Career Day

Fashion Designers and Runway Model

 Champion Horse Rider

Secret FBI Agent and Pro Athletes

Rancher

During recent guidance lessons, students have been learning about careers.  On April 23rd, they were invited to dress as a future career option.  As you can see, they were many creative outfits!

Veterinarian

Salon Owner

Business Manager

Doctor

Lego Engineer

Health Care Professionals

Ballerinas

Playwright and Teacher

Military Hero

Future Athletic Stars
 with Photographer (Ms. Carroll)

Gold Medalists

Fool's Fun

First grader with Linda Vienneau, our Kitchen Manger.

On April 1st, this first grader made a "Fool's Hat" for Ms. Vienneau, he said it was "to give her a taste of her own medicine."  Throughout the day, Ms. Vienneau had played a number of April Fool's Day pranks on students and faculty.  For example, she cut up the lunch order slips and glued them on to long pieces of paper.  In the morning, when students and teachers went to fill out the order forms they had a good chuckle.

Mrs. V-No has school spirit!

She decorated pumpkins as Ernie & Bert
to decorate the kitchen for fall.

Ms. Vienneau, our Kitchen Manager, has a knack for spreading school spirit!  Her enthusiasm is a perfect fit for prek-2 school.  She even spells her name tag phonetically as V-No.  Here are some examples of the many ways Ms. V-No adds fun to our school:

• Throughout the year, she decorates the kitchen for each season with her own hand-made creations, including gingerbread houses and specially decorated pumpkins.

With students on Book Character Day.

• She randomly surprises students with stickers for eating their vegetables and trying new dishes. 

• She created 'Lucky Lunch Day', to encourage students who might not normally buy a lunch to try school food.  (Students who participate are randomly chosen for prizes she purchased).

• If there is a surplus of a particular side item, she draws funny faces on them to entice students to choose it.  (A clever way to promote white milk over chocolate).

• She not only dresses up for school theme days, i.e., "Career Day" and "Book Character Day," she also creates her own theme days.  For example, on Cinco de Mayo you will find her wearing a sombrero and mustache.

Lucky Lunch Prizes

• On her own birthday, she dons a birthday crown and gives away special pencils.

• She is also a talented cake maker who creates special cakes for staff meetings and retirement parties.

• She participates in school events on weekends and evenings-even bringing along her grown daughter to share a PTO Breakfast with Santa.

Cake she created for staff members
.

• Ms. V-No is always ready with age appropriate jokes. "What do you say if someone tries to take your cheese?....Nacho-cheese."  (Told while serving nachos).

Spending a Saturday morning with
 her daughter at a PTO event.

Posters she created to advertise
lunch menu.

PRSD stars against bullying

Kudos to Pentucket High School 

for creating this amazing music video with an anti-bullying message!

This clip was posted on the Vimeo website, along with many others created by Pentucket students and staff members.  Footage from School Committee Meetings and past athletic events are also 

featured on the website at:  https://vimeo.com/prsd/videos.

Teachers' Pets

Mrs. Brennan, School Psychologist, with her 4 legged jogging buddy.

Mrs. Shea's 4 pound kitty and 134 pound dog.

Just for fun, these animals were featured on our lobby bulletin board for September. Staff members sent in pictures of many beloved pets which also included a three legged cat, a guinea pig, a donkey, several horses and a variety of other critters.  Students and visitors have enjoyed discussing the pictures and reading the interesting captions.

PE Teacher, Ms. Moody & Tobby

The pet Prek Teacher Miss Patty wishes she had.

Maisy Byrnes loves to read

Future FNS Workers

Future Engineer
(Designer of the next renovation project.)

On May 9th, students and faculty members celebrated "Career Day" by dressing up in outfits to represent possible future careers.  During lunchtime our Guidance Counselor, Sarah Angell, followed up on classroom discussions about careers by polling students and charting their choices.                                

 

Future School Nurses

Most popular careers:  pro athletes, teachers, artists, doctors/nurses and veterinarians. 

Most unique careers:  pig farmer, gemologist, medical safari worker, lego designer, paleontologist, exterminator, archaeological, secret serviceman and monkey zoologist.

Future Teachers and Principal

These could be the faces at Sweetsir School in 20 years!

Special Visitors

Look who stopped by to visit our kindergarten classes today! Check back later for more pictures of Dean Kosch's Curious Creatures!

Pajama Day Celebration

Students loved wearing pajamas to school to celebrate their amazing efforts to learn math facts. Here are some of the moments I captured on Pajama Day...  

Pointing to their class on the 'Math Fact Power Hour' graph.

Thinking & collaborating in small groups.

Vision & hearing screenings with Nurse Lozier.

Playing "Guess the Verb".



Check out the PJs on these two Lucky Charms.



Dr. Mulqueen shaking hands with second graders.

Dr. Mulqueen, our future Superintendent, stopped by Sweetsir for a visit.  Although he does not officially begin working for Pentucket until July, he spent two days meeting with staff members across the district.  It was impressive that he took this time out of his busy schedule to ask our input about things that will help facilitate a smooth leadership transition.  

Book Characters

Many interesting book characters greeted students on Dr. Seuss's birthday. Among them were Viola Swamp (Ms. Caproni), Teacher from the Black Lagoon, Thing One (Ms. Vienneau) from The Cat and the Hat and the Conductor (Ms. LeGrow) from The Polar Express. This special day was earned by our first and second graders amazing efforts to master math facts.  On Thursday, March 8th, we will also be celebrating with a school-wide "Pajama Day".


I had a blast seeing students react to my costume from  Have You Filled A Bucket today?.  Many responded with giggles and surprised looks upon recognizing the character from the book our school-wide theme is based upon.

Creative Math Instruction

Mrs. Grimes, Title One Math Teacher, created this number grid on the floor of her classroom.  

To help students develop number sense, she has them physically move from one number to another as they practice adding and subtracting.  On 'Stuffed Animal Day', students enjoyed having their favorite pals participate in the activity!  

Wizards Game Blast!

On January 31st, the H.S. basketball court with filled with laughter as Donaghue and Sweetsir Families watched the Harlem Wizards play against faculty members. 
The Merrimac PTO deserves high praise for arranging this fun filled family evening!!

Check out this video of game highlights and see the amazing trick players taught a preschooler during a pre-game visit to Sweetsir!

Why is there a 'blob' in the kitchen?

Watch this video to find out what is on the counter and why 

Chef Vienneau was wishing for 'smelly-vision.'

We have two fabulous women working in the Sweetsir School kitchen!!  Mrs. Chase and Mrs. Vienneau keep a super clean kitchen, are kind to children and take pride in making foods from scratch.  Take a look at this video and you will see why students love to buy hot lunch at Sweetsir!

Mrs. Vienneau became our Kitchen Manager this year after transferring from the Page School.  One of the reasons she wanted to come to Merrimac was to work in an early childhood setting.  She loves young children and has made the cafeteria a warm and inviting place.  She often surprises children with stickers for eating their vegetables or trying new foods.  She raffles off prizes for 'Lucky Lunch Day', decorates pumpkins as sesame street characters and even wore a crown on her birthday and gave away pencils.  It has been fun to have her as a member of our school.

Fall Fun

Mrs. Vienneau, our kitchen manager, decorated these cute pumpkins.  Children get a kick out of seeing Ernie & Bert in the school lunch line!



These two moms brewed up some fun!



THANK YOU PTO!

The October 21st Harvest Festival was a wonderful family event!  


Children had a blast jumping in the bouncy house, decorating cupcakes, eating cotton candy, playing lots of games and, if they were brave enough, walking through the Teacher's Haunted House. 

Loved this video!



Locked Up!

On Friday, June 10th, our kindergarten students walked down Church Street to visit the Police and Fire Departments.  Police Crusiers even drove along side them on the trip!  Our students appreciated Merrimac's First Responders taking the time to answer questions and give tours of the facilities.  As you can see, one of the highlights for students was being locked in the slammer.  LOL, perhaps, I should have titled this blog- Guess: Which Principal's Son Landed in Jail?  Hint- Mrs. Shea only has daughters, so it was not hers.

Curious Creatures

Alligator, Turtle, Frogs, Tarantula, Flying Squirrel and Lizards were seen at the Sweetsir School this week! 

Click on the video above to hear the kids excitement when Curious Creatures came to visit the preschool.  The turtle, who layed 20 eggs earlier in the week, allowed the preschoolers to ride on her back!  One of our Sweetsir Dad's, Dean Kosch, is the owner of Curious Creatures.  His presentation was superb!  He interweaves educational facts about each animal as he brings them out.  Students were fascinated as the squirrel flew across the room and the lizard dined on crickets.  Did you know that alligators fall asleep if you put them on their back and rub their tummy or that flying squirrels come out at night in Merrimac??