Author Joe McGee stood in front of Bayville Elementary School students and asked them to close their eyes and imagine a yellow room with a table and a red tablecloth and a cage with a fuzzy, white bunny.
 
“I just created an image in all of your heads,” Mr. McGee said. “That is the magic of storytelling.” He told the auditorium full of students that storytellers are like magicians. “We take words and create characters, and it’s like magic.”
 
Mr. McGee visited Bayville Primary and Intermediate Schools for Author’s Day, sponsored by the Bayville PTA in coordination with the schools’ librarians Paige Coppola and Stefanie Lipsey.
 
Ms. Lipsey said that having an author visit and talk to the children about writing encourages them to write more. “They see firsthand how writing can be fun, and they learn tricks of the trade that they can use in the classroom,” she said.
 
“My goal is for each of you to use your imagination,” Mr. McGee said. He went on to explain that ideas come from observing, daydreaming, being curious, reading, playing, listening and asking “What if?” He said asking questions and finding the answers helps in writing amazing stories. “Anything you want to do, you can absolutely do it,” he said.
 
After sharing details on how he became a writer, including that he started writing his own stories in fourth grade, Mr. McGee read his book, “Peanut Butter & Aliens.” 

Many thanks to the Bayville PTA for bringing this special guest to Bayville Elementary Schools!

Primary school students can count to 100 by fives, tens and twenties and they proved it during assemblies celebrating the 100th day of school at Ann MacArthur and Bayville Primary Schools.

Students in kindergarten through second grade sang songs that included counting to 100, listened to a story about the 100th day of school and celebrated the number 100. The 100th student to enter the school that day, students who were present for all 100 days of school and those that correctly guessed the number of treats in a jar were all recognized. 

“While the 100th day of school may not be an official holiday, it is an opportunity to reinforce math skills through collaboration with reading, music and movement,” said Locust Valley Elementary Schools Principal Dr. Sophia Gary.

On World Read Aloud Day, celebrated on Feb. 1, some classes from Bayville Primary School and Bayville Intermediate School joined together to celebrate. Victoria Shishkoff brought her first-graders down the hill to the intermediate school and joined Marie Fonzo’s class. Lori Pace’s third-grade class partnered with Dani Schatz’s second-grade class and the four classes celebrated reading.

The students sat in pairs as the older children read books to the younger children, both groups learning and gaining from the experience. 

“The activity made my students feel very important and special,” Ms. Shishkoff said. “The older students were excited, kind and nurturing. It was a wonderful sight to see! My class couldn’t stop talking about the third-graders the rest of the day.” 

She also explained the benefits in developing a crossover and collaboration between teachers at both schools so the younger children become comfortable and familiar with the faces when it’s time to move down to the big school. 

Ms. Fonzo said the event was just as rewarding for her class. “This activity allowed third-grade students to become mentors to their younger peers. They felt a feeling of pride and accomplishment as the roots of our school community deepened.”

Spreading kindness is commonplace at Bayville Primary School, as the students and staff are dedicated to bucket filling, a philosophy that uses a bucket as a metaphor for a person’s feelings. The students learn that kind acts fill the bucket of the recipient and the giver. Unkind acts deplete buckets.
 
Maggie Holz, an Individual Needs teacher, worked with one of the school’s occupational therapists, Alison Milligan, on a special project that would fill the buckets of strangers around the community. First- and second-graders in Ms. Holz’s class created kindness rocks to leave in the community for residents to find.
 
The students used colorful permanent markers to decorate the rocks and write uplifting messages. They brought the rocks home and were encouraged to hide them in the community for random people to discover. They learned that even though they may never know who found their rocks, they could feel good knowing they made someone smile.
 
Besides teaching them to be kind, the activity helped to build many skills, including eye-hand coordination, graphomotor skills, strategic planning, visual perceptual skills, problem-solving, following multistep directions and spatial organization.
 
“While our students are constantly reminded of how we can choose to fill each other’s buckets on a daily basis, we are teaching about how significant of an impact a random act of kindness can make on the recipient, and even people who hear about it,” Ms. Holz said.

Showing empathy is an important part of being a kind person, and learning what empathy is can be the first step in exhibiting empathetic behaviors. Bayville Intermediate School fifth-grade teacher Kelly Price implemented a creative approach to teaching her students the importance of empathy and sharing the lesson with younger students. The lesson, which included reading books about character, carries the motto, “I Have Character.”

To enhance the project, Ms. Price’s students are mentoring second-graders in Dani Schatz’s class at Bayville Primary School to help them learn about empathy. The two classes join together monthly, pairing fifth-graders with second-graders to work collaboratively. In a recent lesson, the older students presented the younger ones with questions about how they would handle certain situations, including seeing a student sitting alone at lunch or witnessing bullying. The questions sparked important conversations, enabling mentors to guide the second-grade students towards the best way to be an empathetic classmate.

Students created paper versions of themselves, and as they learn new, positive personality traits each month, they add symbols to their characters to represent those traits. Ms. Price said this demonstrates to them that what we have on the inside is more important than what we see on the outside. She hopes the lesson will help them become more empathetic, kind, grateful, resilient and hardworking. 

“I hope that 20 years from now when my students think back to fifth grade, they remember their experience and journey of becoming better human beings. I hope when they are 30 years old, they can say, ‘I have character,’” Ms. Price said.