Sturgeon in the Classroom Coming Soon

Hey Parents, this week I located a fish tank, cleaned it out, and it’s placed in the classroom.  Our Endangered Species Permit is hung on the glass outside our door.   If you would still like to make a donation towards the project you can either write a check to Quincy Elementary with Sturgeon Project in the memo line or deliver cash to the front office.  We have created an account through the school and I will be needed some supplies through the school year.  Thanks again for any and all donations, it really helps and the Quincy Community has always been so generous.  We appreciate all your support!   We should receive our Sturgeon sometime in October.

The students are doing a good job on our weekly reading logs.  Please re-enforce the 4 details for 4th grade with them and capital letters with punctuation. 

 We will begin our invasive species projects  this week.  We will have a portion of the project here at school and an at home portion.   We will start next week and set-up a due date for approximately 2 weeks. 

Language Arts:

Narrative Reading and Writing:  We will continue with our Daily 5 that incorporates multiple texts from our reading series, social studies and science.

Math:

Unit  1 Place Value and Multi-digit Addition and Subtraction

TEST this WEEK Unit 1!  Most  likely Wed. or Thurs.

Science:

Organisms in Our Environment

Social Studies:

Geography

P.J. Hoffmaster State Park

Once again our students loved their trip to P.J. Hoffmaster State Park last week.  Hoffmaster kicks off our studies of organisms in our environment, ecosystems, and habitats.  The Great Lakes Dune Ecosystem is very rare and fragile.  Scientists come from all over the world to study how this complex and unique ecosystem operates.  As always the hog-nosed snake and and other animals are a highlight for the kids in the Genevieve Gillette Nature Center, which is aptly named after a woman nicknamed "Natures Guardian Angel" for her help in the formation of our wonderful state parks. This trip is fantastic and free of charge, we are thankful that we have such wonderful resources here in West Michigan, and it's always so much fun to bring kids to the wonderful ecosystem of the sand dunes.

Parent Screen Cast 2013-1014

Dear Parents,

Hopefully everyone had a chance to view the screen cast I sent home on email the other day.  I know it’s kind of long, but I promise most other communication will be 3 minutes and under.  If you didn’t receive any emails from me yet please write your preferred email address on the line below so I can add you to our parent list. 

Email:_______________________________________________

I am looking forward to a great year with the kids, as we get into the beginning of the school year and our routine please make sure you initial the students agendas each night that we have home work and leave any notes for me in the agenda.  I will check with the kids each morning.  Again homework will be Mon-Thurs. and will mostly be math, homework and remembering worksheets, and our reading logs which will come home next week. 

We will be starting some projects on Organisms in our Environment soon and those may require some weekend homework.   Again, I am looking forward to a great year!  Thank you for all you do!

Wetland Trail Sign Posts

We would like to thank our metal shop high school students, their teacher Mr. Crinion, Zeeland Powder Coating, all of the people who bought our Quincy Wetland Project wristbands, and of course Mrs. Timmer for making this a reality!  We had a great two half days here at Quincy installing our trail sign stands.  They look amazing, they're full stainless and powder coated for the ages.  We feel so fortunate to have the help and support of so many local businesses and educators.    

WGVU Cool Teacher

I want to extend a great big thank you to Hannah Peirce for writing such a fantastic letter to the people at WGVU.  We had a great pizza party and it so nice to get featured on television!  I loved seeing our class being featured for such important work.

I also wanted to share the news articles in the Holland Sentinel recently.  They did a great job summarizing our project, and currently our information signage is under production at Zeeland Graphics thanks to such a wonderful school board presentation. 

Also, I can’t recall a time when my class made the front page of the Holland Sentinel for work they have been doing.  Amazing!  Hope everyone is doing well, and it was fantastic to see all of you at student led conferences!  

Featured on ZPS Facebook and Twitter!

Here is a ZPS video shot and editing by Jim Camenga that was featured on our school districts Facebook and Twitter pages.  

School Board Presentation

The students did an amazing job presenting to the School Board Monday night on our Quincy Wetland Project.  They worked together flawlessly and moved through the presentation they had put together, solving technical issues as they would arise.  To see them working so well as a team and trouble shooting little glitches with the iPads in front of such an important audience was a major celebration!  I couldn't have been more proud of them!