Mary Hogan Family Newsletter
May 2, 2025
Dear Mary Hogan Families,
We had the 5th grade Exhibition on Thursday, and it was a highlight this week back from break. For the past 5 weeks, students in 5th grade have been researching and becomming more knowledgeable about their focus area. This week, their hard work was on display at Exhibition. We had a PACKED gym full of younger students, family members, and community who came to check out their learning. It was so joyful and and one grandparent said "it gave me so much hope." Way to go 5th graders!
On Saturday 5/3, we have a Green Up and Garden Celebration from 9-12 at Mary Hogan. There is a lot going on this morning, but we hope to see as many of you as can come. We will be greening up around Mary Hogan, getting our garden started, as well as installing a new timber frame that will become our garden shed. We hope you can come! Let us know HERE you're coming if you can so we have a headcount for food.
💙, Jen
This week was Joke Week at Mary Hogan. The goal of the week was to bring a little joy and levity to this week after break. And, students in all grades had a chance to learn and think about what makes a good joke - A joke is something said or done to make people laugh or feel good.
Students also talked about how jokes can connect people and bring them together. Making people laugh is fun, but some jokes hurt people's feelings - and those aren't jokes for school. Appropriate jokes are:
Fun for everyone
Comfortable for everyone
A way to connect and make friends
We celebrated the week with students sharing jokes in the morning and afternoon - and with a joke bulletin board. What jokes did your child come home sharing?
Two 5th graders' Exhibition project was about the benefits of having therapy dogs in schools - and how we might do this more at Mary Hogan. They connected with Therapy Dogs of Vermont, with the help of Miss Tina. Rasta and his person came in during their research and then came to Exhibition on Thursday. He was so popular among everyone who came to Exhibition and then he made a trip to a kindergarten classroom where he got more love and brought a lot of smiles!
Ms. Corrigan's class was out doing math in the hall this week. They needed a bigger bulletin board for their math display and just found a place that worked. The students modeled for anyone who passed how to be focused in a new place to learn as well as how they showed and shared their math learning. It was an awesome window into their thinking that was a model for others!
Students are always working to share their thinking and learning throughout the day. The moments when students are talking through how they arrived at an answer or are puzzling out why they spelled a word a certain way or reasoning through a hypothesis are so tender and not just for the student sharing the work. They are also amazing to watch as students practice being a communicator by listening carefully to what others are saying. This is just one image from this week of students being communicators.
