Brookside Updates

Once again, many thanks to the PTA and 5th grade committee for the fabulous Trunk or Treat and spooky Ghost Town. We also appreciated the community visitors and special trucks from Joe's Garage and the Town of Binghamton!

Our Student Council is already busy at work here at Brookside. Representatives participated in a Building Leadership Team meeting. They also created a spooky forest trunk for Trunk or Treat. The group will also be leading our Veterans Day Celebration on November 10th.

**We hope to see you this Thursday 11/5 for Math Night! In addition to math games with materials to take home, we will have prizes, raffles, and a photo booth! Math games will be in the cafeteria from 5:30-6:30, then the Book Fair will be in the library from 6:30-7:00.

**We are in the last stages of planning for our Veterans Day Celebration. If you are a veteran or have a veteran in your family or community that would like to attend our celebration, please fill out this form by Thurs. 11/5: https://forms.gle/aDHbYDvpGaaDJp1M9

Important Dates:

• Wed-Thurs. 11/4-11/5: PTA Scholastic Book Fair
• Thurs. 11/5 - Math Night & Book Fair, 5:30-7:00 PM
• Tues. 11/10 - Veterans Day Assembly, 9:30 AM
• Wed. 11/11 - NO SCHOOL, Veterans Day
• Tues. 11/24 - 12:00 Dismissal; Parent-Teacher Conferences
• Wed. 11/25-Fri. 11/27 - NO SCHOOL

Wed/Thurs, 11/4 and 11/5 - Scholastic Book Fair during school. To create an eWallet for your student to shop or to donate to help other students purchase books visit: Book Fair Homepage

Thursday, 11/5 - Book Fair open after Math Night 6:30-7pm

Friday, 11/6 - Festival of Lights ticket orders due

Friday, 11/20 - 5th Grade Pasta Fest, Brookside Cafeteria - order forms will come home soon.

THANK YOU to everyone who participated in the Meadow Farms fundraiser; it was a huge success and will help bring events and activities to our Brookside students throughout the year! And a big THANKS to everyone who hosted a trunk for Trunk or Treat - this event would not be possible without YOU!!

Chess Club - the PTA is looking into starting an after school Chess Club at Brookside for all grade and skill levels. If this is something your student would be interested in, please fill out this interest form to help us plan:

Chess Club Interest Form

For more information, contact your primary care provider or the Broome County Health Dept: https://broomecountyny.gov/hd/

Immunization Clinics: 607-778-2839

Vaccines are also readily available at Wegmans, CVS, Walgreens, etc.

Ms. Simpson's classes have been working on a soccer unit. They have been practicing dribbling the ball and just started working on passing. At the beginning of the unit, students learned the history of soccer.

October has also been full of movement, skill-building, teamwork, and plenty of fun in Mrs. Bidwell's PE classes!

Our 2nd graders have been working on their overhand throwing and catching skills, focusing on accuracy, control, and making successful catches. Students in grades 3–5 have been working through our football unit, developing their throwing and catching skills as they get ready to put those skills into action with some flag football games!

Students in grades 2–5 also enjoyed a variety of target games, with one clear favorite taking center stage – BATTLESHIP! It was a big hit, combining teamwork, strategy, and accuracy.

We wrapped up the month with a couple of days of fall and Halloween-themed activities! From Ghostbuster Tag and the Pumpkin Patch Relay to The Great Yarn Ball Challenge, students had a great time being active, working together, and enjoying some seasonal fun.

We are off to a great start in Music!

You should have received a paper from your child last month concerning music concepts that will be taught and graded for this school year. If you need another form, send me an email request.

If your child is in the 4th and 5th grade Chorus, our first concert will be on Dec. 8th at 6:00pm. More information concerning this concert will be coming out before Thanksgiving Break. Also, if your child has a dance part in this year’s chorus production, they should have received a morning rehearsal schedule. Make sure you receive that since they may not miss more than 2 rehearsals. I will be putting reminders for rehearsals on ParentSquare.

Thank you for your help and support with your child’s music education and look forward to a wonderful school year!

Mrs. Kelly Dyson

kdyson@svsabers.org

In art we have switched over from lines and are looking at shading/light to dark. UPK has worked on pumpkin paintings and spooky spider webs with oil pastels and paint. In Kindergarten, we turned markers into paint with their stacked silly pumpkins. In 1st grade we are looking at Yayoi Kusama and her polka dotted pumpkins. 2nd grade is working on a chalk pastel pumpkin under the moonlight inspired by the Great Pumpkin. 3rd grade is zooming in on their pumpkins with their close up view in oil pastels. They are layering their colors to have a full range of values in their piece. 4th grade is showing off their shading skills with chalk pastels and their more realistic pumpkins. Lastly, 5th grade practiced shading pumpkins with their pencils and soon will be using paint to mix tints and shades for their value scale pumpkins. Art can be a little messy so if you are worried about clothes, you can send your artist in with an apron or old tshirt!

October was a fantastic month for spooky writing! We have been working hard learning about nouns and adjectives! We have used our learning to help write class Halloween stories! We also wrote silly Halloween sentences to describe pictures and characters from stories we have read in groups!

Congratulations to Anthony Marcello, our Student of the Month for Courage!

Students in Mrs. Harlow's class have been learning about map skills through project-based learning. They made their own pirate maps where they had to write directions to their hidden treasure. They then read and followed directions around the school to find treasures!

Congratulations to Alison Rossi, our Student of the Month for Courage!

Our classroom has been bursting with pumpkin and spooky fun this month!

We’ve been busy exploring all things pumpkins! What’s inside a pumpkin? Will it sink or float? Our little scientists loved making predictions, investigating, and discovering the answers! We even worked on strengthening our fine motor muscles by hammering golf tees into pumpkins. What a hit that was!

Halloween excitement has been in full swing, too! We’ve been busy creating silly skeletons, beautiful bats, and spooky (but friendly!) ghosts. All of these fun projects give our little learners wonderful opportunities to practice cutting, gluing, and strengthening those tiny fingers! Some of our favorite stories this month have been Inside a House That Is Haunted by Alyssa Satin Capucilli, Go Away, Big Green Monster! by Ed Emberley, and Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson. There’s nothing better than hearing the children join in with giggles, silly voices, and sound effects during storytime!

Our ABC Bootcamp adventure is going strong! We are already more than halfway through the alphabet! Each day, we’ve been learning new letters, practicing their sounds, and working on letter recognition and formation. It has been so exciting to watch the children grow in confidence and take pride in all they are learning. We are so proud of our little alphabet experts!

October has certainly been filled with lots of learning, laughter, and a little Halloween magic!

As the weather turns chillier, thank you for sending your children to school in warm, cozy clothing. Please remember to label hats, gloves, and other cold-weather gear so everything finds its way back home!

Thank you, as always, for your wonderful support and for helping make our classroom such a special place to learn and grow. We are so lucky to share these sweet preschool moments with your children!

A big round of applause for our wonderful UPK Students of the Month! We are so proud of these little learners for showing what it means to be kind, responsible, and courageous!

October – Courage

A big cheer for Paisley Martin and Tripp Willis from Mrs. Wolf’s class, and Amelia Sprouse and Camilla Harmon from Mrs. Tokos’ class for showing courage!

It has been a busy and exciting time in our kindergarten classrooms! In phonics, our readers have been hard at work learning the letters and sounds for m, t, a, s, b, i, f, g and h. We are putting those sounds together to blend and read simple CVC words like sat, big, and fit! During interactive read-alouds, we’ve explored wonderful stories about courage, respect, the five senses, fire safety, butterflies, and pumpkins. To build strong reading comprehension skills, we’ve had rich classroom discussions about story elements—identifying key characters, settings, problems, and solutions. Please reinforce these skills at home by reading and discussing stories together! We have sent home a school-year reading bag containing books that feature the letters and sounds we’ve learned so far. We will continue adding new books to the bag throughout the year, so please take time to practice reading these books together at home!

Congratulations to our Students of the Month for Courage:

Tkach: Liam Franks & Blaire Gow

Flagg: Michael McCrone III & Isabella Clover

Parkison: Lucas Littrell & Lucy Echorst

1st Graders are working hard in developing their literacy skills with our new program this year, Magnetic Literacy. It offers a structured, Science of Reading-aligned approach tailored to help our students build core reading, writing, and critical-thinking skills. In providing clear, step-by-step instruction in phonological awareness, letter-sound relationships, spelling patterns (encoding), and word analysis students are able to sound out words with confidence.

The focus so far has been on decoding CVC words. Decoding words is the process of converting written words into spoken sounds by using knowledge of letter-sound relationships to pronounce them. It involves breaking a word down into its individual sounds, blending them together, and recognizing the word.

CVC stands for consonant-vowel-consonant, and CVC words are three-letter words that follow this pattern, such as "cat," "dog," and "sun". These words are fundamental for early readers because they are simple, one-syllable words that are easy to decode (sound out) by blending the sounds of each letter together (see image below).

This month we would like to recognize some students for showing COURAGE in and out of the classroom. They work hard even when things can be “tricky”, never give up and are not afraid to try new things ! We are very proud of them. Way to go!

Quinn Webb

Piper Simon

Talia Parsons

Ross Cacialli

Alexzander Egan

Payton Galusha

We finished our unit on Communities and are moving on! Students will explore how artists share feelings and ideas through artwork, building reading comprehension, vocabulary, and discussion skills.

Please continue reading the phonics readers sent home in your child's folder. Just 10–15 minutes each night helps build fluency, accuracy, and reading confidence!

Students of the Month:

Congratulations to our Students of the Month for demonstrating Courage! We are so proud of them for trying new things and taking on new challenges.

King: Chloe Webb, Braxton Kocak, Lorenzo DeRitis

Chapman: Camden Schaeffer, Hudson Neal, Rowan Divis

Gaffney: Namirah Rahman, Marvin Ward, Talia Griffin

Our third graders are diving into their new Literacy program, exploring "Traditional Stories" and why we continue to read them today! We are discovering how characters learn important life lessons and how their actions, thoughts, and feelings help us understand what motivates them to make certain choices. Through reading and discussion, students are learning to look beyond what happens in a story to uncover the deeper meaning and lessons that these timeless tales have to offer!

October Students of the Month for Courage:

Giblin: Esther Inman, Julian Millard

Herceg: Leo Hartman, Arianna Bismark

McPherson: Lucas Byce, Rowan Burns

There may not be traditional homework, but reading should be a regular routine at home. Children who read at least four times per week outside of school are twice as likely to score in the top 25% on all reading assessments.

At school, students are immersed in reading throughout the day. In ELA class, they read grade-level texts and focus on developing specific reading skills. During WIN time, students work with texts tailored to their individual reading levels to support targeted growth.

Reading doesn’t end there! Over the past few weeks, students have been connecting science readings to real-world demonstrations as they investigate how weathering, erosion, and deposition change Earth's surface. Even in Math, reading is essential as students tackle multi-step word problems.

Our school library is filled with engaging books, and we encourage you to continue reading with your children at home. It's a wonderful way to connect, support their learning, and foster a lifelong love of reading.

Thank you for all that you do and keep up the great reading!

Congratulations to our Students of the Month for “Courage!”

Holden Cuvelier, Luke Vaughan, Evelina DePersiis,

Owen Hadlick, Ethan Root, and Avaleen Kellogg

In 5th grade reading, we have been working on strengthening our reading skills through a variety of activities, including independent reading, reading novels, and listening to read-alouds. Students are practicing important comprehension strategies such as making inferences, identifying character traits, determining themes, and using text evidence to support their thinking. Through our class novels and read-alouds, we are exploring characters, discussing important events, making connections, and sharing our ideas with others. We will continue to build our reading fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, and love of reading throughout the year!

5th Grade Students of the Month for Courage:

Timothy Armstrong, Jayce Fish, Ethan Rogers, Natalina Chiarot, Nicole Kane, Jayce McBride , Lillian Kane, Alyssia Millard, Matthew Lisi