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Happy Holidays from Riley Avenue

The holidays are an inspiration for learning at the Riley Avenue School. Parent volunteers, always an active presence at this Riverhead Elementary School, pull out all the stops during the holidays, working as a team with the teachers to enrich the learning and the lives of all the children at the Riley Avenue School.

There is a "Giving Tree" inside the main doors loaded with mittens and gloves that will be given to those children who need them. Outside the cafeteria door a red bin is overflowing with pajamas and books donated by the students and their families that will also be distributed as gifts.

The gleaming hallways are decorated to reflect all of the holiday celebrations. Candles, dreidels, menorahs, trees, elves, cookies, Santas, Kwanzaa colors are part of the art, math, language arts, and other lessons in social studies, geography and science during this time of the year.

In one room, a group of students is making latkes, measuring out the flour, adding the potatoes, eggs, salt and pepper and tasting the latkes of their labor. (Take a LOOK!)

Becky Skrzypecki's parent-led groups are efficiently helping students, fill out worksheets, make holiday treats, and play games at one of six stations.

Tanya Congliglio's grandfather, Steve Sekine, who is a retired baker and owner of the Cream Puff in Deer Park, ably applies the frosting and the students add the decorations on small gingerbread houses. Another group is making Christmas cookies, while John Graziano (Ashley's dad) helps the children in his group assemble pretzel and marshmallow Kwanzaa candles on a graham cracker spread with peanut butter. Another pretzel and a larger marshmallow and chocolate drop make a dreidel. Next to them Mrs. Skrzypecki shows a group of students how to play the dreidel game. A sugar cone acts as the base for an M&M Christmas tree. There are worksheets with math questions and pages for coloring and readings that relate to each holiday. (Stick your head into her room and see what the kids are doing. Click HERE!)

Language arts and art spills out of the classrooms and into the hallways. Students in Ilene Chafetz's class are making crayon wax resistent drawings of a winter night sky based on the paintings by Jan Brett in the book The Night Before Christmas. They finished their drawings by giving them a water color wash. Further down the hall, students used Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to inspire another winter scene. Earlier in the month, the Riley students carried several huge holiday murals to the nursing home to hang in the hallways. Later that day, the students sang a mini-version of their holiday concert, which was presented recently to the community.

These are just a few of the ways Riley is celebrating and learning during the holidays. Now multiply by 8 and you'll begin to realize that we've just touched the tip of the holiday iceberg at our schools.

Riley says, "Happy Holidays!"