Highlights: Swim
We participate in Swim for Life, the YMCA’s 2nd Grade swim collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. The focus of Swim for Life is to teach second grade students basic aquatic skills to make them safer in and around the water. The YMCA has a history of over 160 years of teaching swimming classes. The 10 week program operates during the school day at The McBurney YMCA, and follows the YMCA’s nationally standardized curriculum for swim instruction.
Highlights: Music
Music and the Brain™ is a project of the 42nd St. Development Corp. designed to teach public school students to read and play music through classroom keyboard instruction. Since 1997, more than 275 schools and 400,000 students have benefitted from Music and the Brain training, curriculum and keyboards.
Chrissy Inserra, our music teacher, sought and received a grant to offer this program, and is specially trained in its instruction. Our PTA has helped fund the program. All of our students, from pre-k through 2nd grade receive this special music instruction.
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Highlights: Film Making at PS 340
We believe that children learn in different ways, and through different media. We, therefore, partner with Take Two Film Academy to provide filmmaking instruction for our second and third graders. Through this work, our students gain the technical and creative competencies needed to transform their ideas into fully realized documentaries. Take Two works hand in hand with the students and teachers to support our existing literacy and social studies or science curricula, inside the classroom and on filmmaking trips.
Last year, each of our second graders produced a documentary highlighting the particular bird they researched as part of our Bird Study. In third grade, the children will learn new film making skills, and new features will be added to their documentaries.
This 10-week program operates during the school day and is generously funded by our PTA.