One new upgrade is an improved library with additional books, more space to do activities and new computers. This year there is a librarian and can have lunch clubs and expose students to more literature.
There are also additional ways that the library will be utilized this school year.
“We are going to incorporate a lot of harbor reading,” Principal Figueroa said. “We can have dialogue and explore different types of books, we can have author studies, we can have lunch clubs and do book clubs, we can celebrate reading, we can have readathons and we can give students prizes for reading.”
The book selection in the library has also changed from before.
“We pulled out some books that were dated, we gave some books to community members and families and we are ordering new books as well,” Figueroa said. “We are doing inventory so we have enough with a wide variety of books for the students. They will not only have hard copies but will be able to read on the new technology.”
Teachers will have laptops/iPads that they will be able to use with the students in the classrooms.
There is a new media center room this year and the funding for this as well as other additions came from written grants to the borough president and to the city council.
There is surround sound in the media room to improve the experience and they showed movies and documentaries to the kids over the summer. There are laptop stations in the new media room that the students will be able to use with their classes.
The students will be able to do project work, demonstrations and watch documentaries in this space.
“We have already started showing documentaries related to the harbor,” Figueroa said. “Kids can experience being out in the field through the use of technology.”
Another technology upgrade this school year is that there will be a brand new PA system for making announcements for the school that they got through a grant from Borough President Eric Adams’s office. It is a little studio near the main office.
Also, this year PS 676 has a full-time speech therapist for the first time. She started over the summer. She will be doing one-on-one interaction with the students, and she will be concentrating on the goals of the students.
The floors in the school were repainted for this school year and the classrooms have ventilation.
There is a new marine science teacher at the school who previously taught at MS 88 in Park Slope. He has been involved with the Billion Oyster Project since it started and will continue being involved with it.
He is a licensed captain, so his real dream is to get the kids out on boats. He has a lot of maps, so the kids will be able to practice navigation. He thinks there is so much information that can be learned from maps and cartography.
They will try to schedule for this school year taking kids on an 80-foot long schooner made of steel that has a great history. It is docked at the South Street Seaport and can take 20 or 30 kids.
In the future, a goal that the teacher has is to get boats for the school. He pointed out that the Harbor High School on Governor’s Island does not even have kids sailing their own boats.
On the first day of school, the second graders wrote descriptive words about how they were feeling. Some of the kids in a different classroom were interacting with the robot named Nao. The robot asked their names and hobbies, and the robot told the kids what its hobbies are.
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