Learning Starts at Home

The Island School participates in the 21-Day Reading Challenge with Read Aloud 15 Minutes each year in the spring! Don't wait until spring to start your read-aloud journey at home. Read here about how it makes a difference!

Practice Keyboarding Skills at Home

The Island School is utilizing an innovative typing tool called Typing Agent, an intuitive and powerful tool to teach students keyboarding skills to help them become efficient and accurate typists. Student progress is saved online. Typing Agent is fully web-based, so your child can log in with their own unique username and password at any time from any computer.

All students in grades 3 – 5 will be using this program at school. If you would like your child's login credentials so you can practice typing at home, please contact your child's teacher.

As parents, you want your child to always do his or her best, but not getting enough sleep can greatly hinder a child's performance. Lack of sleep is a common issue for this age group due to outside activities, homework, electronics, and later bedtimes. Please read this article from Harvard Medicine to access information on why sleep is important for your child’s mental and physical well-being and how you can help them get the rest they need.

Read these Sleep Hygiene Tips for Kids from sleepfoundation.org:

Daytime habits also affect sleep. You can promote restful slumber in your children by following basic sleep hygiene rules:

• Arranging a balanced schedule with interspersed periods of rest and play
• Keeping a regular bedtime
• Making the bedroom, and especially the mattress, a no-screen zone, even during the day
• Providing a healthy diet
• Setting the thermostat to a slightly cooler temperature
• Using dark curtains to block out light, or a nightlight if they’re scared of the dark
• Keeping the bedroom quiet, or using a white noise machine to mask outside sounds
• Avoiding caffeine, large meals, and sugary treats before bedtime, opting for a healthy bedtime snack if necessary
• It’s important to give your child regular exercise, but don’t fall into the trap of exhausting your child to have them sleep better at night. More often than not, this will make them overtired and actually make it harder to fall asleep

Fuel the School Day with an A+ Breakfast

Study after study shows that breakfast provides many benefits for children and their learning experience. According to the Mayo Clinic Health System, kids who eat breakfast:

• Can score significantly higher on standardized math, spelling and reading tests
• Develop a healthy breakfast habit that can carry over into adulthood
• Have better brain function, memory, attention and energy
• Perform better on vocabulary tests, math problems and challenging mental tasks
• Show increased focus, alertness, improved moods and ability to deal with frustration
• Tend to have lower body weight and struggle less with weight-related challenges in life since they may not be eating unhealthy foods or overeating later in the day

Pack a Healthy Lunchbox

When packing your child's lunchbox, consider these choices from Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health:

1. Choose any 1 fresh fruit. For example: grapes, apple slices or rings, any melon chunks (cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon), any berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries), or banana slices.
2. Choose any 2 vegetables. For example: carrot coins or sticks, cucumber, broccoli, bell pepper strips, asparagus spears, summer squash ribbons, or grape tomatoes.
3. Choose any 1 healthy protein. For example: Beans, edamame, nuts, seeds, peanut butter, hummus, veggie burger, roasted turkey or chicken slices, or a hardboiled egg.
4. Choose any 1 whole grain. For example: whole grain pasta, bread, and crackers, brown rice, quinoa, steel-cut oats, and other minimally-processed whole grains.
5. Incorporating dairy (if desired). For example: unflavored milk, plain Greek yogurt, small amounts of cheese like cottage cheese, and string cheese. For dairy-free options, try soy milk and soy yogurt, which contain similar amounts of calcium, protein, and vitamin D as dairy milk.

Click here for lunchbox ideas