Happy Retirement Ms Keniry

Who’s in charge when the Principal isn’t here? The Vice Principal! Or in other words, Ms Keniry.

Ms Keniry taught in a lot of schools before she came to Chickering such as schools in South America for 2 years, Framingham for 20 years, and a Japanese School in Boston for 10 years. She was at Chickering School for 10 years. Ms Keniry said that the thing she will miss most about Chickering is “the kids.”  She says that she gets very lonely during the summer when she is alone with the staff, but when the kids come back in the fall she isn’t lonely any more and really enjoys working with the students. Ms Keniry’s impressions when she first came here were “Chickering was the best school in the whole state”.

Ms Keniry taught in many schools and enjoyed each one for its unique characteristics. Ms Keniry taught the kids and staff of Chickering School many things and was a very thoughtful and considerate Vice Principal.

Ms Keniry left a legacy that will be at the school for generations. The legacy she left was the blue tickets and blue ticket awards. If you do something nice to help a teacher or student they might give you a blue ticket or blue ticket award. All the blue tickets get turned to cash and are used for kids who don’t have enough money to go to camp. On Ms Keniry’s last day at Chickering she blue reindeerreceived a blue reindeer covered in blue tickets that Student Council group A worked on.

We will all miss her very much. We interviewed Ms Keniry about her retirement and thought you might like to hear her answers in her own words. (Please click on the podcast below).

Ms_Keniry_interview

Reported by Seika and Mariam

DinoMan

Life size inflatable dinosaur modelHuge! Gigantic! Creatures filled the gym of Chickering School. What are they? Life size colorful blow-up dinosaurs. Who are they for?

We asked some students who were learning about The Dinosaur Unit in second grade two questions: What is your favorite dinosaur and why? From Mrs. Baker’s class, Andrew said that the Plautus because he likes how the tail and neck is really long. Addie likes the Pterodactyl because it can fly. From Mrs. Brannelly’s class, Amy said that she likes the Pterodactyl because it can fly. Theo , T Rex because it’s huge! From Ms. Genetilli’s class, Ingrid said that she liked the Brontosaurus because it’s a plant eater and she likes plants. Aiden said that he likes the Stegosaurus because he likes spikey things. From Mrs. Moran’s class, Noah likes the T Rex because it’s one the most bad dinosaurs, it can kill other dinosaurs. From Mrs. Young’s class, Kevin likes the T Rex because it has three horns.

The second question is what was one new dinosaur fact you learned from Dino Man?

– Kevin learned that the dinosaurs that Dinoman showed them were not real dinosaurs.
– Addie learned that you can dig for dinosaur bones.
– Amy said that paleontologist put the bones the wrong way in museums.
– Ingrid learned that not all dinosaurs have big bones.
– Aiden said that the egg is more oval than round.

We interviewed lots of kids about dinosaurs and their visit to. Dinoman is a person who specializes in dinosaurs, called a Paleontologist. We asked kids what they learned from Dinoman. The second grade was learning about dinosaurs in science. The second grade had to pick a dinosaur that they liked and make a poster or diorama about it. We interviewed 1 or 2 students from each class in second grade. They all learned something new.

Reported by: Peter, Jonathan,Sara and Iona


Chickering Reporters

Have you ever made a podcast? Or an Animoto video? Well if you haven’t, and would like to, you might consider starting reporters at your school.

Chickering Reporters is a fun activity in our school for kids who do not participate in band. Reporting is an educational and enjoyable program for our kids.

We are able to pick our own topic ideas to investigate. The kids that choose the same topics meet on long Wednesdays, to plan what they are going to do.  They are kids from different classes.  In order to figure out what we need to work on we have to meet together to agree. We have a digital workspace called a wiki.  We meet and brainstorm ideas for our present posts both in person and virtually.

What happens each day, is one class comes and reports on the topic that they had picked to report on.  The next time we meet, we look over all the work we did, and make a plan for what we will do next. When we finish our post we take pictures, create podcasts, and/or videos to go along with the post. Mrs. Chase then checks over our work and suggests  final edits. Then we put the blog post, videos, etc. on chickeringreports.edublogs.org. We self-assess our work by  reading our post and listening to our podcast or video. Next we answer the questions given on the self -assessment sheet. When we interviewed some of the fifth graders about what they thought of being a reporter, everyone said they “loved it”.  When we have finished our posts we think about new topics we could write about for our next post. We make new groups, then we will follow these steps again.

Here are a few students’ thoughts on Chickering Reporters.

Chickering Reporter Interviews

 

Reported by: Andriana, Anabel, Isabella F., Brickley, Caroline W.,  and Hannah T.

Matt Noyes – The Marvelous Meterologist

Boom! Crash! Crackle! Bang! We needed an expert on weather noise so we called in a pro!  Matt Noyes, a weather expert on NCN TV news. It is watched by people all across New England. He visited our school to teach us and tell us about his job. He told us about his interest in weather and about when he was in high school he wanted a job that he would enjoy. He taught us about storms and the water cycle. He taught us about how to be safe during violent storms. He talked to us about different kinds of percipitation and different kinds of clouds. We did some experiments with Matt showing us how storms are created and work. Then we watched a movie about lightning and some people had some questions and we interviewed Matt here are the questions we asked.

1. What were you interested in as a kid?
2. I would be nervous before going on Television — What is it like for you before you go “live” each night for the weather?
3. What is your favorite part of doing the weather?

4. How do you know where to point your hands on the green screen?
5. Do you read your lines off a screen? If not, how do you know what to say?

To hear Mr. Noyes’ answers to the questions above, please click on the link below.

  Matt Noyes interview

 Thanks, Matt Noyes, for letting us interview you, we appreciate all the information you gave us. We hope you enjoyed our post about having Matt Noyes as a Chickering school guest.

By:Maggie, Alex A., and Avery