Career Day

Friday was Beaverdam's career day. We enjoyed great weather, a great turn-out, and a packed schedule for the day. Unfortunately, the camera didn't come out until mid-morning, so the pictures you will see do not include our first three presenters.

We heard from an electrician (thank you, Mr. Holloway!), an attorney, a flight attendant, and an environmental engineer. Below are pictures from our visits with a retired army pilot, a secret service officer, a K9 police unit and a SWAT team member.

Sporting a flight helmet, standing at attention

Watching a slideshow of pictures about life as an army pilot

Explaining the functionality of the helicopter's controller

Ready for action

Explaining the details of a secret service job assignment

Trying on various secret service & police gear

Looking at photos from different secret service details

A dog from the local K9 unit inspecting various pieces of luggage for explosives

Checking out the pieces and parts of a mobile SWAT team unit

A big thank you to all of the parents and volunteers who helped BES's career day run smoothly. 

Richmond Symphony

Today we had a wonderful morning visit to the Carpenter Center to watch and listen to the Richmond Symphony play. The symphony told the story of Romeo and Juliet in a fragmented format so the kids could all understand how the music complimented (and told) the story.

A big thank you to Mr. Walker and Mrs. Lilly who joined us as chaperones!

What a great way to ease back into school after a few unexpected snow days!

Light Switch Cover Winners

Below are the winning light switch cover entries. Soon, they will be up around the school! Keep an eye out.

Box Top Winners!

A big congratulations to our class! We won the BES Box Top Super Bowl game by bringing in an amazing amount of box tops: 2,608!

Nice work, parents!

Welcome Back!

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a restful and relaxing holiday. Here's what's on tap for this week:

Language Arts
- new stories for each group
- a new read aloud: Percy Jackson & the Lightening Thief. This is also a Reading Olympics book!
- homophones: their, there, they're
- punctuation with dialogue in writing
- new word study unit will start Wednesday

This week we will be beginning a weekly paragraph writing routine to build our writing. It will start in school and will eventually move to become a homework activity. It will not become homework for several weeks ... look for this to happen the first week of February. See the "Reading & Language Arts" tab for more information!

Math (my group)
We will be starting our study of decimals and fractions with decimal place value. We will focus what decimals are and how to read, write, and order them.

A remediation group for the multiplication/division unit will be meeting during tutorial this week and next.

Science
We will be picking up where we left off with our electricity unit. We will talk about conductors and insulators and basic circuits. Look forward to a possible visit from an electrician and an assessment late next week.

Virginia Studies
We finished our Jamestown unit before break and we will be talking about life in Colonial America for the next few weeks. Our focus this week will be the relationship between agriculture and slavery in the colonies.

Tutorial
A remediation group for multiplication/division will be meeting on Monday and Wednesday.

Tuesdsay, I will start a new, rotating enrichment group. This will typically take place Tuesdays and Thursdays (or Fridays). We will play games such as Snake Oil, Blurt, and other games to help build vocabulary and reasoning skills.

Thursday, the school spelling bee will take place at 9am.

Friday, we will spend tutorial learning about series and parallel circuits.

Looks like a busy week! I can't wait to see everyone!

Static Electricity

Today we had fun in science with static electricity experiments. Ask your student what he/she would have to do to end up with balloons on the ceiling!

Pollution and the Chesapeake Bay

My apologies for the delay! On the 21st of November, Mrs. Kaufmann's class and our class gave presentations to several people who work in various positions at central office, including the director of elementary education and the science lead for the county. They were impressed! 

Each group showed a demonstration about how pollution affects the Chesapeake Bay and offered a proposal for how we can help the environment/watershed here at school. The groups did a great job explaining their thinking and offering ideas for improvement here at the school. Ask your child how he/she did!

Learning about hot and cold currents from one of Mrs. Kaufmann's groups

One group's demonstration about soil and forest buffers

How pollution affects watersheds

Different polluting factors build on one another

Lots of different variables affect the Bay

One group held a school-wide contest to design new light switch covers

Here are a few early entries for the contest

The light switch cover contest came to an end on Tuesday, November 26th. The group who held the contest will be reviewing entries (there were A LOT!) and we will have a winner soon! Stay tuned!