On Friday, November 2, the Chesapeake Academy campus will be teeming with grandparents and grandfriends anxious to share a bit of the school day with their special osprey(s). Registration begins at 8:30 a.m. in the gym, followed by classroom visits and then some fun student performances for our favorite audience! Students will be dismissed at noon. Grandparents will have the opportunity to visit the Enchanted Forest Book Fair, have a photograph taken with their grandchildren, or consider donating a book to the Birthday Book Program in their student's honor!  

Our first  Parent  Partnership Days (PPDs) of the year are scheduled for the week of November 13. In the Early Childhood and Lower School Divisions,  conferences are designed for  parents to find out about the progress, goals, challenges, and successes of their child, as well as to share any helpful information with the teacher. Lower School students will be completing a reflective piece on their first marking period that will be shared at their  conferences.

 

Conferences may be scheduled directly through the teachers or through Ms. Connie via email or phone call.  Conferences are available after school and into the evenings for  parent convenience.  If your child has more than one academic teacher, please feel free to schedule a conference with the homeroom teacher (who will have a full picture of the child's academic work) or  conferences  with both the homeroom teacher and the partner teacher for that grade. 

 

In Middle School, PPD  conferences  are generally scheduled with the advisor and the student. Students review and reflect upon their strengths and challenges, sharing their goals with their parents. If you would also like to meet with a classroom teacher in addition to the advisor and student conference, you are encouraged to make an appointment for a conference with classroom teachers as well. 

We look forward to seeing all parents at the two scheduled PPDs (in November and early February). These times are essential for parents and teachers to collaborate effectively to support the student's best progress. 

After being sidelined by Hurricane Michael, the fates finally aligned to give Pre-K 3&4 the perfect fall weather for a rite of passage at the Belmont Pumpkin Farm! Hayrides, pumpkin picking, animal education, a snack lovingly made by Walter Abbott's grandmother, Michelle Robbins, and the most challenging and interesting playground around all combined to make the trip practially perfect in every way! Too excited to snooze on the bus ride home, students could not wait to see their pumpkins unloaded safely onto the Wiley porch to wait there until dismissal!

Each lower school class is inviting parents in for a glimpse of what happens in school every day. The first of this series of Muffin Mornings was well- attended and well-received among third grade families! 

These Muffin Mornings (or, in select cases, Muffin Afternoons) will give parents the chance to see their child's class in action with a special focus on STEAM projects. 

The dates for these Muffin-stuffing adventures in your child's classroom are listed in the Heads Up dates and on the school calendar.

The economics thread of the Chesapeake Academy curriculum weaves throughout the grades but accelerates in third through fifth grades where students experience basic concepts of economics in the process of preparing and engaging in the Virginia Council on Economics' Mini Economies Market Days. This year the fair falls during our Spring Break, so we will be doing our own fair in-house!  Economic concepts such as specialization, productivity, division of labor, efficiency, productive resources, output and input get plenty of practice in the process.

This week, students applied many of those concepts to the task of creating hamburgers following certain guidelines.  Students worked individually to create as many hamburgers as possible within a 7 minute time period. Then they compared their output with what they could accomplish when they worked in a group that was arranged in an assembly line. 

The discussion afterwards highlighted successes with teamwork, as well as challenges when just one person was in charge of creating many finished products in the amount of time provided. This activity helped students to understand the economic concepts and provided good insight for them as they begin to work together to create a product or service for consumers. 

Marine science is the name of the game in fourth grade these days! Currently, student focus is on the animals that live in a watery environment. Budding marine biologists have learned about food chains and the adaptations animals have made to survive. To pull all this together, students were then challenged to create their own fish and describe its adaptations to survive in the habitat in which it lives. 

Getting Lost? Not Any More!

Chesapeake Academy will host Scholastic's Enchanted Forest Book Fair from October 29 to November 5 this year. It will be open from 8:15 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and afternoons from 3:10 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. 

Grandparents and Grandfriends will have ample opportunities to shop for their grandchildren on the morning of November 2 until the program starts. Following the program, the book fair will remain open untill 12:45 p.m. 

In preparation for a culminating field study comparing the Chesapeake Bay to the Florida Keys in February, Chesapeake Academy students took to the waterways with Christchurch School's Director of Place-Based Education, Dave Cola, to compare fresh and saltwater ecosystems. Placed-based Extensions of the Academic Curriculum at Christchurch School (PEACs) are designed to break down the walls of single teacher classrooms and use the natural and social resources in our region to enhance classroom effectiveness and relevance.

Students began the day at the Christchurch School dock, looking at the turbidity of the water in the Rappahannock River, and considering how that measurement might have changed due to the recent hurricane. Using their senses to observe what they saw, heard, felt, and even tasted from that specific area, students discussed the watershed, and how the sun, air, nutrients and oxygen provided for the plankton (the base of the food chain) to allow our unique brackish water be a good nursery for water life and what impact the influx of runoff from the storm could have on the ecosystem. Collecting specimens from the Christchurch beach using a seine net, students catalogued twelve species unique to saltwater environments.

In order to make comparisons between the salt- and freshwater systems, students headed over to Dragon Run, a freshwater tributary. Accessing Dragon Run from canoes, students collected specimens from the grasses and water using nets. Cataloguing about the same number of organisms, students noted these organisms were much smaller and more likely to be insect types than those from the river.

The students explored the interconnectedness between the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the Bay itself, quickly coming to the conclusion that it is important for us to keep the waters on the earth healthy. These basic local comparisons will become the springboard for a more in-depth comparison of the Bay and Florida Keys estuaries.

Next Wednesday,  October 31, Student Council is encouraging a black and orange dress day on tag day. The cost as usual is .50, and students may dress in regular tag day wear, but we encourage people to have fun and participate.