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Oldfields Robotics Team Captures Innovation Project Award

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The hardworking robotics team Harborfield Tornadoes Lego Robotics team from Oldfield Middle School came home from the FIRST Lego League Long Island Championship Tournament as winners of the prestigious Innovation Project award. This honor recognizes the team that utilizes diverse resources for their Innovation Project to help them gain a comprehensive understanding of their problem; has a creative, well-researched solution; and effectively communicates their findings to judges and the community.

The eight-member Oldfields squad consists of dedicated robotics students Neela Bajon, Quintin Briggs, Chase Ciccone, Tanner Facella, Andrew Hollweg, Dylan Lakhani, Alexander Prudente and Imran Shah.

“Our students put in so much time and effort on all the ‘little things’ that really made a difference at the competition,” adviser James Temps said. “They had to make a professional presentation in front of independent judges explaining the idea of their own creation and describe the benefits this invention would have for the people it was designed for. They all had to contribute in some way and did so without hesitation. We couldn’t have been prouder of them.”


 
Date Added: 3/26/2024

A Week of Empathy at Oldfield Middle School

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Sixth grade English language arts classes at Oldfield Middle School in the Harborfields Central School District recently worked on a Project-Based Learning (PBL) assignment on how to teach empathy to their fellow students, culminating in a student-organized Empathy Week in February. Since last November, the sixth graders had researched empathy and brainstormed ideas every Friday, guided by teacher Monica Zenyuh.

“I attended an in-district workshop about PBL and wanted to fit it into my curriculum,” Zenyuh said. “I decided to ask my students, ‘How can we teach OMS students empathy?’ Empathy is the theme in my current ELA curriculum, so it fit perfectly. The kids ran with it. We started with individual research, where students researched what empathy was, how it could be taught and what were examples of empathy, and they posted everything they found and thought of on Padlet boards. I then asked, ‘What can we do with all of this? The idea was then proposed to have an Empathy Week for the school, and we dedicated every Friday for two months to work on this. Letters were written to the principal and groups formed to plan it all out. It was entirely student-run, I was just the tour guide.”

Empathy Week proved to be a different form of a spirit week at OMS, including a daily video feature, daily quote in morning announcements, activities and challenges during homeroom, events during lunch and recess, and empathy-themed songs between classes. Students were asked to wear certain apparel or colors each day to unify them. The ELA students created Valentine’s Day cards for nursing homes and veterans, and placed anonymous positive notes on classmates’ lockers. In addition, students reached out to the district’s primary and elementary schools and got both involved in poster making and book reading.

Emma Bemiss developed ideas like Empathy Bingo, while Anabella Czekaj, Leah Davila, Maeve Donovan and Jaclynn Smith came up with the idea of Kindness Jars, putting small slips of papers in each jar with empathy challenges for students to complete, and placing the jars in each homeroom.

“We just thought it would be nice if each class had a challenge that each kid had to complete within a week,” Donovan said. “And then if the kid completed it, they would get a tally and whoever had the most tallies would get a prize for completing those challenges because they were being kind to other people.”

A Conversation Cubes project, organized by student Arianna Bester, compiled lists of ideas from her classmates to use as conversation starters when they sit with new people at lunch.

“School has always been kind to me, and I wanted to help people spread kindness,” Bester said.

“We picked numbers and sat at a different lunch table than we usually do,” student Isidora Doeschner said. “We rolled the cubes and made new friends in the cafeteria.”

Empathy Week surely left a mark on Oldfield’s student body, leading to a greater sense of unity and compassion.

“Empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and understanding what they’re going through and not making it all about yourself,” sixth grader Olivia Castellano said.
 
“I’m so proud of where my students have taken this idea,” Zenyuh said. “Helping students understand how to think about things from another point of view, and that doing small things can make a huge impact on someone’s life, is an essential skill to possess in this day and age. Being able to facilitate that in my classroom has been a very rewarding experience.”

Date Added: 3/19/2024

Harborfields Board of Ed Honors PTA Reflections Winners

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At the Harborfields Central School District’s Feb. 14 Board of Education meeting, student winners in the 2023-2024 Suffolk Region PTA Reflections contest were recognized.

Honored were Washington Drive Primary School’s Kayleigh Holahan in the Dance Choreography category; Harborfield High School’s Bridget Hickey and Oldfield Middle School’s Karynn Modica and Lucy Morris in Literature; Harborfield High School’s Caelan Bues and Thomas J. Lahey Elementary School’s Madeline Klug in Photography; and Harborfield High School’s Keira Lau and Samantha Urmaza and Washington Drive’s Eliana Tacy in Visual Arts.

Also honored was Washington Drive volunteer Diantha Demetriou, for dedicating her time to the school’s students for over a decade through writing, directing and playing the piano.

Date Added: 2/28/2024

A Marvelous Masked Celebration at Oldfield Middle School

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Seventh graders in Rosalia Sinatra’s Italian class at Oldfield Middle School celebrated the end of Carnevale (known in America as Mardi Gras), by creating “Le Maschere di Carnevale” and wearing masks in the Venetian tradition.  

Date Added: 2/16/2024

Harborfields’ Black History Month Celebration Highlights Hidden Heroes

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“Hidden Heroes in STEAM” was the theme at Harborfields’ annual districtwide Black History Celebration, held on Feb. 1 in the high school auditorium and emceed by Oldfield Middle School students Kingston Carter, Amir Charles and David Ferdinand and Dean of Students Jeffrey Shade.

The many marvelous musical performances included “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by Harborfields High School freshman Ashley Deronvil; Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” by senior Emma DiPrima; Steve Lacy’s “Dark Red” by the rock trio of Aaron Alonso-Tittmann, Amelia Freiberger and Kieran Maguire; Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” by the acoustic duo of seventh grader Abigail Kelly and her father, Board of Education President Christopher Kelly; Coleman Hawkins’ jazz classic “Body and Soul” by Peter Hoss and Laura Pomerantz; and “Celebrate Black History” and “What Can One Little Person Do?” by Washington Drive Primary School and Thomas J. Lahey Elementary School students, respectively.

Original poems were read by eighth grader Katelynne Figueroa (“A Legacy of Strength and Resilience”) and sixth grader Sebastian Rabel (“A Fire and Words”), while sixth graders Milanna Orza and Anjali Rampersaud presented Curtiss Hayes’ “I Had a Dream”; seventh graders Nadia McKelvey and Alani Spence read Nikki Giovanni’s “Black History Month” and Mychal Wynn’s “I Am the Black Child”; and freshmen Ashley Deronvil, Needjy Guerrier and Skylar McDougal narrated Roda Ahmed’s “Mae Among the Stars.”

A video from Washington Drive students spotlighted the achievements of acoustician Dr. James West, inventor of the foil electret microphone. Other Black STEAM luminaries acknowledged as hidden heroes included dentist and inventor Dr. George F. Grant, inventor Frederick Jones, and nurse and inventor Marie Van Brittan Brown.

The event’s keynote speaker was Emmy Award-winning Spectrum News NY1 journalist, “Live at Ten” anchor and author Cheryl Wills, the first African American woman to host a prime-time nightly newscast for the cable network. Wills led the audience on a fascinating historical and genealogical survey of her own hidden hero, her ancestor Sandy Wills of Haywood County, Tennessee.

“As I give my speech, I want students to think of science, technology, engineering and math, because my journey touches on every one of them,” Wills said. “I didn’t know I was a descendant of a black Civil War veteran until about 12 years ago. When I was growing up here on Long Island, I had no idea. My dad didn't know about him. My grandfather’s father had no idea, neither did his father. I am the first to use technology such as Ancestry.com and other records to find my grandfather’s hidden story. My great-great-great-grandfather, Sandy Wills, was born in 1840. He was purchased at auction by a slave owner named Edmund Wills, and he suffered on that plantation, working against his will. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, my grandpa Sandy made a run for it and waited for the opportunity for black men to fight, which came the moment. President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He didn’t go alone; he went with his friends. They all escaped together, and using technology, I found all of their enlistment records. He got his honorable discharge. When they handed this to my grandpa Sandy, he could not read a single word of it, even though he knew what it meant. Why? This is Black History Month, and this is an important part of Black history that everyone in this auditorium should know: It was illegal to educate enslaved people. But my grandfather still understood the power of this document, which meant freedom.”

Date Added: 2/6/2024