Monkton Session 1 News

We are off to a small but mighty start at Monkton!

Once again, we welcomed Grace Freeman for a movement, music, and poetry workshop where kids are learning songs, making instruments, and even doing a little science... or is it magic?! Grace is always such a lively addition to our program and we are glad to have her here once again.

MCS first- and second-grade teacher Caitlin Gadhue has been leading a group of future writers through an author study of Eric Carle. The students have been reading Carle's books and studying the craft of picture book writing and illustration. They are such experts that they are now writing their own books!

Megan Mitchell, MCS's math interventionist, is managing a bustling Scholar's Club in the Library. Students are using it as a quiet time to get assignments done with adult help or on their own. Parents are loving the removal of nightly homework debates and kids are learning the value of time management. We are also glad to have partnered with the school's on-site Mary Johnson childcare program to give MASP kiddos a crack at Scholar's Club as well. Many of them are taking advantage of the quiet time to get work done before heading outside to play.

With just a couple weeks left, we are piecing together an awesome second session, to begin November 15th and end on December 22nd. Right now, we have two crafty offerings, Japanese, and a couple more surprises so stay tuned!

More Reasons to Love ELP During Week 3 in Monkton

Making new friends is a huge part of ELP!

Summertime is definitely meant for teachers and students to rest and recharge, but the educators and learners at ELP are keeping their heads in the game with out-of-the-ordinary ways to keep kids engaged and connected during the break. For many kids, ELP is a way to keep up with friends when seeing them every day gets a little trickier without having school and transportation to be the link. We are so happy to see friendships being forged and maintained thanks to the ANESU expanded learning program! Likewise, teachers are getting to work with different and varied age groups than they are used to and also have the perfect platform to try new things and sharpen their own professional games in a more informal and flexible learning environment than the regular school year can often provide.

Making wellness posters about healthy bodies also grows healthy minds!

We've had a great couple weeks in Wellness thanks to Mr. Hall. While the focus remains on getting kids active and using healthy fuel, we did have a chance to reflect as a group on other realms of wellness. The kiddos thought that treating other people well and refraining from becoming angry were very important...impressive thoughtfulness from elementary-aged students! Students worked with myplate.gov to dive into how many daily choices to make within each category of food and made some awesome posters to remind us all what and how much to eat for a healthy lifestyle. Of course, we played a lot of great games, went for walks to the pond, and moved a lot! We began to talk about stretching and breathing as we gear up for next week's yoga unit. We also began replicating letters and animals in order to get comfortable with the mimicking nature of yogic instruction.

In the STEM classroom with Ms. Zimmer, the kiddos spent a lot of time down by the pond discussing, making hypotheses, forming questions, and then researching many aspects about the pond. Students also discussed the life cycle of frogs, representing it in a couple of science-based art projects. In any spare time we had, we worked with our math facts across the four operations by several different games that have become very popular with all of the age groups.

Cooking and gardening have become a huge part of Ms. Gadhue's literacy block, which is a great way to practice and hone technical reading and writing skills. The students harvested mammoth cucumbers and radishes and put up several quarts of refrigerator pickles that we will enjoy next week. They are keeping up with recipe writing for our ELP summer garden cookbook as well, so that the recipes they learn this week can be replicated later on for family and friends at home. Learning to use garden treats for healthy eats fits great with our wellness themes and also helps students become stewards of the new MCS garden. These are great life skills that we are glad to be honing through expanded learning!

Perennial ELP favorite specials educator Shawn Kimball also joined us this week to get students familiar with cameras, Go-Pros, filming, and videography. Shawn will be joining us on and off in Week 4 and all of Week 5 in conjunction with Ashley and Skyler our theatre specialists to pull together some movies for the ELP Film Festival in Bristol on August 5th. ELP-ers as young as six right up through our oldest participants all learned how to use cameras and phones to take videos and even did some underwater Go-Pro filming at the pond, which was a perfect way to spend a sweltering Friday!

Week 2 In Monkton Serves Up Tasty, Healthy Snacks!

Stemming kale from the school garden... We are so lucky to have such a bounty!

Almost time for kale chips!

Mmmmm... healthy!

Stretches in wellness keep us limber and ready to learn...

Solar ovens during STEM time let the sun make our s'mores!

See you next week!

Three Schools Meet at Monkton... Fun Ensues!

IMPORTANT LINKS

Summer Lunch Menu from ANESU Food Cooperative
Bristol BASK Schedule***

Monkton's first-ever summer expanded learning program is following in the footsteps of its successful school-year program with a great start to our five weeks together!

Our wonderful core staff Shelly Cota, Caitlin Gadhue, Phil Hall, Taylor Zimmer, and visiting specialist Charles "Mr. Wizard" Black have made the MCS ELP the place to be for students who attend Monkton, Lincoln, and Beeman elementary schools. We are also grateful to Steve and Isaac, the MCS custodial team, for making sure that our learning spaces were clean and ready for the Tuesday start.

"Anyone who doesn't like math should come here, where it's fun." --sixth grader

Inside the STEM workshops the kids have worked with shapes, symmetry, and math facts. We started off the week exploring the shapes that naturally occur around the beloved Monkton Pond. After our geometric discoveries we discussed what symmetry was and created our very own symmetric art pieces using plants and other pieces of nature we collected. We then ended our week playing some math fact racing games and some addition connect four. All in all we had a great time getting to know each other while exploring some fun math topics! Can't wait to see what the next few weeks have in store!

We had a great first week of wellness here at MCS. We have started every workshop by reflecting on the food that we have eaten throughout the day. We place our breakfasts into categories (grains, proteins, dairy, etc.) and discuss the ways in which these foods are used to fuel our bodies. Based on the past week of sharing, our kiddos have been eating really well! It has been a very active week in wellness as well. We have learned new games such as Rock, Paper, Scissors Tag and completed personal fitness challenges based on individual goals. We have shared our favorite stretches and warm ups with each other, hiked to the pond, and had a chance to draw some of our favorite activities. We even had an awesome dance party with first and second grade group! It was a wonderful week of learning and having fun, we are excited for week number two!

Literacy workshops also explored the beautiful area of Monkton Central School. We visited the pond, read stories about frogs and made our journals for this summer adventure. We also spent time working in the school garden, harvesting kale and basil and working together to make a super batch or delicious pesto. We wrote the recipe in our journals, listed the steps we took to make our pesto, and enjoyed it as a special treat at our Friday lunch all together!

"Are we going to play science next?" --first grader

The Week One gang poses for a group shot after our Friday kickball game.

Our workshop leaders have decided to create a one-room schoolhouse (ORSH) on Fridays, where we will have an array of multiage activities that our whole crew can participate in together. We are very excited at this new way of looking at teaching and learning all ages! We started today with a whole-group kickball game and it was a blast. Look forward to more news about ORSH Fridays!

Enrollment is robust with new faces joining every day. If you are interested in sending your student, please contact Kate La Riviere Gagner at klariviere@anesu.org.

"I like coming to summer camp. There's always something new." --third grader

***Please note! Bristol BASK is only open to families who have made all of the prior arrangements with the Mary Johnson Children's Center. ANESU ELP paperwork is for our 8am-12pm program only!

Session 3 Is 4 Times The Fun

Monkton is pumped to kick off our third session of ELP with our returning dream team of MCS classroom teachers Stacy Carter, Caitlin Leggett, Jenn Livingston, and Kelly Pierpont and MCS alum Shawn Kimball making up our awesome workshop leadership team! The title of this post references the fact that in our third session, we have quadrupled enrollment from our first session back in the fall. ELP is rocking at MCS and we have the droves of enthusiastic students to prove it.

This session, our workshops include Food Network (cooking and video tutorial productions of recipes) for 3rd through 6th graders, Craft Club for the K-2 crowd, and Film Production with the 5th and 6th graders. Already, we are off and running on a great session, so stay tuned for updates and pictures from Monkton!

Mystery Mousse at MCS

There is something pretty soothing about ending the day quietly stitching and chatting with friends and that is just what the Craft Club has been getting up to these past two weeks. Hard at work, but also relaxed and enjoying the time together, our third through sixth graders have been sewing bean bags and putting the finishing touches on their stylish felt bracelets some with conductive thread, allowing for it to light up. The dynamic duo of Ms. Leggett and Ms. Pierpont are the perfect pair for these high-tech, low-tech projects!

Beets & Blinks at MCS

The second session of Monkton Central's ELP started this week. We are overjoyed to offer two workshops again this session with one geared for our K-2 ELPers and one for our 3-6 crowd. We are also very proud that we are fully staffed by members of our teaching team. As our visitor Superintendent Vilaseca said today during his impromptu visit, it is so wonderful when teachers are able to work in this different context with students they might not normally work with. It also builds and maintains these all-important teaching and learning relationships.

It's a beautiful thing.

Our older students are participating in an eTextiles Craft Club. What does that mean? Well, it's a mix of traditional crafts like sewing with a modern, maker twist. Workshop teacher teammates Caitlin Leggett, who is our Kindergarten teacher, and Kelly Pierpont, who teaches 5th and 6th grade, have joined up to bridge the old and the new. This week, crafter Ms. Leggett is teaching the students sewing basics. They began with a felt bracelet, decked out with buttons and felt cutouts. Super fun to wear and share! Next week, makerspace guru Ms. Pierpont will show the students how they can use conductive thread to wire their creations with a simple LED circuit so that they light up! The students will combine these two seemingly divergent fields into such fun projects as light-up stuffed animals and other blinking craft creations!

Down the hall, Stacy Carter and Jenn Livingston, two of our 1st and 2nd grade teachers, have a crew of twenty-two 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old sous chefs in their wildly popular Good Eats cooking workshop. This week, the little ones learned safe knife skills in order to make carrot, beet, apple, and ginger juice and fruit kebabs with a delightful cinnamon-honey yogurt sauce. "This is better than pizza!" exclaimed first grader Kaidin.

Thanks to the students, families, and teachers who are making expanded learning possible for Monkton's students! Stay tuned for more pictures and news next week!

~Kate Gagner, Site Director