Achieving Personal and Academic Excellence through Individualized Education

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Kate’s Note:

What causes the transition from ―I didn’t do it!‖ to ―He made me do it‖ to ―I did it on accident‖ to ―I shouldn’t have done it and I’m really sorry‖? Some days, we teachers and parents feel like all we are doing is trying to help kids develop impulse control. But,

perhaps, that is the beginning of becoming civilized!

The newborn communicates every impulse – pain, hunger, fatigue, discomfort – and it is important for those needs to be quickly met for the baby to acquire confidence and a

sense of safety. The infant is trying to survive. But very quickly, ―needs‖ can become confused with ―wants‖. It can be complicated for those of us who naturally adore the perfect individual placed in our midst to show our love by setting limits and teaching

control of certain impulses.

Here’s the payoff. Children who have not had every want and desire met in the toddler years, enter school with confidence and a sense that others matter. It is easy for them to

accept rules and limits, because they have internalized behavioral ―brakes‖. They know they are loved and valued, and they learn to relate to others in a loving way.

For some, ownership and responsibility for actions, come at age four; for some it’s age eight; and for some twelve and beyond. There is no norm. But we know it must take

place at some point in order for us to become effective, caring people.

Childhood is made for joy, serendipity, experimenting and easing toward the words, ―I

shouldn’t have done that and I’m really sorry.‖ Perhaps the child can even get to the point of saying ―Wait – I’m going to make another choice‖.

Kate

October 2009

Rivendell Newsletter october 2009 - Issue #39 Published September—May Fed Tax I D #84-0715315

Property of Rivendell School of Northern Colorado · 1800 E. Prospect Road · Fort Collins · CO · 80525

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Rivendell School does not discriminate on basis off race, creed, color, sex, national origin or physical

handicap in any educational program or activity sponsored by the school.

Board Members’ Contact Information

Craig Rickey—secretary

Phone#: 225-1561

e-mail: craig@rivendell-school.org

Edward Smithwick—president

Phone : 377-0766

e-mail: edward@rivendell-school.org

Jacqui Zipser

Phone#: 493-8176

e-mail: jacqui@rivendell-school.org

Jamie Yost

Phone#: 686-2297

e-mail: jamieyost@comcast.net

Karen Wolff —treasurer

Phone#: 897-3028

e-mail: karenw@rivendell-school.org

Maggie Walsh

Phone#: 482-20182

e-mail: maggiew@rivendell-school.org

Patrick Quinn

e-mail: patrick@rivendell-school.org

Paul Hach

Phone#: 962-6787

e-mail: paul@rivendell-school.org

Tara Bunch—VP

Phone#: 484-9004

e-mail: tara@rivendell-school.org

Tracy Lowrey

Phone#: 407-9023

e-mail: tracy@rivendell-school.org

Kate Duncan (not a voting Board member)

Phone #: 223-9716

e-mail: kate@rivendell-school.org

Vicki Mykles - Development Director (non-voting)

Phone#: 484-2696

e-mail: vicki@rivendell-school.org

“Vegetables are a must on a diet.

I suggest carrot cake, zucchini bread, and pumpkin pie.”

~ Jim Davis, American actor

Calendar of Events

Morning daycare 7:30—8 AM Classrooms open 8 AM Instruction starts 8:30 AM Pick-up 3:20—3:30 Afternoon daycare 3:20—6 PM

Days Off—no school or daycare Oct 12 Fall Intermission Oct 23, 30 Parent-Teacher Conferences Nov 25, 26, 27 Thanksgiving Break Dec 21—Jan 1 Winter Break—

dismissal at 11:30 am

(Back to school - Jan/4) Jan 18 Martin Luther King, Jr Day Feb 15 Presidents’ Day March 15-19 Spring Break April 9, 16 Parent-Teacher Conferences May 27 Last Day of School - out at 11:30 am

Special Dates -

~ watch this space monthly for updates

Oct 30 FUNFest fun-raiser

May 6 Spring Program

- Rocky Mountain High May 17 start of Sky Ranch

Just A Reminder: Morning daycare

opens at 7:30 a.m.

Right next to the ―Put It Here‖ box is a small safe labeled, ―Tuition Troll‖. With so much activity going on at the front counter, we think The Troll is the best place for you to put your payment check. You do not need to give us

your statement with your payment. Make sure to push the check all the way in. The ―Put It Here‖ box is where you should return paperwork, book

O f f i c e

W i n d o w

PLEASE continue to bring in the Morning Fresh Dairy bottle caps, Box

Tops for Education coupons, and printer cartridges. They are worth free money for your school.

Thank you Beverly Upham and Dylan DeMoss for counting out and arranging the pick-up for our dairy caps

Beverly is also managing our Box Tops for Educa-tion program. We have a couple of months before we will be sending in the mid-year collection. Look at your cereals, Ziplocs, Kleenex and various Gen-eral Mills foods for the ―Box Tops for Education‖ tabs. Bring them in to us!!

5th Grade Free Ski Passport

The 5th Grade Free Ski Passport is here! Pick one up. And while you are at the office, buy a Gold C or eBook coupon book for the skiing coupons (rentals, entrance fees, etc.) We won’t have the coupon books beyond the end of October, so do it now!!

We have several large

bowls left over from the

Potluck Picnic. We hope

the owners will pick

them up at the office.

An information sheet went home last week explaining how we do

student photos: the proofs, the or-dering, and other details. If you

need another copy, stop by the office. The most important thing

you need to know is that Thursday, Oct. 15th is student photo day.

“Pennies For Peace”

Collection Tote Bags

Claire Neff, an Older Kid, approached us with a brilliant idea. She suggested we decorate small totes for Rivendell

kids to carry along while trick-or-treating to collect for our ―Pennies for Peace‖ project.

We will wrap up our ―Pennies for Peace‖ efforts the week before Thanksgiving, so as to receive matching funds from the Stryker Foundation. Thank you to all the kids and their families for all the effort put into this worthwhile cause.

Do you shop at Albertson’s? If you do, pick up a Community Partners scan card. Use the card when

you check out and the school gets a percent of your purchases in cash. You can also buy Albertson scrip cards and give more rebate money to Rivendell, as well as, give your May tuition some credit.

Monday, 10/26 - all students need to start bringing their pumpkins in for Pumpkin

Carving Day on Wednesday, the 28th. Please choose a size that is easy for your child to carry and carve. Your child may love a huge pumpkin, but being able to carry it is

important. Also, stay away from pie pumpkins which are not easy to carve. Please

the label pumpkin on top with the child’s name.

Monday, 10/26 - 5th Graders are invited to bring to school their best pumpkin creation to dis-

play in the Commons. Be imaginative! Be creative! Try non-traditional ways of decorating your pumpkin face, but keep it non-gory.

Wednesday, 10/28, 2:00 PM Pumpkin Carving Day – (Inclement weather will cancel this activity.)

Children take the pumpkin they brought in and scoop out the seeds and draw their idea of the

perfect pumpkin face, which is carved out by a helper. These ―grins‖ are then taken home to help decorate the house.

We use parents and 5th graders as carving helpers and as enthusiastic support. Please bring your favorite carving tool and join us.

We will be needing a lot of help, so—Come One! Come All!

Halloween Parade and Party - Thursday, October 29, 2:00 p.m. The Costumes! Costumes should come to school in a marked bag, not worn to school.

Please make the costume easy to put on and keep the swords, lances & pokey things at home—they create problems with the excitment of the occasion and our space

limitations. We are asking that costumes be in good taste and not involve blood

and violence. * * Parents are welcome to come and help children dress. We will start dressing around 1:45 PM.

The Parade! The costume parade starts at 2:00! Weather will influence the parade route.

We like parading outside, but if this is not possible we will parade through the school. The parade will circle several times so you can see all the fun costumes.

The Party! Classroom parents are being coordinated on the supplies and food needed

for the party treats and the fun when the children return to their classes.

Don’t Forget - Oct. 23 & 30, Friday Parent - Teacher Conference Days

No school/preschool/daycare these two days

So many fun activities for students and families during October! Read on . . .

October Activities Extraordinaire

October 30, Friday ~ FUN Fest 5:30-8:30 pm at Rivendell

(school carnival/fundraiser) Tickets going on sale soon! Rivendell families, friends & relatives welcome!

Come have Fun! Games, Food, Prizes, Friends! Wear a costume!

Words from our Spanish Teacher YK are developing their Spanish skills as they take turns leading the class in counting and reciting days of the week. Take time to look at their Span-ish papers and see what they have learned about colors, dinosaurs, families and shapes. The MK have just completed the chapter book Get Ready for

Gabi, A Crazy, Mixed-Up Spanglish Day. They en-

joyed hearing about the challenges and adventures of this bilingual school girl. We also studied idi-oms in Spanish and English. Ask your student to share one that they learned. The OK classes will be participating in a Latin

American marketplace on Thursday, November 19. This will culminate a Latin American cultural study with a visit to 'el mercado'. Students need to make some simple crafts to sell at the marketplace. Some ideas for crafts are beaded bracelets, neck-laces or keychains, clay pinch pots or figures, yarn God's eyes, or other designs. Students can work individually or in groups. Each student should plan on making at least 15 - 20 items to bring to the market. Items should be fairly simple and inex-pensive. Each child will be given 10 pesos to shop with at the mar-ketplace. Preschoolers, YK and MK will also be given 2 - 4 pesos so they can visit the market and enjoy the experience too. We will have fun practicing our Spanish phrases and enjoying the culture in our own Rivendell commons. Students are encouraged to wear som-breros, ponchos or whatever they have to suit the occasion. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at kevindyer1@comcast.net or #229-9692. Hispanic Heritage Month is September 15 - Oc-tober 15; watch for various celebrations and infor-mation about the Spanish culture.

Preschoolers Mary, Maggie, Lois, Holly

September just flew by and the Preschoolers

are off to a great start. They are all settling in

well and learning our routine. We have just

wrapped up our unit on Dinosaurs and we are

about to begin our Mayan studies. Your children

will learn about: homes, families, food, household

goods, clothing, art and crafts from the Mayan

child’s perspective. We will set up a market

place, practice a little weaving and send the doll

corner back into the past.

We have a lot to look forward to in the upcoming

month. First there is Pumpkin carving, then

there is the Halloween Party, and don’t forget

about Fun Fest. It should be a pretty exciting

month. Sign up sheets are outside of our class-

room doors for fall conferences. This is a great

opportunity for us to sit down with you and set

some goals for your child, as well as answer any

of those questions you might still have.

Fall is in the air, a good reminder to make sure

your child has extra warm clothing, hats, mit-

tens, and boots. Also be sure that you have snow

pants at school every day. The snow will be here

in no time. We all know that preschoolers like to

get in the sand and play. The sand can get wet

and cold and snow pants keep us warm and dry. A

dry preschooler is a happy preschooler!

The Fridays of October 23 & 30th are Conference Days. Conferences are a vital piece in the school - parent communications concerning each student.

Sign-up sheets are at each class. We ask, if possible, for parents of students who have two families to schedule conference times together. This will maximize the teacher’s time and al-

low for all parties to receive the same information. We do understand there may be cases when separate times are needed.

Conferences are conducted between the teacher and the parents. We know with school being closed for the day, sometimes children need to come too. Please provide for some quiet entertainment, and remind them that the ―school rules‖ still apply. It is a working day; the staff cannot supervise the children.

Conference scheduling is tight. We will make every effort to stay on schedule; please be on-time.

O L D E R KIDS -Ashley, Jane, Julia This week, we completed our topic unit on dinosaurs. Our final project, dinosaur newspapers are on display in the hall leading to the pre-school. Our students did inter-views of their dinosaurs, wrote an article on what extinc-tion theory they felt was most probable and a narrative story about their dinosaur. There are also many individ-ual touches on their newspapers. Please go and take a look. We are proud of our budding journalists and illus-trators. Novel study continues with Because of Winn Dixie.

The character sketches that our students have created are extraordinary. The pictures, words and phrases that make

up these character sketches invite you into the minds and hearts of the characters. Last week, our students created a thesis about how Winn Dixie had changed the preacher. Then they went back into text and found specific exam-ples of how Winn Dixie had changed the preacher and added those to the paragraph they were writing. Conclud-ing with a flourish or really a statement similar to their thesis demonstrated to our students how easy and satisfy-ing it can be to write about good literature. Their final project for this novel study will be to write a literary essay on the changes Winn Dixie wrought on a whole series of characters. Writer’s workshop has begun. We reviewed the writing process and introduced our writing center. We

start with prewriting (brainstorming, MCPASS, creating webs, and making idea and word banks.) Then we pro-ceed on to creating a rough draft, conferencing with a teacher and a peer is the next step. Revision occurs during conferencing and then after conferencing on an individual basis. After a final conference editing takes place. Publica-tion, the last step of the writing process, can be in either written or typed form. We have taken our dinosaur stories through this process, and next our Halloween stories will follow the same path. We will be studying three ancient civilizations: the Maya, Aztec, and Inca for topic starting this week. We will start by studying math, art, and astronomy all

through a Mayan perspective. The Mayans were an ex-tremely artistic people, so we will be doing several hands-on art projects in an attempt to understand and feel a part of their culture and time. They were also amazing mathe-maticians. The numbering system used by the Mayas was based on twenty, not ten, like ours. Zero was represented by a sort of shell shaped like a football. Ones were shown as dots; fives as straight lines. We will be exploring their mathematical language by ourselves and with Pat.

COMPUTER LAB - Sarah DeNardo

We have had a great start to Computers this year. I've had a chance to assess the comfort level different kids have with the computer and their skill level. With the Younger Kids I will be working on fa-miliarizing them as to how to use the mouse, and keyboard through educa-tional games such as www.starfall.com and www.abcya.com. I would also like to get them comfortable and familiar with word processing programs. Many of the kids are enjoying typing their names and maybe a short letter. They really enjoy playing with the sizing and font style. This play will help familiarize them with many of the features in a less threatening way. In Middle Kids we have started keyboarding. Learning key-boarding will greatly reduce the stress they may feel over writing and will be a skill they will need for the rest of their life.

We have also been checking out some websites that could help them study vo-cabulary, www.spellingcity.com, and math skills, www.coolmathgames.com. We will be working on word processing and presentations through out the year along with some fun. The Older Kids jumped right into projects. Keep an eye out for their dinosaur newspapers to see the word processing they have done for that. We also used time in the lab for research. To start out the year we fol-lowed an online tutorial on navigating

safely and efficiently on the web called ―Welcome to the Web‖. They should be bringing home those packets. We will continue keyboarding practice and work more on their word processing and pres-entation skills along with some fun along the way.

Younger Kids Seth, Suzanne, Scilla

The Younger Kids are bubbling with enthusi-asm and delight. There is a nip in the air and darkness comes quickly after school dis-missal, but our days at school are bright and busy. We are now full swing into our sched-ules with work sessions being done every day. It is such a joy for us to see the growth of the students, both academically and socially, so early in the school year.

We have concluded our study of dinosaurs but our display of the dinosaur time-line is still up. Please take a walk through the halls and find the plethora of growing dinosaurs.. The children are very proud of their work. Our new theme centers on the ancient civili-zations of the Maya, Incas and Aztecs. We are learning about how they studied the stars, developed a new way of living as farmers, and the importance they placed on corn and pottery. Of course, their carvings and pyra-mids are amazing and we are trying our hand at these two creative and difficult tasks. This

topic will continue throughout the month of October. Friday Folders continue to be stuffed full of papers which show all the incredible and hard work completed by the students. Not only are the children completing the work itself, but they are learning to work independently and ignore the little distractions; two difficult skills to master no matter what age. We are grateful for the parents who sit down on the weekends to go over the work and give en-couragement and support. This sets a helpful

expectation in the minds of the children and supports the idea that working at work ses-sions is important, not only to the teachers but to their parents as well. Our reading volunteers are dedicated and can give great reviews on the progress we have made since September. It is exciting to see more students reading and choosing reading as a free choice.

Middle Kids ~Michele, Bryce, Inta

The Middle Kids are cruising into fall, and have wrapped up our study of dinosaurs. We enjoyed learning about those fascinating, prehistoric crea-tures through guest speakers, our field trip to Dino-saur Ridge, and research for our recitations. We are now moving into a unit on Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs. We will be studying about many aspects of these ancient civilizations, including food, dress, daily lifestyle, ceremonies, and art. All other aca-

demic subjects are well under way, and the kids are making great progress. We encourage the kids to take their math book home occasionally, either on a weeknight when the homework load is light, or over the weekend. It is a great way to make progress, and it is also a way for parents to get a better idea of the work their child is doing at school. One of our main goals for Middle Kids is that they learn to take responsibility for themselves. One of the ways we help them learn this is by assigning

homework during the week and having them trans-port their homework folders to and from home. They are responsible for doing the work, then showing it to a parent to receive an approving sig-nature. There are other ways young kids can start to learn responsibility. We encourage parents to assign certain daily or weekly chores at home so that all members of the family can have investment in their environment. Another very simple way is to have them be in charge of carrying their things into school and making sure all items are put where they belong (backpack, homework folder, lunch ticket, lunch box, etc.) Think of it this way - the more they do, the less we have to worry about.

- and, the better they feel about themselves! We will once again be making the autumn trek to Miller Farm for their Fall Festival. The Middle Kids always enjoy this trip. This year the trip will be on Friday, October 16th. We will be inviting parents who are willing to help drive some kids and join in the harvest! Make sure you check the homework folder and get the permission slip back to your child’s teacher.

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Daily Schedule

Morning Daycare 7:00—8:00 AM Classrooms Open 8:00 AM Instruction Starts! 8:30 AM Preschool Day Ends 3:00 PM School Day Ends 3:20 PM Outside Pick-up 3:20—3:30 PM - preschoolers picked up in the classroom After School Daycare 3:30—6:00 PM Cell Phone: (after 4:00 pm) #310-9369 FAX #493-9056 E-mail office@rivendell-school.org Web Site www.rivendell-school.org

Lunch Schedule Preschool 11:30 AM Younger Kids 11:30 AM Middle Kids 11:45 AM Older Kids 12:00 noon

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