News & Notices

First graders at Ridge Ranch and Memorial have been practicing color and alphabet vocabulary in Spanish, especially to share about the colors they like and dislike. They have identified the colors they are wearing on Spanish lesson days and showed or pointed to different colored objects around the room while talking and singing. First grade classes have especially enjoyed singing and standing up at the right times to show colors worn or liked in the "¿Qué color te gusta?" activity and watching, singing, and moving their bodies along with a colors music video. In addition, first graders have started to practice letters of the Spanish alphabet, especially the vowel names and sounds. This includes a mystery letter game, tracing the shapes of letters while singing songs, and an alphabet bingo game.

Jennifer Klausner has been teaching 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders at Ridge Ranch and Memorial to identify and discuss days of the week and a wide range of emotions in Spanish. This includes expressing their favorite days of the week and discussing yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Students continue to participate by drawing, speaking, listening, and guessing in a Pictionary-style game about how they feel on a specific week day. They watched, sang, and moved along to lively music videos to help remember Spanish day vocabulary such as a Spanish song based on "We Will Rock You." They have also begun exploring, learning, and practicing Spanish months of the year and which ones correspond to birthdays and specific holidays. Soon they will sing each month while dancing the Macarena!

Ms. Starace’s kindergarten class did a STEM challenge of building beaver dams out of sticks, rocks, and clay to learn about how animals change the environment to meet their needs. Beavers are known as nature’s architects and engineers because they constantly change the environment to meet their needs. After students built a beaver dam, water was poured into each container to test how well each design slowed the flow of water. The students noticed that some designs worked better than others but that all of their beaver dams slowed the flow of water. Great work, kindergarten!

Who doesn’t love Mrs. Oliff? Mrs. Oliff recently accepted her most awesome teacher award from one of her first graders. Paramus is lucky to have so many awesome teachers!

Memorial School and Ridge Ranch school counselors Poonam Aier and Laurie Corizzo held a mental health awareness night. They started the evening with a zoom session followed by interactive drive-by events at each school.