At Todd Elementary School, you can always count on older students to lend a hand.

Recently, as part of their physical education class, kindergarten students in Leslie Newman’s and Bonnie Seligson’s classes watched a video of Todd third, fourth and fifth graders demonstrating a variety of basketball dribbling skills.

Todd Elementary first graders are learning about each other’s family traditions, but more importantly, they are also learning how to compliment each other on those traditions.

Getting the dragon to the treasure. Creating artwork. Picking a soccer team and having its players kick the ball to score a goal.

These were just some of the activities Todd Elementary fourth graders in Lorraine McDermott’s class did during their Hour of Coding event in Amira Lahlouh’s STEAM class.

The entire Todd student body recently participated in this hour-long event, which takes place all across the globe and is designed to show that anyone can learn the basics of coding with no prior experience.

For many, cursive is a lost art. In fact, there is a generation of children who do not know how to write in cursive.

Leave it to Todd art teacher Paul Villanueva to rectify that.

Recently, fifth graders in Jennifer Case and Stephanie Grace’s class worked on Illuminated Positive Script Messages and used cursive or script to write them.

It all started when Todd Elementary School Principal Jessica Michaelidis asked art teacher Paul Villanueva to read the picture book “Ish” to his students in art class, as part of December’s social emotional learning word, confidence.

After reading the book, Mr. Villanueva came up with “Ish Drawings – all about confidence,” an art project inspired directly by the book, written by Peter H. Reynolds.

“Welcome to Qatar!” Todd Elementary School physical education teacher Jamie Tranchida announced ceremoniously to students in his class. “We started with 32 countries competing for the 2022 FIFA World Cup and now we are down to eight countries left.”

Kindergartners in Michelle Kiger and Jeanne Dal Piaz’s classes were sitting on the gymnasium floor, looking excitedly at the set-up.

“There are eight goals: one for each country that is still in the World Cup,” Mr. Tranchida said. “We will continue our soccer adventure today.”