Wolf Literacy Night Held at Salem School

The Salem School second grades sponsored a family literacy night on April 1 entitled "Wolf Night." The two classes had been studying the beautiful animals for several weeks and parents and students headed back to school at 6:00pm to celebrate their learning with this event.

Salem principal Jennifer Kruge was at a table in front of Salem's staircase and assigned the students to their teams as they arrived. Before the could proceed they needed to tell their principal one fact about wolves. The students then followed the paw prints on the staircase to the second floor of the school where the four centers were set up. Paw print balloons decorated the hallway and staff members wore gray wolf ears for the evening. Mrs. Chris DiMaio looked comfortable in her wolf slippers and her student teacher Cathy Kulmann wore a great wolf hat for the event.

The students and their parents rotated through the "dens" that were run by faculty members who volunteered to attend. The Red Wolf Pack was led by physical education teacher Kathy Loukoumis in the hallway and was a relay race where students had to choose letters on cards to form words. Art teacher Lisa Vaccaro worked with a group of students to roll out dough and make a necklace with a wolf tooth.

Computer teachers Mrs. Sharon Hrasback and Mr. Hollern worked with the second graders in the computer lab. They used the website Taqxedo to make a word splash in the shape of a wolf and printed it out to take home.

In the second grade classrooms, the students worked on more academic pursuits. Mrs. Debby Wilson and reading consultant Gina Kotsaftis encouraged students to choose one of four types of wolves and then come up with "spicy" words to describe them to write on their paper paw print. Many worked on writing more wolf information in their journals and sharing the facts with their classmates, while the sound of howling wolves could be heard coming from the teacher's computer. They carried paper bag wolf puppets that they had made in art class. In Mrs. DiMao's classroom, the students watched a movie on the SMARTboard that explained the far reaching effects that introducing one new animal into the food chain can have.