New Gym!

Students visited the new gym last week for presentation on pedestrian safety.

Hello!  I hope you enjoyed the mid-winter break!  The students were really rested and focused for today’s lessons.

New Gym
The new A2STEAM @ Northside gym is open!  Student began using it today.  Remember, all students will need gym shoes in order to keep the new gym floor looking amazing.  The goal is for students to bring a set of shoes specifically for the gym, not shoes that they wore outside that day.  You can leave the shoes here at school if you wish.

Box Tops for Education
We are having a school-wide Box Tops For Education collection.  If you find any box top cut-outs on your groceries please bring them in.  If possible put them in a plastic bag and write "Mr. Luxon, Room K-3” on the outside.  There is a big school wide push to get them in this week if you have them.

A2STEAM Used Book Sale
As I wrote last week, this year at A2 STEAM we will be having our first-ever Used Book Sale in conjunction with the Heritage Festival on Saturday, March 12! Please start gathering your used books and other materials to ready them for donation! The Media Center will begin accepting donations to the sale Wednesday, February 24th through Tuesday, March 8th.  For more information on what donations we are accepting and how you can volunteer please check out this flyer.

Valentine’s Day Cards
Thank you so much for helping your children create these.  All of the students really enjoyed exchanging them.

District Wide STEAM Expo
I sent some emails about this already, but I wanted to make sure the message gets out to everyone: The Ann Arbor School District is hosting a district wide STEAM Expo at the Pioneer High School Annex on Wednesday, February 24th from 6PM to 8PM.  The kindergarten team wanted to showcase some of our weather work from our November Expo. I have two Room K-3 students who are going to go to the Expo to help present what we learned about clouds, our anemometer, and some of our other work.  Now that the mid-winter break is behind us, are there any other families that would be interested in attending a portion of the night?  I will be there to you set up.

Curriculum Overview
Science - We are getting ready for our next Expo!  During this unit we will study how plant and animals adapt to an change change their environment.  We are starting this week, learning about plants, plant parts, and plant needs.

Math - This week we will celebrate the 100th day of school and with that practice counting and grouping quantities by tens.  We will also review addition and introduce subtraction and the subtraction symbol.

Literacy - As we begin our next Project Based Learning unit on plants we will be reading about plants and taking a close look at the features of non-fiction books like headings, captions, a table of contents, an index, etc.

Writing - This week students will be writing about what we have learned about plants.

Word Study - Identifying the vowel sounds found in simple words.  This week we will compare the short o and short e sounds as well as the short o and short u sounds.

The new gym has our school mascot painted in the center.