10-10-17 GBH Newsletter

Important Events (Always defer to the parent calendar on our website, if you notice a discrepancy.)

• October 12th- Student planned Hurricane Help Fundraiser Bingo! (please come support)
• No School This Friday October 13th  
• Next Early Releases: October 16th and October 30th.
• Thursday, October 19th- Open House/Parent Ed Night - We are hoping for 100% attendance, because we want to update families on some new routines and be able to say hello.
• Monday, October 23rd- Pumpkin Patch Field Trip
• Monday, October 30th- Historical Halloween (please look for more details soon)

Reminders:

• The weekly reflection letter, should be signed by a parent  and returned each week by Thursday.
• All students in the GBH Room are expected to have their own Library Card - we have only seen half of them so far.
• Historical Halloween Speeches (and notecards) are due Next Friday.  The students are getting some support this week in writer’s workshop, but the majority of the work should be done at home.

Requests:

• We are hoping to do a soccer unit for a month in PE.  However, we need soccer balls.  If you have any around your house that we could use, please write your name in sharpie and send them in with your child.  The more balls we have, the bigger variety of games and drills we can play. We hope to get 10-20 Soccer balls! Thank you.
• Come to the Auction!  It will be fun, and it helps a lot with our charter school funding gap.  

Weekly Update:

Three students are putting on a BINGO night this Thursday.  They are hoping to raise several hundred dollars to support the Red Cross in their efforts to support the disasters from the Hurricanes of the last month.  It is a great, community building event that will help raise money, and Friday isn’t a school day- so would be a great way to celebrate a long weekend.  Look for more details on the facebook page, and on fliers coming home this week.

This week we should be finalizing the Heron Code, so it should be coming home with next week’s newsletter.  The students have put some great thought into it so far, we are looking forward to seeing what comes of it.  In this three week cycle, the students have really shown improvement in keeping track of a large variety of work, and are using their plans, their teacher conferences, and their tools of responsibility to really do a great variety of work.  Please ask your child about their progress on their weekly work map, their project, and how they are doing sticking to the code.  These connections between school and home are very valuable!  

On Monday, we heard the fourth great story.  We heard how humans slowly developed signs to communicate.  Writing with an alphabet allows us to have our voice travel great distances, it even allows our voices to travel in time.  We can be connected to the poems of Shakespeare or the music of Beethoven, or the sayings of Confucius and Socrates because of writing.  They all died hundreds or even thousands of years ago, yet we know what they were thinking because of writing! We can do this because of the Phoenicians, and the Sumerians, and the Egyptians.  The unknown heroes who used their special mind and their special love to create something that we can write with our special hands.  We are celebrating this by beginning our Writer’s Workshop in earnest this week.

Gratitude Corner:

• Thank you to Jahne’s mom for helping students plan the fundraiser.
• Thank you to Molly’s mom for cooking a meal for the staff.
• Thank you to the families that have volunteered to help cook for the open house and for the Thursday Fundraiser!

Picture of the Week:

Students have begun to fill our new shelves with interesting projects, artwork, and research!