Kids on the Block

Middle school students from the Phoenix School in Salem presented a wonderful performance for our students, Kids on the Block is a puppet group that teaches children about disabilities. Each skit involved a child with a disability, meeting another child and discussing how they are the same and how they are different. After the skit, students asked the puppets interesting questions about making friends, what they wanted to do when they were grown up and which sports and activities they loved.

They helped us remember... anyone can do anything, just sometimes in a different way.

Although Mark has Cerebral Palsy he loves to play basketball and is a champion swimmer. He wears a helmet because he sometimes has seizures and his helmet protects him from getting hurt. Mark sometimes needs his friends to help him but he can do almost anything. Rinaldo has Down's Syndrome and told his friend that he needs extra time to learn information, but he loves hanging out with his friends.  He loves his pet snake, George and he wants to be a veterinarian one day.

GRIT

October and November so far have proven to be very busy and an exciting time in our classroom.
Please take a glimpse of how we show ...
                                          Guts     
                                          Resilience
                                          Innovation    
                                         Teamwork...  in our work!

Dr. O'Mara shared a passage from his book to help us understand how descriptive writing helps the reader "visualize" or see the action in a story.  We practiced using visualization in our own writing and we learned how important it is to add strong descriptions to make our writing easier to "see."

Kristina is exuberant as we practiced our song Never Give Up by Bruno Mars!

All second graders learned the words to Never Give Up by Bruno Mars and practiced, practiced and practiced until we knew the words by heart, that took RESILIENCE.  Once we felt comfortable with the lyrics we sang them in front of the whole school during an All-School Assembly to show we had GUTS and demonstrated TEAMWORK!  We were very proud of our INNOVATIVE idea to show we use GRIT at Steward School.

Great TEAMWORK boys and girls!

The children worked hard and enjoyed every moment of our recent Walk-a-thon.  We walked around the playground many times, and as you can see we felt proud for each stamp we received. Our school earned five extra minutes of recess and some new equipment for our playground.  A special thank you to the Playground Committee for supporting our school, your idea or INNOVATION helped us to raise money for the playground and we love the new soccer balls, buckets of chalk, kick balls and jump ropes that were graciously donated to Steward School.

We showed resilience to find every single error...we never gave up!

Working as a team to show our best thinking.

It takes resilience to find all the errors on these sentence strips, but working together as team makes it so much easier.  We focused on capitalization rules and using our most British voice stated..."It is PROPER to capitalize all PROPER NOUNS."

Using RAz Kids is an INNOVATIVE idea to practice using our comprehension strategies.

We love using RAZ Kids and the iPads are so much fun to use as we read both fiction and nonfiction texts.  Many students brought in their own headphones, it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop as they selected reading passages at their reading level, answered comprehension questions and even recorded their own voices as they read each book.

MacLean and Janey demonstrated persistence and RESILIENCE as they pounded their leaves.

We BLASTED all the chlorophyll from the chloroplast cells in the underside of our leaves, we demonstrated TEAMWORK and RESILIENCE, but are so proud of our hard work.  We shared our INNOVATIVE idea to prove that even though the autumn leaves had changed color, their food or chlorophyll was still green.

Timmy and Ben work to test their hypothesis.

Great TEAMWORK ladies, especially on a blustery fall day.

Great TEAMWORK and GUTS Vowel Super Heroes!

We have GRIT!

We have all earned our GRIT feathers...our headdresses are so colorful!