Mrs. V's Blog |
Mrs. V's Blog |
My last post was almost four months ago. I don't know how so much time went by so quickly. I feel like we just were talking about expectations and here I'm not talking about saying goodbye. It's been a very busy year and I am so grateful for the wonderful children you have sent me.
A few highlights of our year include joining in a wave of acts of kindness in our middle school, where we dropped of gifts to fifth grade and asked them to pass it along to more classrooms in the building. We also succeeded in raising enough funds through a coin drive, to support two families during the holiday gift drive. We were amazing in our lip sync performance of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." We laughed, played, had ice cream, took pictures, and just enjoyed being together. Something I'm most proud of though, is how my students connected to their preschool buddies. There is nothing more special than seeing students shine in a new and different light. They were leaders, role models, and great playmates for their preschool buddies. The sixth graders loved it so much that they have asked to continue to do this into 7th grade. I have passed their names and their buddies on to the Peer Mentoring Club in hopes that they are able to connect again next year. I hope that these relationships continue to flourish as the buddies move onto Kindergarten. At the end of each year, I have the most fun looking back and reflecting on all of the things we learned and experienced in 6th grade. My favorite thing to do is to compile all of these memories into a slideshow for kids. Below is the link to the slideshow I made for students, please take the time to watch with your student. It's long, but there are so many great things we did this year and they should all be celebrated. The link is below! Lastly, please know I've enjoyed each and every student in my TA. I'm grateful to have and get to know each one. I have no doubt that they are moving on to 7th grade ready to take on new challenges. I just hope they will stop back in and say hi! Happy summer, and thanks for sending me awesome kids!
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This week, students took over CPR, our morning circle. Students signed up last week to run a meeting with a partner. They had to plan and prepare a morning message, greeting, seating arrangement, share, and activity. On top of planning the meeting, they also need to run the meeting with little to no adult help/interruptions. So far this week, Asher & Jacob, Aidan & Brendan and Ella & Eva, have led our meetings. Tomorrow Grace & Alyssa will run our meeting. It's been a lot of fun seeing what the kids come up with for greetings and games. Ella and Eva brought a new game to our class today, called Curtain Call, that was super fun! You can see pictures from the game on Instagram. Tomorrow, Grace and Alyssa are bringing us a new number game that will be challenging and fun. It's really great to see kids stepping up into these leadership roles and taking over an element of our classroom. They are building community and having fun while doing it. Tomorrow we will take time to sign up for next week's meetings, and I already have many kids who are asking to do it! Keep checking out our Instagram to see pictures of what's happening in our room! Hello Parents, On April 4th, we will have our second round of conferences. Attached is a sign up sheet. Please enter your name and your child's name next to a time that works for you. Your child should be coming to the conference with you, as this will be student-led, just like in the fall. It's another chance to check on your students' progress toward their goals they made in the beginning of the year. Conferences are not mandatory, so if this doesn't work for you, please know that we can email or chat at anytime. Just let me know what you need. If you have any questions, please let me know! Sign up For Conferences Here! Below are some of the many pics we took on Lip Sync day, enjoy!Our fourth annual Lip Sync Battle is coming up in February. We have been working all week to pick a song and we had narrowed it down to two choices. Sadly, those two songs have already been picked by other classes. This year we have to choose a song that has the word SUN in it. The word sun does not have to be in the title, it can be anywhere in the song. Unfortunately we've spent a week trying to choose and now cannot use those songs. We are asking for some help. If you have any suggestions of songs with the word sun in them, please send them our way. We have looked at every curated list on the internet, and a lot of them have already been chosen. If you have a fun, upbeat choice, you can comment on this post or send them to my email. Any help would be greatly appreciated. If you are new to Barre Town this year, you may not know what the Lip Sync battle is. Below are some links to our past performances. We have a lot of fun with this event, and it's a great team building activity for TA. Please send us some fun suggestions! Thanks! Hello TA Families!
It has been awhile since I last posted, and I wanted to send you a quick update. Last week we spent a lot of time working on our door decorations. The kids decided on a Charlie Brown theme and went to town. They planned, created, and drew all of the characters independently, with no help from me! It was awesome to see their creative talents shine through in this group project. Some students were leaders, others were the creative/artistic minds behind the work, and some just enjoyed helping. Students also enjoyed decorating our door so much, they decorated Mr. Grigg's & Mrs. Benson's door, and created snowflakes for Ms. Lovell's room. I am super proud of the work they did. Tomorrow we'll walk around the rest of the building to see all of the other directions! Pictures of ours are below. Students also got to visit preschool again yesterday. We weren't there for very long, but preschool performed a quick play for us and did a great job, our kids were a fantastic audience. They then got to do their favorite thing they do with preschool... PLAY! There were many smiles and happy moods when leaving the school yesterday afternoon. I always love to see how excited our preschool friends are when we visit. They are thoroughly enjoying each of your children, and love to play with their "big kid" friends. Some students have been asking if they can bring in treats tomorrow. I am fine with that, they can if they want. They do NOT have to. There are 22 students in the class, if you are sending something in. I hope you all have a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season. We got to go outside and play with our preschool buddies today. It was great to see that so many 6th graders were prepared with snow gear. Preschool has a very strict rule that all students must have all of the proper gear to play outside. We have to adhere to their rules when we are with them. Students who did not bring snow pants, mittens, jackets, and gloves, stayed inside with Mrs. Allen's class.
I wanted to share photos here because I can't post them all on Instagram. We had a ball. The sixth graders are being so great with the younger students. They are helpful and they truly play and enjoy the preschoolers' company. It's been so much fun watching these relationships develop! Please take a look at all the pics from our fun in the snow! There will be videos and more posted on Instagram tonight! Thanks to all of you that sent in coins and containers for our annual coin drive. It was a huge success. In just two short weeks we raised a total of $776.00! We had 19 TAs contribute money to our drive. Nine of those TAs contributed more than $30.00! But, we have to have some winners. In fifth and 6th grades, our winner was Mrs. Ather's TA with a total of $117.53 raised! Not only were they the winners for 5/6, but they brought in the most money out of all the 19 TAs that participated! In 7th and 8th grade, Mr. Leonards TA won with a total of $66.75! All of this money will be split between two families that Mrs. Allen and our TAs will be sponsoring for our holiday gift drive . What great work! In other news, we will be heading back to preschool tomorrow. Last week's play session was a hit. The adults in the room couldn't believe all of the cooperation, collaboration, creativity, and FUN that was happening in the room. It was awesome to see that in children with such a large age gap! This week we'll be heading back and writing stories with our buddies. Our students and Mrs. LaPerle's preschool students are really looking forward to it! Mrs. LaPerle is also on Instagram and posts photos of our buddy times. If you'd like to follow her she's @mrslaperlespreschool , check out all of the awesome things happening in her room! Ask your students about our time in preschool tomorrow afternoon. Today we got to meet our preschool buddies in Mrs. LaPerle's classroom. I have never seen so many smiles in one room! The sixth graders were wonderful with our new friends and the preschoolers instantly attached to them. The sixth graders conducted themselves in such a way that the kids were comfortable with them and happy to have them in their space. The preschoolers were showing them the room, playing blocks, reading, playing in the kitchen, and so much more. There was not a grumpy or unhappy person when we left the room today! It was amazing. We will officially start visiting them next week on a weekly basis. Be sure to ask your student about this fun experience today. Also, check out the pics on Instagram! So many smiles! We are already looking forward to the next visit!
In other news, our coin drive has started off pretty slow. We are in need of more containers so that all TAs can collect coins in their room. If you have any recycling to contribute, please send it in! Next week our TA and Mrs. Allen's TA will host our annual coin drive. The drive will start next week and run through November 2nd. The money we raise helps support the Holiday gift drive. In years past we have raised over $800 at a time to support the drive! All of the money raised goes to buy gifts for multiple families that are part of our Barre Town Community. We will need jars (old milk jugs, glass jars, etc) to pass out to all of the middle school TAs. We will collect and count the coins at the end of each week to keep a running total! If you have any jars/containers you can donate to the cause, please send them in! Also- if you want to send in spare change, that would be wonderful!
Our Random act of kindness project will be finished and delivered tomorrow to the fifth grade. Ask your students about these! They are super cute and we hope to make the 5th graders smile! Thanks to everyone who sent in candy to help us with this! We have enough candy to also send a fun gift to our new PreSchool buddies from Mrs. LaPerle's classroom. We will be starting to buddy up with PreK in quarter two! Maybe you saw the cute Don't forget, Flannel Friday and our Hike tomorrow! A couple of weeks ago, an 8th grade TA handed out flowers to all of the classrooms in the middle school as a random act of kindness. Our discussion this week in TA focused on how we could do something similar for students in our middle school. Our TA had a great discussion on neat ways to spread kindness, our ideas were as complex as remote controlled cards carrying surprise gifts to each classroom, all the way to as simple as sending notes to each TA. Today we narrowed down our ideas into more feasible possibilities. The kids came up with a creative way to spread kindness to our 5th graders. Students decided that they wanted to welcome 5th graders to the middle school. They thought it would be cute to create notes for each 5th grade student that "officially" welcomed them to middle school with cute puns and candy. So out of this "punny" conversation, came the idea to "O Fish ally" welcome kids to middle school with Swedish Fish, and to let them know they are all "Smarties" with smarties candy. We would like to create notes with these candies for every 5th grader, and the kids thought it would be resourceful if each member of our TA tried to bring in either Smarties or Swedish Fish. This is not a requirement, but if your family could help us with this project, that'd be awesome. If you're out grocery shopping this weekend or running errands, please consider picking up a package of Smarties or Swedish Fish (individually Halloween type, wrapped packages, NOT large bags). If you are able to do so, please send me an email to let me know! If we get enough supplies, we will be starting to create the notes on Monday as a TA project. If you have a 5th grader, or 5th grade family members, please keep this quiet, we'd like it to be a surprise! Thanks for your help in this! We are hoping that our act of kindness will inspire 5th graders to pass it along to someone else in the middle school. |
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