Winter Break Message to Families

Dear Families, It has been a wonderful December full of so many memorable moments with our students and families! We kicked the month off with our beloved Eat Pie Shop community event. Led by our remarkable PTA members, our students and families mingled to the sounds of the Beatles (thanks to a PS 29 parent musician), and consistent with the PS 29 spirit of student voice and agency, 4th and 5th graders designed and developed their own wares that they sold in the student marketplace. Likewise, we launched our student newspaper, the 29 Post, and we are so grateful to family volunteers who have been joining us each week on Thursday and Friday mornings as our student reporters are hard at work developing stories to research and write about. Look out for a published newspaper in the new year! Furthering our goals around building a more sustainable future, our science teachers Tina Reres and Molly Dubow recently took our Green Team student leaders to visit a local NY-based factory that has diverted over half a million plastic bags from reaching our landfills and waterways by using discarded materials to create hand-woven textiles. All of the above and more happened in December! Here are some highlights that we’re seeing across the school…

• Our Pre-K students are engaged in their home studies in which they have done learning walks to study architecture and design, sketched what they explored in their discovery center, and have been incorporating all of their explorations in constructing homes with blueprints and recycled materials - thanks to the help of our families. In the classrooms, our Pre-K students have been sharing and celebrating family traditions.

• Our Kindergarteners are learning how to read and write! They have been developing their own books as a culmination of the show and tell work in the classrooms. Kindergarteners are also joyfully making connections between their knowledge of shapes in math and the real world through art and other content areas. We have enjoyed inviting families into the classrooms to do read-alouds with our students.

• Our 1st graders continue to work on their family units of study in social studies, exploring the concepts of needs and wants. 1st graders proudly collected over 800 pounds of food in their collaboration with City Harvest, supporting families in need across the city. Consistent with our school-wide goals around celebrating our unique identities, our students in this grade have been developing culture books in which they’re sharing family keepsakes, traditions, recipes and more. This grade has also been enjoying their STEM & Coding collaboration with Ms. Sperry, our library + technology teacher, as well as Ms. Van Duzer, our math coach.

• Our 2nd graders have just wrapped up their STEM & Maker Space collaboration, and they’re working away on developing “mindful jars” as a way to empower ourselves to identify our feelings and develop and apply strategies to regulate our emotions, moving ourselves towards a more positive mindset. 2nd graders finished their non-fiction reading unit, becoming experts on various topics, and now they’re applying these skills to their writing as they immerse themselves in creating informational books. They recently went to the Staten Island Museum, where they learned about the impact of the Lenape people on our city, a deep connection to the work that they’re doing in social studies.

• Our 3rd graders - in the spirit of service at P.S. 29 - recently partnered with Bloom Again Brooklyn to make cards out of silk flowers for seniors who were home-bound during the holidays. Furthering these service-oriented projects, 3rd graders have also launched their endangered animals unit of study in social studies, as each classroom has “adopted” an animal and is actively exploring ways to raise awareness and support in protection of these animals. The non-fiction work in reading and writing lends itself to making connections with these service projects and multiple disciplines.

• Our 4th graders recently showed off their newly developed skills on our stage for our families in the ballroom dance share. The spirit of celebrating multiple cultures through art was evident. 4th graders are also working on multiplication and division, reading short fictional stories, and writing literary essays. We are looking forward to the interdisciplinary American Revolution unit of study that we will be launching soon.

• Likewise, our 5th graders are looking forward to demonstrating their creative talents in the musical revue that will take place in January, led by our music teacher, Ms. Fitzpatrick. (Many 5th graders will also be participating in our newly launched musical production of Shrek, Jr. that will take place after school in collaboration with Brooklyn Acting Lab.) Like 4th grade, our 5th graders have begun to immerse themselves in the world of literary essay, and in reading they’re engaged in book clubs. 5th graders have just jumped into the study of fractions and will be applying all the math operations to fractions in this unit of study.

We could not do any of the above without the love and dedication of our families, teachers and staff. Thank you for believing in us. As you head into the holidays, please know that we are so grateful for our partnership. We also recognize that the holidays aren't easy for everyone and are thankful for the many ways that our PTA has supported our own families as well as those beyond the P.S. 29 community. Specifically, on behalf of the district 15 community, P.S. 29 was a collection site for clothing, food, and toys that were distributed to families in neighboring schools. Thank you for your partnership in taking care of one another. We appreciate your generosity and kindness. Looking forward to seeing you in 2023, Rebecca, Halee, Dawn, and Olivia