Quaker Hill Elementary School Christopher Discordia, Principal [email protected]

Winter 2017

Highlights from “The Hill.” Advances in Special Education

(parent permission received for use of this photo)

Throughout our school, you will notice anchor charts and activity charts that follow the “Zones of Regulation,” curriculum. Students are taught to identify their zone and perform exercises or yoga poses to help get them back in the “green zone,” and be ready to learn. We could not have done this without the financial and logistical support from central office

Empowering students to teach others about their disability: students in grades 3-5 have worked with their parents and Spec. Ed team to create presentations for their classmates to educate them about disabilities including hearing impairments, autism, stuttering and Down Syndrome. These are tremendously powerful learning experiences for both our students with special needs and their non-disabled peers.

Afterschool Allstars: our special education team recently finished up another successful session of Afterschool Allstars. The program matches Special Education students with non-disable peers to work collaboratively on art projects, cooperative games, and team building activities.

Professional Learning Opportunities

Quaker Hill Teachers have had the chance to participate in many successful professional learning opportunities this year including ongoing, embedded PD with literacy and math coaches. Recently, a group of teachers attended a wonderful (and free) STEM PD at New England Science and Sailing Foundation. Additionally, our teachers have participated in district-wide Ed Camps, and several during PLC at the building level. Some of those topics include: Google Classroom, Movement in Math, Growth Mindset, Discovery Education, STEM, Storytelling and many more!

Learning Through Service in Kindergarten and Grade 1 Students in Mrs. DeVito and Mrs. Forando’s class have been working as “Little Community Helpers,” this year. In the fall, they secured funding for a Little Library, and our maintenance dept. worked quickly to get it installed outside before it got too cold out! We recently had 6 benches built and donated by Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center so our students have a place to sit while reading. The photo above also shows a warm quilt that students made to donate to the homeless

TECHNOLOGY Students in K-5 have been working to build and program robots to perform tasks. Below, two 5th grade students built an arm on one of our “Dot and Dash,” robots, and wrote code on the iPad to program the robot to write letters on a piece of paper. Students in the primary grades are working to program the robots to perform simple tasks.

After School Activities– Fun and Free for Families

Quaker Hill is happy to offer a wide variety of enriching after-school activities for our students in K-5. Some of the topics include Knitting Club, Chess Club, Basketball (for all grade levels), Flag Football, Lego Club, After-school All-Stars, K-1 Coding Club, School Newspaper, and Fit Girls Running Club. The clubs are supported financially with stipends from the BOE for teachers, but also rely on WHS student volunteers and parent volunteers.