- The LE 5th grade car wash and SAVERS donation drive is scheduled for Saturday, April 30. Please see the attached flyer for more details.
- Come help spruce up LE during NewtonSERVES on Sunday, May 1, from 9 am – 12 pm! Adult workers are needed, as well as kids ready to work with their parents. We need 50 volunteers. We will be spreading mulch, raking, preparing our school garden, painting the class garden boxes, as well as aiding with other needed outdoor maintenance. Please see attached flyer for more information. Feel free to email Nora at noraziz@gmail.com or Amy at arpollack2@yahoo.com with any questions.
- Parent volunteers needed for the LE teacher appreciation luncheon scheduled for Tuesday, May 17th from 12:30-2:30pm in the Cafeteria. Parents are needed to help organize the event, as well as donate food and drink items. If interested in helping to organize this event, please contact Andrea at ahemment@gmail.com.
- We are collecting can pull tabs in the LE office to help support families who need transportation to Shriners Hospital. More details can be found in the attached flyer.
- The Boston Emeralds, a 3rd grade basketball program focused on development, is looking for players! For more information and/or to register, please visit: http://bostonemeraldsbasketball.com/
Spotlight on the Gym
Since February vacation we have done a lot with hand dribbling and basketball skills and lots of jumping and jumping rope (so many opportunities for fun). Just as we were finishing dribbling, March Madness started with lots of great basketball to watch. Soon, the NBA playoffs will be starting and the Boston Celtics will be playing. I showed 3rd – 5th graders this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE_zVd49u0I short video of Stephen Curry, the current NBA Most Valuable Player doing a dribbling warm-up with many of the skills students were working on. They were amazed at how easy he made it look to do skills they were struggling to figure out! Kindergarteners made great progress learning to dribble with one hand and were pre and post assessed, which shows evidence of the dramatic improvements many made.
Jumping has been a ton of fun! 2nd -5th graders learned to jump rope or to jump better, 3rd-5th adding different jumps to their repertoires. This is exciting and makes jumping rope more interesting. Students made great improvements in the number of jumps they could do in 1 minute. 3rd-5th graders also learned how to turn and jump with long ropes. They really enjoyed working together with others as a team and were surprised and excited when they were able to accomplish new skills.
Also, in the last few weeks, in coordination with Massachusetts Safe Routes to School, we have had a bicycle safety presentation for 4th graders and pedestrian safety for 2nd graders (unfortunately the safety walk was rained out, but we improvised some situations indoors, that we are confident will carry over). Thank you to Donna Vincenzino, the LE parent coordinator, and the parents who volunteered to help with the pedestrian safety. We will need a few parent volunteers again in June when we have a bike safety program with the 5th grade that includes a Bike Safety Ride with the Newton Police Safety Officer. See Bike and Pedestrian safety videos on my website: http://www2.newton.k12.ma.us/~david_rota/?OpenItemURL=S0CFE34ED
Keep up with what is happening in PE on my new website http://www2.newton.k12.ma.us/~david_rota/?OpenItemURL=S0CFE20D5 . Also, in student links, there is the Stephen Curry video, and links to a couple of sites I highly recommend with different movements for students & families to use to be better movers. I have been using these sites with my own children and they really enjoy doing the exercises together with me.