Hello Families and Happy Back to School!!

It's been so nice to welcome the students back to Endeavor as 5th graders this week!  It's great to see them all again and have time to check in about their summer adventures.  How lucky we are to get to be together for a 2nd year!  We also get to welcome 2 new classmates this year: Lexi and Kat (Kassidy)!!

One of the focuses of the entire school this year is to strengthen our community through a clear set of schoolwide expectations.  The 3 main expectations of SCS are: Be Safe, Be Respectful, and Be Responsible.  These expectations are posted throughout the school and are to be followed in all school related settings.  It's been great to see the entire school work together on these!  We've been taking time to review what this means throughout the various places we visit each school day.  

Additionally, we've been focusing on Mindfulness as a class! This work will nicely tie into our discussions/work with Habits of Mind and Growth Mindset.  We're learning poses and breathing techniques that can help us calm down and focus, and also ones that energize us!  I plan to integrate at least 3-5 mindful minutes into our schedule daily this year.  I hope you hear about this at home, and I am quite confident students will learn from this.  What a great way to help students manage impulsivity, practice self control, be reflective, practice positive self talk, and learn how to persevere through tough moments! 

We've already started our first Science unit which is an Ecology unit focused on our local Watershed.  So far, we're just reflecting on and practicing what we know make good scientific observations and illustrations.  We're taking advantage of the great gardens here at SCS to do this! :)

I'm trying to use technology more frequently this year as a way to keep parents informed of our daily and weekly learning. I got an Ipad for students to use throughout the day to document our lessons, activities, and learning! I hope this means our blog page gets updated more regularly, but I also created a twitter account that I hope to have students post to throughout the day.  You can follow me (us really) at Mrs. Crowther (@crowther_mrs).  I also hope to have students do a weekly reflection on their See Saw account each week.  Stay tuned for more info on these digital tools or just check them out and see how we're doing. :)

Blog page:  http://shelburneendeavor4.blogspot.com/

Twitter Link:  https://twitter.com/crowther_mrs

See Saw:  https://app.seesaw.me/#/class/class.ba8434fd-85da-472f-8389-547a9cbbdb62

And a few final calls for help before I finish...

1.  Please remember to send (or have your child do it) photos with summer highlights to your child's school email account (firstnamelastname@cssu.org).  They'll need them by Monday at the latest. 

2.  If you have any old magazines laying around at home that students could cut out, please send them in on Monday also.  We'll need them for an art project we're doing next week. 

3.  We will also need some mesh fruit bags to make "Leaf Packs" for our ecology unit.  (like the kind a "bag" of oranges comes in - I know Trader Joes sells some produce in them...)  If you have any at home, please collect them and send them in. We'll need them the week after Labor Day. 

4.  We'll need a few chaperones for our October field trips.  We have a walking field trip the week of the 5th that we'll need  2 adults for, and another to Shelburne Farms on the 21st that we will need 4 adults for.  Let me know if you'd like to join us for either of these!

OK.  That's enough for now!  Don't want to overwhelm you.  I'll be in touch next week, and please don't hesitate to ask questions if you have them.

Thank you for sharing your kids with me!!

Cara :)