallway near room 38 or in the front office.

THANK YOU for supporting the cheetah council!

12/23 Early Release

12/24-1/2 Winter Break

1/5 Return to School

1/12 BOE Meeting at Town Hall @ 6:30

1/13 iReady Assessments Begin

1/19 MLK Jr. Day NO SCHOOL

WINTER HAS ARRIVED! Art making in winter is such a fun and exciting opportunity! Students view the changing season and watch their world turn into a winter wonderland, coated with white sparkling snow and frozen ice. This month, we took time to recognize the beauty that comes along with winter, and explored some of the many ways artists can reflect that beauty in their masterpieces. Not only is winter an inspiring time to create art, but it is a perfect activity to do when it’s a bit too cold to go outside! Encouraging your child to make art on a chilly day surely helps them to pass the time, and further explore their artistic abilities (not to mention, its FUN!).

Students learned about clay, and how it is a special art supply that comes from the EARTH! Who knew it was made out of DIRT?! We explored how to form and shape clay into a ball by rolling, and then flattening into a slab by patting. Using our gross motor skills is a great way to build our muscles as artists! Students then used a variety of objects to press texture and make patterns in the slab of clay. We created SNOW FLAKE designs in our clay slabs, and to finish them off we painted them to look icy and sparkly, as a real snow flake looks! We learned how to thread a pipe cleaner through a hole in our clay and twisted it together to make a hanger, finishing a perfect hand made ornament to hang in a special place in our homes! We know that clay has to be fired and becomes very fragile, and we have to take great care while we hold and carry them, so that they don’t break!

Students learned all about straight lines and how simply you can use a RULER to create such crisp and even DIAGONAL, HORIZONTAL, AND VERTICAL straight lines. After practicing using a ruler, students began painting into the lines they made. Students are using tempera paint to explore color mixing and outlining to find shapes! It was so fun to discover that our straight lines connected to make all sorts of shapes to paint inside of. In order to keep our straight lines so neat, we learned that taking a paint brush and following the edges first helps to keep those shapes nice and straight-sided. Of course, painting is so fun, and as kindergarteners, we are expanding on our abilities to wash our brushes well, and keep our paint on our palettes clean. We have to wash our brushes a LOT in order to mix colors carefully. We made grays, greens, purples, oranges, pinks, and browns, all while using the PRIMARY colors! To further inspire our work, we learned about the artist, Piet Mondrian, and looked closely at his famous work of art called “Broadway Boogie Woogie” (1942). Mondrian was an EXPERT at straight lines, and also loved using the primary colors in his paintings. The students loved looking at this painting, as they noticed how his work had energy, and described it as little cars on a busy street, yet all he actually created was squares and rectangles! This special style of art is called “Abstract Art”, and inspired us to let loose and be creative, making art that shows nothing we can recognize. We are so proud of our Abstract paintings and can’t wait to bring them home. To extend the skills learned during this project, students will be using rulers to create snowflake paintings!

Students worked so hard to complete their still life collages, and are now beginning a landscape painting. In order to prepare ourselves for a painting unit, we have been practicing and exploring mixing TINTS and SHADES, and carefully washing our brushes. A tint is created when white is added to a color, making it lighter. A shade is created when black is added to a color, making it darker. Students began their own landscape paintings by creating either tints or shades of various colors for the sky. We will be continuing our landscape paintings after winter break, when we begin adding a background and foreground, and all sorts of winter-y details. This will create a “Winter wonderland Painting” with the most amazing colors!

Students have begun exploring the use of FORM in art. A form is a three-dimensional shape, and can be made from a variety of art supplies. When an artist uses FORMS to make their art, they are making a SCULPTURE! We discussed these new vocabulary words and took a whole art class to experiment on as many ways as we could come up with to transform a flat 2D paper into a 3D form. Students came up with an amazing list of strategies to do just that, including: fold, twist, roll, bend, crumple, and use tabs, slots, connections, and overlapping. We learned that tape, scissors, and glue are helpful tools while getting paper to stay in that 3D Form! After discovering and experimenting with making 3D forms out of paper, we then took our learning to the next level. For our next work of art, we began a Winter Landscape Sculpture, made entirely out of paper! Students are building in three dimensions, and are being amazing problem solvers, in order to avoid making anything flat/2D. Students have made mountains, caves, animals, trees, frozen ponds, and so much more! We will be completing these sculptures after winter break, and are very excited to be building 3D works of art!

Students have experienced their first formal art critique during art class. We had already seen this work of art during the “Wit and Wisdom” lessons at the beginning of the school year, however we didn’t get an opportunity to learn about the artist, their life, their style, or the story behind the work. Looking at art, discussing the visual qualities of artworks, and learning about the history behind the work of art makes for a deeper understanding about that particular art, artist, and allows the students to have their own opinions and make personal connections to a work of art.

Learning how to look at art, and how to discuss art more deeply takes practice, and the students spent one whole art class during this past month using their artistic brains only, and not their artistic hands. We learned the process of responding to a work of art, called a formal art critique. The four steps include: 1. Describing 2. Analyzing 3. Interpreting and 4. Judging. We started with “What do you see?” and made quite a detailed list of descriptions while looking at all parts of the work, including very small details, colors, textures, and more! Analyzing and interpreting the work presents more challenging responses, and we will continue to improve on how to think about the artist's artistic process (how was it made) , intentions (why was it made), the message behind the work (what is it about), and why an artist might want to make a work of art like this. Thinking deeper doesn't mean you have an answer, but exploring possibilities and hearing others' thoughts helps to cultivate that deeper understanding and allows students to respect each other's different thoughts, feelings, and observations about the same work of art. Students had very different thoughts on what was happening in the work. Some felt peaceful ocean waves, while others felt impending doom, and our own feelings about a work of art can’t be wrong! Judging the work is the last part of an art critique, and allows a student to be empowered by having their own personal opinion as to what makes “good” art. That is a debatable topic, and we had a great conversation about it. We will be having 2 more formal art critiques this year, while continuing to expand students' knowledge and understanding about works of art from “Wit and Wisdom” being presented outside of the art room.

Congratulations to the following recipients of the December “Artist of the Month” Award! These students exhibit all of the characteristics of “cheetah pride” during every art class, and they take great care to make high quality works of art! These students will be receiving their awards during their art class on Monday!

Sofia Casal-Oleynek/ Madden Johnson (Pezzi)

Hunter Heine/ LottieAnn Bostic (Vigue)

Jackson Lindsay/ Meara St. George (Ryczek)

Annabelle Merklin/ Jase Fazzino (Lukeski)

Dear Memorial families,

I just wanted to thank each of you for sharing your children with me these past 5 years. I have truly enjoyed the moments as the school nurse, whether it is a hug, funny story or helping with an upset stomach or worry or an injury. I have learned so much from everyone and will miss helping the kids at Memorial as well as all of my amazing coworkers. It is not an official goodbye as I am moving up to be the nurse at Center school, so it is a “see you later”. I wish everyone a happy healthy holiday and look forward to seeing everyone again soon!

Nurse Katie

This year we will be treated to a long winter break, which is so exciting! A long break away from school doesn’t mean literacy activities have to stop. Here are some ideas to continue to support all of the great learning your child has done so far this year.

1. Engage in a Winter Reading Challenge with your family. Children and adults can read with their scarf on, read while sipping hot cocoa, or even read a cereal box!

2. Visit your local library for fun activities over winter break. Activities include ‘Bubbles and Beats’ and ‘Drop-In Card Making’. Registration is required! If an event is full, you can still cozy up with a good book.

3. Reorganize your Home Library: Use this extra time during winter break to rearrange your home library with your kids by author, color, title, or subject. This is the perfect opportunity to audit your current collection, revisit classic favorites, uncover new interests, pick out a few books for storytime, and reignite a love of reading in your kids!

When considering the number of absences your student has accrued, keep in mind that a student must be present for 195 minutes in order for the day to count! When bringing your student in late, or signing them out early if they have not been in school for a 195 minutes the day will be recorded as an absence.

Memorial School Attendance email:

memorial_attendance@easthamptonct.org * there is an _ between memorial and attendance!

Please Review This Important Information Below.

Students, parents, and community members have access to an anonymous tip line on the front page of the school district website to report self-concerns, mental health concerns of a friend, or concerns of violence. Simply click here or view on the website: https://www.easthamptonps.org/.

Email: jbauer@easthamptonct.org
Website: https://www.easthamptonps.org/o/memorial-school
Location: 20 Smith Street, East Hampton, CT, USA
Phone: 860-365-4020
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ehmemorialschool