Throughout this school year, two classes from different parts of the district have made a special connection. Stephanie Zelinski's third grade class at Idle Hour Elementary School has been corresponding as pen pals with Valerie O'Connell and Susan Meade's third grade class at Cherokee Street Elementary School. This program has been beneficial to the students both in terms of improving their writing skills and fostering their social-emotional development.

Recently, the two classes finally met “face to face” through a video conference so the students could introduce themselves in real time and discuss their writing. To celebrate, the classes also enjoyed playing a few rounds of multiplication bingo together.

Valerie Calvo, a talented and civic-minded fifth grader from Idle Hour Elementary School, was recently chosen by Assemblyman Jarret Gandolfo as the winner of his Earth Day poster contest.

The contest was open to all fourth to eighth graders residing in New York’s State District 7 and its theme was “A Greener Long Island,” with the option to choose between the topics “saving water,” “preventing litter,” “saving animals,” and “energy champions.” Calvo’s winning poster is now being displayed in Gandolfo’s Albany office until Earth Day 2022. Posters by Idle Hour’s Kylah Getty and Olivia Buckley, as well as John Pearl’s Charlotte Maffetone and Sophia Stecker will also hang in Gandolfo’s local Bayport office.

Connetquot Central School District congratulates Calvo on this wonderful accomplishment and commends all the students who participated.

An impressive array of multi-media artwork by six Connetquot students in Krystal Zaglool’s art classes was recently showcased in the children’s category of Suffolk County Art Leaders Association’s 2021 virtual art exhibition. The district congratulates Alondra Sorto (grade 5), Brooke Kelly (grade 2), Michael Winter (grade 4) and Valerie Calvo (grade 5), from Idle Hour Elementary School and Pola Szwedt (grade 4) and Caydence Shupack (kindergarten) from John Pearl Elementary School.

To view the exhibition, click here: https://www.scalaart.org/

Students in Claire Bancroft’s and Lanie Goodman’s kindergarten classes at Idle Hour Elementary School recently participated in a virtual field trip to the “Teddy Bear Clinic,” an injury prevention program sponsored by the Trauma Center at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital. Each student brought in their own stuffed animal and learned how to care for and properly apply bandages to their fuzzy friends while suited up in surgical masks and scrub caps.

https://youtu.be/d6KMbkRKrtc

The poetry of Shel Silverstein planted the seed of creative expression for fourth graders at Idle Hour Elementary School. Inspired by Silverstein’s work, the students wrote poems on pieces of paper shaped like leaves, which library media specialist Julia DeMaio then arranged into a “poet-tree” on a bulletin board in the school hallway. Pictured are Matthew O' Hagen (left) and Kayla Rosen (right) who posed proudly with the blooming “poet-tree.”