Thanks to our SCA for the great Food Drive!

The Baker-Butler SCA is comprised of representatives from the fourth and fifth grade homeroom classes.  These students meet once a month to plan Spirit Days and Service projects for the student body and school community.  During the month of October, SCA members coordinated the collection of food items to be donated to the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank.  Through the generous participation of the Baker-Butler community, fourteen boxes were filled with canned food, cereal and dried pasta.  $110 was also collected for the Food Bank.  Many families in our community will benefit from the success of the food drive.

Performing dogs, stacking cups, and collecting food drives at Baker-Butler!

It's been a great two weeks. Check out these videos and pictures of just a few of the events at our school since the beginning of November. 

Our students loved having the Olate dogs perform on November 8th. This act won America's Got Talent in 2012. Check out these videos to see these dogs perform!

In class our students have been learning to Sport Stack. Check out these pictures and videos of the competitions in PE class today:

Finally thanks to our amazing school and fantastic SCA officers, we had lots of food items collected in our food drive. Here are some of our SCA officers as well as the Albemarle County Police Department who transported the food to the area food bank.

Pictures from the past few days

There's been a lot of great things happening over the past few days. Check out these pictures below to see what's been happening in our school!

In PE our students have been assembling skeletons to learn about the body and the names of their bones.

Students worked together to assemble their skeletons.

Spotted outside a 1st grade classroom: What should my teacher be for Halloween?

BBES teachers rocked the Trunk or Treat!

Our BBES bus drivers decorated a haunted school bus for our Trunk or Treat!

Harry Potter!

It's a Railroad trunk.

Finding Nemo & Finding Dory!

A creative and spooky way to learn synonyms.

Our first annual K-1st grade book character parade was a big hit!

It's been a great few days here at school. We hope that you've enjoyed seeing just a few of the great events that are happening at Baker-Butler!

Quick look into a Tuesday morning at Baker-Butler

There are lots of great things that go on everyday at Baker-Butler. Here's just a quick snapshot of what is happening around 8:30am on a Tuesday morning.

First, there was a fantastic interdisciplinary lesson going on with two 5th grade classrooms and our PE teacher, who was participating in their Morning Meeting. These two classes are partnering for our Bear Tracks unit this year, which is connecting physical activity, geography, Virginia Studies, and math. The students are wearing pedometers and they're tracking their steps as they walk the Commonwealth of Virginia through the lens of the history they're learning in class. As an example, if they start at the settlement of Jamestown, they then keep track of their steps until they reach Williamsburg or Richmond, which they're also learning about in class.You can learn more about this project and track their steps at their wesbite, Bear Tracks.

 One of our 3rd grade classes has a praying mantis that they found, and they're using their questions to learn more about this insect and its characteristics. Here's a picture of some of their questions below. You also see the word YET, which is a focus of our school as we help students understand that they have the potential to change their success by their thinking and their effort. We encourage students not to say "I'm not good at this (Math, Reading, etc)" but rather "I'm not good at this YET," which implies that they can get better. This is called adapting a growth mindset and it has been a focus of our school the past two years.

Our Music, Art, and 3rd grade homeroom classes (especially Science) are working on an interdisciplinary unit on Autumn. Here are 3rd graders learning how to play a song about autumn that they will be performing at the end of the unit.

 In Art, our 3rd grade students are making leaf prints on their shirts to wear during the performance. They paint leaves and then roll them onto the shirts.

  

Here's another example of a Morning Meeting in a 2nd grade classroom. In this activity students are greeting each other by name by passing a ball to each other until everyone has had a turn. They will time themselves and keep repeating the pattern (student A to B, B to C, etc) until they beat their record. This was a great way for one of our new students who started today to learn his new friends' names quickly. 

 Lastly, some of our 5th grade Reading students were working together in the lobby on a word study sort. They were exploring the differences and similarities of synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and homographs.

We hope that this quick glance into just 30 minutes across the school gives you a snapshot of what goes on every day at Baker-Butler.

Our Closing Ceremonies

 This past Friday was a special day at Baker-Butler.

We had our Closing Ceremonies of the school-wide Olympics our students have been doing since the first week of school. Students were assigned to be a member of one of 12 different countries, and they then competed to earn Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals through different PE activities. One of the great features of this plan was that every country then had K-5th grade students in it, and students got excited about being an Olympic athlete representing "their" country.

At our Closing Ceremonies we brought everyone back together and then announced which countries had won.

First, all of the students lined up outside by their countries, and then they marched in together under their flag.

 
They then sat together by countries; as example, the country of Ireland had Kindergarten to 5th graders in it. They all stood up and said good afternoon in their country's language.

Then we watched a video highlight of the Paralympic Games to show the best differently-abled athletes in the world.

It was a fantastic experience and another example of the wonderful things going on here in our Baker-Butler community.

 

Students from China stand up and say good afternoon in Chinese