Our Lenten Journey

If you have been in the hallways of St. Sylvester recently, you have probably noticed the second grade "Lenten Journey" outside of our classroom. Each day of Lent is marked with a stone in order to make a pathway to the Three Days, and eventually Easter. As you can see there is a purple cross on each Sunday during Lent. Beside each of the purple crosses you will also notice a baggie. Each week on Monday, the second graders answer a prompt or complete a sentence to show what they are doing to prepare themselves for Easter. One example is " For Lent, I am giving up..." Another reads, " One kind thing I will do for someone else during Lent is..." In this way, the second graders are more easily able to fulfill their promises of fasting, prayer and almsgiving during the Lenten season. Ask your son or daughter about how they finished the above sentences and what the other Sunday sentences say on our Lenten journey.

Weather Watching

The students on the first floor of St. Sylvester School have been studying weather and the seasons in a variety of ways over the past few weeks. March is a great month to observe the weather since it changes so drastically (we hope) from the beginning to the end. This is why many classes discuss the old saying, “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.” In the one of the preschool classrooms, the students made both lion and lamb faces to hang in the hallway. The heading is not finished yet, though, because we have not quite reached “lamb” weather. In the arts and crafts after school club, the students also made lion faces out of paper plates. They used several different materials to make each lion unique! Hopefully, they will be able to make the lamb faces as the weather continues to warm up!

In the second grade classroom, the students have been learning about different tools that can be used to measure the weather. First, they observed an anemometer to measure the speed of the wind. Then, each child took a thermometer outside to measure the temperature difference from inside the school to outdoors in both Celsius and Fahrenheit. Finally, the students each made their own windsock. The pictures they drew were scenes of spring, which is just around the corner! After constructing the windsocks, the students brought them outside to test the wind strength and direction. It was only slightly breezy, but everyone agreed the wind was blowing southwest. We will continue to watch the all of the changes in the weather as Winter turns to Spring!