A Look Inside Tech

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Our kindergarten through fourth-grade students rotate to specialists throughout the week, fully rounding out their STREAM (science, technology, religion, engineering, and math) curriculum.

From Spanish and technology to P.E. and music, our Falcons are being challenged in new and exciting ways, keeping them fully engaged each and every day!

Recently, in technology, our students have been tackling a rich mix of projects and balancing the hard work with some friendly competition at the end of each class.

The kindergarten and first-grade classes have been wrapping up their coding lessons and developing their typing efficiency.

The second-grade students have been writing stories about a dog, using the Keynote app to prepare a presentation that shares the tale.

In third grade, the students are mastering Google Slides by writing a presentation on a specific country.

Lastly, the fourth-grade students, are working on tinker modeling, which we will share more about on the Falcon Feed blog in the weeks ahead.

The technology room is very quiet as each of the students focuses on their projects, and in the final minutes of class, breaks out into excited chatter, happy dances, and encouraging chants as students compete against each other in educational brain-break games.

Oh, but all the games are in Spanish, adding a different twist on brain-break time!

Discovering Pi

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While Pi Day may have taken place while the students were out on spring break, there was no way Mrs. Heinz (our middle school math teacher) was going to let the day go by unrecognized!

What is Pi Day you say?

Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) around the world. Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159. Pi Day is an annual opportunity for math enthusiasts to recite the infinite digits of Pi, talk to their friends about math, and eat pie.

At Frassati, our sixth-grade students did a lab experiment to discover (and celebrate!) Pi.

In this lesson, students blew bubbles on their desks and then measured the circumference and diameter of the bubbles they created.

The sixth graders then recorded their data for analysis and reviewed their findings as a class. To sweeten the lab, the experiment ended with slices of pie for all to enjoy!

Celebrating Reading & Dr. Seuss

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Every year on March 2, schools all across America celebrate National Read Across America Day, which also happens to be Dr. Seuss’s birthday.

While every grade at Frassati was celebrating this special date, our preschool classes turned the one-day celebration into a weeklong event, and boy was it a fun one!

On Monday, Sam invited the students to taste-test green-eggs and ham.

The students even wore their best greens to celebrate the special delicacy of the day.

On Tuesday the preschool students celebrated Dr. Seuss’s birthday by wearing their favorite hats to school.

They also made Thing 1 & Thing 2 hair-hats, and a famous red and white striped hat that belonged to a crazy feline.

Wednesday was all about Fox in Socks and The Foot Book.

Thursday was all about reading, finding word patterns, rhymes, and more!

To close out the fun, the students celebrated Wacky Wednesday on a Friday.

What a great way to celebrate all that we love about books and reading!

 

 

** Please note that preschool students remove their masks when they are in the classroom.

Creating New Ways

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As we approach the one-year anniversary of last year’s virtual-learning experience, it is hard to not feel in awe of all that this school year has held! From a virtual 5K to a handful of clubs that have been able to meet in-person, to our annual Christmas Concert being recorded and shared via YouTube, to the creative ways our students celebrated Catholic Schools Week while still following COVID guidelines, it has been remarkable to see how our Falcon family has created new ways to “gather”.

One significant way in which families and students came together for a common good took place during Catholic Schools Week when the Student Ambassadors hosted a food drive for the White Bear Lake Area Emergency Food Shelf.

The Student Ambassadors coordinated all aspects of Catholic Schools Week and added in the food drive as a community service project. Students were encouraged to bring items during the week and to select one of four bins to place their donations in. Each of the bins had pictures taped to them of teachers and Ambassadors. Where students placed their donations, was a vote for the people pictured on that trash bin to be pied in the face.

Families sent an astounding number of items to school with their students that week! Mrs. Heinz, the Student Ambassadors advisor, had to deliver the donations in two separate truckloads, as it totaled 1,046 pounds!

The initiative was such a smashing success, that the Student Ambassadors decided to go all-in on the pie-throwing celebration.

Since assemblies are not an option this year, the Student Ambassadors got creative and developed a schedule for some classes to attend the pie-throwing in person, while other classes could watch via Google live. Classes shifted in and out of Kohler Hall, taking turns participating in the fun.

As students took their seats, and Ambassadors set up their live-stream, students’ names were drawn at random, and those individuals got to throw the pies.

What began as families gathering at home to collect donations for those in need, translated into a virtual assembly where Falcons were gathering from their individual classrooms, celebrating the success of our community initiative.

We would like to say a very special thank you to all who supported this project and share a very special thank you to the 2020-2021 Student Ambassadors for creating new ways for us to have fun, come together, and live out our Frassati mission!

Please enjoy this roundup of photos from the excitement: