It's gotta be the 100th day of school when you see 5 year olds dressed as if they were 100! Our old-fashioned 5 years olds brought smiles to everyone's faces today as they celebrated the 100th day of school. For even more fun, our teachers used the Aging Booth app to age their kindergartners all the way to 100!

Okay, well, not exactly by osmosis but by Tangible Play's Osmo apps! Students in our first grade classes have been using Osmo's letters, numbers, tangrams and now Pizza Company apps and manipulatives to reinforce their spelling, counting, spatial reasoning, and financial literacy skills. Ms. Gunter and Ms. Stone's classes were visited by a developer from Osmo to give their feedback about how to make this program work even better in an educational setting. Way to learn, first graders!

It's not just the weather that's shaking things up in Ms. Ward's second grade classroom! Apple's new virtual teaching assistant, Apple Classroom and a small, but powerful device called the Apple TV are making some big waves too! Ms. Ward is one of our many Bridge Point teachers piloting the Apple Classroom app and Apple TV, and she absolutely loves both of these new initiatives!

With Apple Classroom, Ms. Ward can connect to all of her student's iPads in her room to seamlessly send her students to websites she has favorited on her iPad, open apps that her students have, monitor student use, as well as lock down iPads and be alerted to battery issues.

In this lesson, Ms. Ward sent her students to Weather.com to fill our their moon journals during science class. Then she sent them to PebbleGo, a kid-friendly research site that we subscribe to, to complete some guided research on Wild Weather. After that, her second graders created Keynote presentations and beamed their work up to the Apple TV to share with the class! That's sure is WILD!

STEAM equals Science & Technology interpreted through Engineering & the Arts, all based in Mathematical elements. To support and encourage more S.T.E.A.M activities in our classrooms, our district has provided Bridge Point with building, creating, programming and just plain tinkering tools! To model effective use and to get our students' brains flexing, we have created the Bridge Point Bobcat Brain Gym. K-5 classrooms, in search of a little extra brainercise, can join Ms. Osofsky, our GT teacher, on Fridays during F.I.T (Focused Instructional Time) to create, collaborate, cooperate, build, tinker, and well, THINK! If you hear a hullabaloo in the Think Tank  (located in our library) on Fridays, it's most definitely coming from all of that THINK-TINKERING! 

Did you see us in the Westlake Picayune? Read the article online or below and see how our new principal, Heather Meek is settling into her new job here. We are so glad to have you here at Bridge Point, Mrs. Meek!

Help streamline your classroom with Apple's new virtual teaching assistant, Classroom. Our Tech Services department helps to configure it, you just download it and try it out! Send your students to a website in a flash, showcase a student's work or help them focus by locking their iPad down to one App. Check out the App Integration Snapshot below and give it a try!

To complement Ms. Mill and Ms. McMillin's unit on on weather, they Skyped Ms. Mills' niece (who happens to be a second grader!) at St. Ambrose Elementary School in snowy Minnesota . Of course, on this January day, our students were dressed for 80 degree weather while their new friends in Minnesota showed off their daily wear of snow pants, boots, hats and gloves to simply go outside! Brrr! Students asked each other questions about the weather in each region and enjoyed a conversation that spanned over 1,000 miles. A great tip our second graders learned was if you wear a skirt to school in the snow, simply tuck it into your snow suit! And we thought snow suits were just for ski trips! 

January's Life Skill is RESPECT. BPE 4th graders show us what respect is all about in this student-created video. Earn a Bobcat paw by showing respect this month!