Students in Rocky Point Middle School created a visual aid for a social studies lesson. Along with teacher Mr. John Mauceri, the students used brown paper lunch bags to serve as buffalo hide, which they pieced together to create the Native American traditional conical tent covering on their studies of the Westward Expansion. The students learned how buffalo were important for the Great Plain Native Americans’ everyday life. The students added symbols that were used as ways of communication for the Native Americans, and the multidisciplinary approach incorporates social studies, math, science and English language arts on the hide. As an addendum to the lesson, the students read Gary Paulsen’s “Hatchet” and are working to recreate the story’s main character Brian Robeson’s campsite using the tent dwelling as his shelter. They will also create dioramas and will learn about CPR – also featured in the story – from the school district’s senior guard Mr. Gene Buchner.

Rocky Point High School senior Kristen Zoll will be one of the thinkers and makers to shape the future as a freshman at the Pratt Institute, the renowned college for art and design, in the fall of 2021. Kristen was awarded The Pratt President’s Wallace Augustus Rayfield Scholarship to attend the institute’s School of Art. She was notified of the honor during a Zoom scholarship meeting led by Pratt’s president, Frances Bronet.

The school was so impressed with Ms. Zoll’s talents, character and qualifications that it has invited her to study there on this scholarship for seven years, according to Rocky Point High School Principal Mr. Jonathan Hart. To make the Zoom call more meaningful, Mr. Hart asked Kristen to invite an influential staff member to attend the scholarship meeting. She chose Mr. Gregory Armine, her art teacher and art/library chairperson, to join her.

“It was one of the greatest thrills of my career to have been included in the meeting,” Mr. Armine said.

Kristen is one of only five students to be offered a scholarship in each of the degree-granting schools – Architecture, Art, Design, Information, and Liberal Arts and Sciences.

The Pratt President’s Wallace Augustus Rayfield Scholarships are named in honor of one of Pratt’s first Black alumni, Wallace Augustus Rayfield, who graduated in 1889 and was only the second formally educated African American architect to practice in the United States.

The Rocky Point school community congratulates Kristen on this exceptional honor.

In a fun literary lesson in FJC, students learned to take a classic fairy tale and brand it as their own, with a twist. Second graders in Ms. Kathy Guerrisi’s class chose among at least five books and created some inspired fractured fairy tales using the story of the Three Little Pigs. They revised the well-known fable by taking one of its elements – the plot, the setting, the characters or the ending – and using their imaginations and even pieces of real life, turned their stories into more contemporary versions. Not only did the lesson enrich their understanding of story setting, point of view, conflict and resolution, it brought many giggles among their classmates.