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Contents

Pg 1 Principal’s Report Pg 2 Admin Mission Status Pg 4 PTA Space Notes Pg 5 Mission Notes Pg 7 3rd Grade Explorers Pg 8 4th Grade Explorers Pg 9 5th Grade Explorers Pg 10 6th Grade Explorers

October 2019 Published by the LES PTA

985-792-0156 www.lancasterelementary.stpsb.org

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From the Principal’s Desk... Happy Fall, Lancaster families! Hopefully we will start to see some of that cooler weather soon! As we move into the end of the first grad-ing period, I would like to remind everyone about the JPAMS Student Progress Center. In late August to early September, letters were mailed home with the username and password to access the program. This program will enable you to check grades and attendance online at home. Please let us know if you are experiencing problems with your passwords or access. I also encourage you to check individual teacher websites on JPAMS as well as the Lancaster website regularly for up-dates. School robo-calls made to all Lancaster families go to parent numbers entered in JPAMS. If you have not received any of my robo-calls, please call the front office and have one of our secretaries verify your numbers in JPAMS.

Special thanks to our wonderful grandparents for attending our spe-cial BINGO days. The PTA did an amazing job sponsoring this event for our students. I hope everyone has a chance to visit the St. Tammany Parish Fair with your children and check out our awesome fair booth on our day off of school on October 4th. This year our staff and stu-dents did an awesome job choosing work that represented the stu-dents and community of Lancaster very well. Our students will also be off of school on Friday, October 11th as we will be having a parish pro-fessional development and record keeping day for our teachers. Stu-dents will receive their report cards the following Friday.

National Bus Safety Week will be later this month as well as Red Rib-bon Week and Family Learning Nights. Please watch the school web-site for more information on these events.

As always, we are always eager to talk with parents. If you have any concerns, please let us know. Thank you for supporting our efforts and making Lancaster a great school!

Sincerely,

"Teaching us responsibility to learn every day."

2

PBIS Happenings

This year, our PBIS Team is doing some revamping and will include both parent and student representatives from

all grade levels. We are looking forward to having the students share their experiences of PBIS with us. We are

hopeful that our parents can help us improve the communication between the school and the community in the

eyes of PBIS.

Our school year has kicked off to a great start with our weekly PBIS lessons. Each Wednesday, students view a

power point presentation with key ideas that we focus on. For the past few weeks we have focused on using good

manners. Ideas like cleaning up after ourselves and opening the door for others have been a couple of our topics.

Moving forward, we will begin looking at our school-wide data to determine our greatest area of concern. We will

target the specific area and will continue our weekly lessons with the area in mind. Students will have a goal to

reduce the amount of discipline in that area and will be rewarded if they meet their goal. We are looking forward

to a great year with PBIS!

3

School Bus Safety

We will be celebrating School Bus Safety Week during the week of October 21-25. During this week, we will be reviewing the safety rules for waiting and boarding a school bus, along with the rules for riding a school bus. Below are some of the rules as outlined in the bus safety brochure. Students are expected to follow these rules on a daily basis!

4

Hi Lancaster families!

School is off to a great start and PTA has been busy helping our students and teachers get into the swing of the school year. Open house was very successful and PTA was there to help with uniforms and PTA memberships. Don’t forget it’s not too late to sign up for a PTA membership if you haven’t already. We had our first “shake day” where students who wanted to participate received chocolate or vanilla ice cream shakes from Bops Frozen Custard. It was a huge success and the students were excited about the special treat. Grandparent’s Bingo was great. Thanks to all of our grandparents for coming out. It was a fun time for all who attended with a fun bingo game, prizes and yummy treats. Thanks to all who were able to volunteer to help run this exciting week of bingo! We have many more wonderful activities coming up. Bus driver appreciation week is coming up in October, more information to come on how you can help. Our next big activity coming up is Boosterthon! This is our biggest fundraiser of the year. We will need as much help as possible in order for everything to “run” smoothly. It really is a lot of fun and a great way to raise money for our school. Thank you to all of our amazing PTA volunteers, because of you we are able to provide extra activities and funds

for our students. Sincerely your PTA co-presidents,

5

A G H U Y T R E W Q

Let’s “Rock It” in MUSIC

LES has exciting things happening in music this school year. Here is a quick introduction of our music faculty.

This year at LES Mrs. Popovich will be teaching 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade general music classes along with 4th , 5th

and 6th grade choir. Our choir this year has 115 members. We are looking forward to our first performance. Mr.

Dardenne will be teaching 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade general music classes. He will also be teaching 5th and 6th grade

band. The band has 120 members this year and is gearing up for their first performance. Mr. Albus will be here on

Thursday and Friday. He will be teaching 3rd, 4th,5th, and 6th grade general music classes. Mr. Messina, from Madi-

sonville Junior High, is teaching third grade general music this school year. The music faculty looking forward to

Learning out of this world music during the 2019-2020 school year.

Out of this World Learning in Academically Gifted Classes

Academically gifted 5th and 6th graders have been having lots of fun while learning this year! They’ve been honing

their questioning skills by interviewing their classmates to create a “Biography of a Classmate.” They will be utiliz-

ing their editing, writing, and keyboarding skills to create a biography of their partner. They will then develop

their public speaking skills by sharing their biographies in front of an audience of their peers. Artistic creativity is

added in as students will create a cover sheet for their biographies by utilizing their individual art talents as well

as technology. Students are excitedly working on this project along with their Guidebook lessons based on the

novels Hatchet (6th grade) and The Templeton Twins (5th grade). Fifth grade’s unit has students reading informa-

tional and literary texts to understand how different scientific theories have changed over time. They express

their understanding about these theories and the process of scientific inquiry by gathering evidence and compar-

ing and contrasting different theories. Sixth’s grade’s unit has students reading literary and informational texts to

understand how positive thinking, slowing down to think clearly, problem solving, and constant vigilance support

survival in the face of grave danger

and overwhelming odds. Students

express their understanding of

characters in literature by analyzing

the struggle of man versus nature

and the life lessons we can learn

from others’ survival situations.

Both groups will create, type, and

share their culminating writing task

at the end of the units this month

thereby further developing their

writing, citing from text, keyboard-

ing, and public speaking skills. Both

groups will continue to see that

learning can be a truly out of this

world experience filled with fun

and excitement at LES!

7

As the first nine weeks comes to a close, third graders will enjoy a fun-filled October! Between Red Ribbon Week activities, Parish Fair Day, field trips to Destrehan, and Character Dress-Up Day, there will be something exciting happening often.

To connect to our social studies standards on Louisiana heritage, our students will be able to ex-perience Destrehan Plantation. Some of the included experiences will be calligraphy practice, plantation house tour, and an indigo demonstration.

As far as academics, we will dig deeper into our challenging and engaging curriculum. In math, third graders will continue to become fluent with their multiplication facts, use strategies to solve multiple step word problems, and begin working with time.

For ELA, students will participate in guidebooks lessons for the Stories Julian Tells unit. In sci-ence, the hands-on Mystery Science labs are always a favorite!

As the year progresses, please contin-ue to practice multiplication facts and reading fluency at home. We look for-ward to an awesome second quarter!

8

What a busy and fun time of the year for our 4th graders! In ELA, the students have been read-

ing literary and informational texts to learn about hurricanes and their impact on Louisiana.

Students are gaining the understanding of how history involves the sharing of memories and

the differences between firsthand and secondhand accounts. They will express their under-

standing of the impact of hurricanes on Louisiana by writing a first person narrative about an

experience in a hurricane based on texts that they have read.

Our 4th grade scientists will continue their journey through Earth's processes, where they will

gather evidence to support an explanation of how Earth's landforms change over time. In

Math, the students will be blasting off into our multi-digit multiplication and division

unit. Please continue to study facts nightly.

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9

What an outstanding October we will have! Our first month of Power 30 sessions have launched us into orbit and the students are thriving in their small groups! We will be finishing up the exciting novel, The Templeton Twins. The students will focus and learn about the main idea of articles and stories. They will also learn how to search for supporting details like highly trained astronaut scientists. In Science, we will build a Bohr model based on an element each student chose from the periodic table of elements. We will become great friends with the en-tertaining Atoms Family while learning about atoms and believe us, we won’t even close to Bohr-ed! We will also be busy building our brainpower in Math while learning all about deci-mals. We will be adding, subtracting, and multiplying decimals faster than you can say the word decimal! We will also have a blast exploring the past to learn more about early civilizations and early explorers of the world! We will be busy searching for artifacts and making inferences about the past based on the artifacts we find buried in the Woodland Indian mound we will re-create for Social Studies. Story Book Character Dress Up Day will be amazing and we look for-ward to seeing some awesome home-made costumes! We have amazing students and parents at Lancaster!

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10

Our 6th grade Sea Turtles have blasted off into an out-of-this-world school year. In ELA, students will finish exploring what it takes to survive in the wilderness while reading Hatchet. While in Math, students will be learning more about Ratios.

In Science, 6th graders will discuss the topics of energy and forces. And lastly in Social Studies,

students will study ancient River Valley civilizations. On a field trip to the Louisiana Arts and Sci-

ence Museum, they also get the chanCe to examine a mummy up close and personal in the An-

cient Egypt Gallery and

learn more about the Solar

System in the Planetarium

and Solar System Gallery.