DCS Ravens' Report

October 4th-Walk to School-

October 7th-11th-ConVal's NH Tackles Hunger Food Drive-food collection in the DCS Lobby

October 9th-Open House and Harvest Supper 5:30-7:00pm please park at Yankee and take bus to DCS, change in date.

October 15th-School Picture Day

October 25th-Community Lunch 12pm, please bring your lunch and join us

October 31st-Halloween parade-please no masks or weapons.

Hello DCS families, there has been so much going on this week! We are just about finished with the fall benchmark assessments. We now are working on developing small groups and the instructional focus for those groups. Parents will be informed if their student is part of an intervention group and what the goal of that time will be. We also had guest readers (Dublin resident and author Rebecca Smith-Allen and parent Brittney Redler), integrated Art work with Jeannie Connolly, Cornucopia, and other classroom activities to deepen our students' understanding and experience.

We are busy planning for the Open House/Harvest Supper on October 9th from 5:30-7pm. The PTO has kindly put together a sign up for the potluck supper. https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0F4BACAB2BAAFBCE9-51634404-harvest

This upcoming Friday we will walk to school from the Dublin General Store. This is a lovely tradition which we participate in both in the Fall and Spring. Feel free to join us for the walk up to school.

Yesterday's Friday lunch included our first Community Lunch with about 40 guests. Members of the SAU staff joined us as well. I am aware that many parents cannot attend due to work constraints, but we do invite those that are able to join us on the last Friday of the month at 12pm. Our week ended with a Whole School Assembly (picture below) at which we recognize birthdays, greet each other, and play an activity together. We also celebrate the Miss Emily Award. Emily Brnger, longtime educator at DCS was the most kind and caring person I have known. We honor her memory with the award that recognizes a student that has demonstrated those traits which Emily possessed. Ending our week with the meeting is an important part of our community. I hope you all have some time to enjoy this lovely day and weekend, Nicole

Hi! My name is Deb Lang. I live in Temple, NH with my husband, Tom, and two beautiful children, Audrey(19), Sam(17), and happy dog, Marla. This is my 13th year at DCS and this year I'm teaching kindergarten. Over the years I've taught kindergarten, first, second and third grade, directed an after school program and taught preschool when my children were young. When I'm not teaching, I enjoy reading, watching movies, theater, dance, yoga and spending time on the water boating and swimming. I love our small school and the relationships I have with families and colleagues. It's incredibly special to teach all of the siblings in a family and watch them grow up! Fun fact: this is a picture of me in first grade!

Mrs. Lang's family

DCS has a strong connection to our community, and we continue to explore ways to connect in different meaningful ways. This year we invite members of our community to join us for lunch on the last Friday of the Month from 12:00-12:30pm. After lunch from 12:30-1 pm, I offer the opportunity to engage in conversation. I look forward to seeing you on September 27th for our first lunch.

Kindergarteners have learned the letters a,m,s and t....just enough letters to begin building words! Students repeat the word I say and then "tap it out" using their fingers to isolate and identify how many sounds are in the word. Then, we use magnetic letters to build the word. Very exciting! We also began talking about the difference between vowels and consonants.

It is so wonderful to watch kindergarteners getting their hands dirty in the garden and preparing salad! They've investigated insects (good and bad) in the garden and learned about edible plant parts. Today they harvested potatoes that we'll prepare for the Harvest Feast the night of Open House.

In math, students have learned to count accurately using 1:1 correspondence. I am so proud of how well they work in pairs using math centers and explaining to each other their math thinking.

Beginning next week, kindergarteners will begin bringing home books to read with you at home. Keep an eye out for an email with more information on Monday. Happy reading!

Second grade has been hopping! We are so lucky to have Ms.Jeannie Connolly from Arts Integration come and make self-portrait banners with first and second-graders. They are painted and are so bright and cheery hanging in our classroom! Come take a peek! The students have also been earning money for excellent behavior and doing their work. We've been counting change and making trades, and today was our first store. The students loved spending their hard-earned money. We have been learning about picture and bar graphs in math and practicing making both. We are also learning about goods and services and producers and consumers in Social Studies. Stay tuned for activities that go along with this unit! The students have been so involved in learning!

The children are getting into the rhythm and flow of being part of our third grade classroom community. For our social/emotional learning, with the Zones of Regulation Curriculum, the students learned about expected behaviors vs. unexpected ones, along with the differences between comfortable and uncomfortable thoughts, through group discussions and activities. For Language Arts, the children continue to read Forest Secrets, discussing and anticipating the mystery of the fairy houses. The children reviewed what a topic sentence is and practiced writing them. Our grammar study topic is verbs, focusing on action verbs. For Science, we are in our weather unit and concentrated on clouds last week. The students listened to Tomie DePaula’s story - The Cloud Book, and then went outside with “cloud finders” to identify the different clouds. Then, with Mystery Science, the “students learned how to predict the weather by observing clouds and their changes. This week, the students explored seasonal weather conditions across different regions. They investigated how weather patterns can be used to predict future weather.

The children love spending time in the garden with Cornucopia, learning about the different parts of plants that we eat, harvesting and eating vegetables, and helping to prepare the gardens for winter.

4th/5th Grades Language Arts -

The class continues to enjoy our class book, Forest Secrets, focusing on vocabulary, making predictions, and working on fluency. We have started Writing by thinking about and practicing expanding sentences using more intentional details. The practice correlates well with our grammar review. This week, we focused on verbs - action, helping, and linking. Ask your child about our read-aloud, Fish in a Tree. Please note their September reading homework is due on Monday.

As September nears an end, the 4th and 5th graders have been working on finding creative ways to grow our skills. We have focused on buoyancy in Science but testing our understanding floating an orange and building tin foil boats to make vessels that were sturdy and able to float blocks. The highest number of held was a tie with 60 blocks!

Math classes were full of NWEAs, math centers and a mathematical piece of art.

If you are interested in ordering some DCS swag for your student(s), please use this link. We will be providing new students with a DCS T-in the near future. https://dublinravens.deco-apparel.com/

We know how important attendance is to student success at school. There are District Policies and procedures that guide responsibility with regard to attendance. As part of this, I monitor absences and last year DCS had a large number of students with more than average absences. Many of the absences are due to illness over which there is little control. Please consider taking family vacations when school is not in session. Thank you for your help with reducing the high number of absences at DCS.

Did you know that DCS has been recycling clean plastic bags since 2022? Even more exciting is that we have recycled 683 pounds of plastic since this program started! That is about the same as a zebra, motorcycle, or baby grand piano weighs! That is amazing! Thanks so much to Mrs. Hopkins for bringing this program to DCS! Please bring clean plastic grocery bags, bread bags, or pellet bags to school.

DCS also collects aluminum tabs to be donated to Shriners Hospital which designs and creates prosthetics. Please bring your aluminum tabs to DCS, there is a collection container in the lobby.

Email: npease@conval.edu
Website: dcs.conval.edu
Location: 1177 Main Street, Dublin, NH, USA
Phone: 603-563-8332