WES 2025 Teacher of the Year- Mrs. Moore

WES 2025 Support Person of the Year- Mr. Justin

This month we celebrate the delightful journey of our young learners! Our kindergarteners have had a fantastic first month filled with exploration and discovery! From mastering the art of sharing to creating colorful masterpieces, each child has blossomed in their own unique way. We've seen remarkable growth in their social skills, as they eagerly greet new friends and learn to work together. The classroom buzzes with excitement as our little learners dive into stories and informational text. We’ve introduced topic and details and how texts can give us information. We’ve begun our phonics program, UFLI (University of Florida Literacy Institute) which entails producing correct letter sounds, identifying beginning sounds, and blending sounds. In math, our focus has been on introducing the concepts of numbers and using a number line to compare them. In science, we are learning about our five senses and will soon apply those skills as we move into learning all about apples!

We couldn't be prouder of their accomplishments!

This month we are featuring Mrs. Moore’s 1st grade class! We are working our way through our first quarter of the school year. The children are doing great, making many friends, and are happy members of their new classroom families. They have done a wonderful job of learning routines, rules, and procedures and are becoming responsible first grade students.

Each of our first graders have been attending Science Stem Lab (where there is always hands-on learning) and Media (where they get to pick out books and learn all about computers). The children have also been to all the special area classes, including PE, Music, and Art.

We offer many volunteer opportunities at Windermere Elementary. Please be sure to register as an ADDitions volunteer with OCPS and become a member of our fabulous WES PTO. 

Your WES First Ladies,

Mrs. Beavin, Ms. Knight, Ms. Lipp, Mrs. Moore, Ms. Shreves

In reading, second graders are reading informational texts. The students are explaining how text features—including titles, headings, captions, graphs, maps, glossaries, and illustrations contribute to the meaning of texts.

In math, students are solving one and two-step problems, as well as rounding numbers to the nearest ten.

In social studies, the students are learning about communities and how communities are different. Lastly, in science the students are learning about states of matter and its properties!

We are excited that Firefighter Karyn will be visiting our second graders! She will be sharing about her important work and teaching us about fire safety.  

We are moving right along in third grade! It’s been said that second to third grade is a big academic shift. In third grade we look at common prefixes and suffixes (e.g., -ful, -less, -est) to create new words, while discovering the different parts of speech. This builds throughout the year and helps our vocabulary grow. This is of course seen in our oral reading fluency too. This is why the weekly fluency passages and words per minutes are vital at home.

In reading, we continue to work on providing evidence to support our answers. This is the biggest difference and sometimes challenge from the second to third grade requirements. We can often answer how a character is feeling, but now we work on why the character feels that way while using evidence to support our thinking. These higher order questions are seen frequently in tests. It also makes reading more fun! We love seeing our students defend their answers and discuss topics with their peers. In addition, we will get to explore unique skill such as free verse poems, haikus, limericks, metaphors, personification, and hyperboles in text(s).

We start exploring multiplication and division in math! In third grade we work to solidify those fast facts in multiplication, allowing us to work on larger problems and real-life problems. We learn different methods to multiply, and even learn the relationship of multiplication and division. Reflex is an online program we use in class to work on fast facts, and we encourage families to practice with flash cards of all equations when they can!

In science we continue to work on properties of matter and how matter changes (liquid, solid, gas). This of course leads to experiments and STEM; we look forward to those activities throughout the year! In social studies we often discuss what makes a good citizen in the community and the classroom. Coming up, we learn ways to make a difference in the world and begin exploring world geography!

There’s always so much to learn in third grade! Please remind students to come to school as often as they can so they don’t miss these opportunities 😊

Pictures: Mrs. Reyes class had to “save Fred” as we worked on classroom community at the start of the year. Ms. Jordan’s class practiced measuring water volume with classroom objects. 

Hello Fourth Grade families!

We are currently learning about non-fiction text features and text structures in ELA, estimating products and quotients in Math, the properties of matter in Science, and the regions of the United States in Social Studies. 

Below is the QR code for our grade level’s Transformation Wishlist. Our first transformation day will be October 1st. Thank you so much for helping to make this day a special day for our learners! 

As a reminder, if your child is ever absent, they can work on Reading Plus lessons and listen to our class read-aloud from home. 

Hello 5th Grade Families! We are off to a great start!

This year is off to a great start. 5th graders are working hard to complete their beginning of the year FAST assessment. This assessment covers everything the students will learn in 5th grade and provides us with very useful data to help guide our instruction throughout the year. 

In math, we are finishing our unit on place value and will soon move on to multiplying whole numbers and decimals. 

In science, we just finished our first unit on matter.

In ELA, we are continuing to work on explaining how story elements contribute to the text. 

We are looking forward to attending the Young People’s Concert at the Dr. Phillips PAC next week. 

Thanks for all of your support,

5th Grade Team

The STEAM/GTC room was filed with 3rd graders learning all about team communication and construct of structures!

They learned about the art form of collage and combined their Math and Art to create word problems about their collages. Then the challenge was on to cooperate and use the STEM design to create a stable structure to house an animal. The day ended with Lego Spike building structures of tree houses, zip lines, and boat launchers. What a day of STEAM.