With our kids spending so much time at home, we know many of us are looking for more ways to access books for them to read!  This week, school librarians introduced many of our kids to a program called Sora, an app that gives students access to free e-books.  Visit our school library website to find out more about Sora and how to log in with your student’s LASID and password.

That link will also connect you to Epic and Tumblebooks for even more e-book options.  You can also borrow free e-books from the public library anytime using apps like Libby and Hoopla.

Or if you are looking for paper books to give your kids a break from all the screen time, both the Newton and Watertown libraries are open again!  For books from the Newton library, you have to request them online using your library card and then go in to pick them up.  Watertown library also offers curbside pickup and is open for browsing on a limited basis — find out more here!

Not sure what books to request?  Newton Library offers personalized recommendations and a book bundle service, while the Watertown Library has a recommendation form and book lists here!

Both libraries also have lots of online events happening for young readers, including Graphic Novel Month at the Watertown library and an upcoming author visit with Jerry Craft (author of the Newbery Award winner New Kid) via Zoom at the Newton Library.

We hope that’s all helpful and that your kids find some great books — happy reading!

Thank you to everyone who’s signed up for the directory in the last week.  This week we were able to assign everyone in the directory to their teacher — so if you’d like to find out who else is in your child’s class and how to contact them (at least, if they’re in the directory!) you can sign in to LE’s Membership Toolkit now and see!  We also added the option of noting your cohort, so everyone is welcome to add that information to your student’s account.

If you’re not in the directory yet, please sign in to lepto.membershiptoolkit.com now and register!  Even if you think you are, we’d love for you to sign in and double-check your information.

If you’ve never signed in before, it may ask you to create a new account — but if your email address is already in there, it should link that new account to the information we have.  (Please note that you may not have access to the full directory immediately, since we have to approve each account, but we’re checking in daily, so you should be able to within 24 hours — let us know if you don’t!)

And please feel free to reach out to secretary@lepto.org with questions anytime!

Dear Lincoln Eliot DLA families,

Welcome to the new (in many ways) school year at Lincoln Eliot!  I am your Lincoln Eliot DLA Liaison to the PTO for this year.  Please help build our community and connection by making sure we can reach each other.  We’d like to have complete class contact lists for every DLA classroom.

I imagine we will all need a little extra support this year!  Though we are not all in the same cohort, we will still be tackling the same grade-level curriculum.  And we may not see each other in classes via Zoom, but we can still keep families connected to their classes and our kids’ classmates.

A few things to do…

1. Update your information in the Aspen portal to allow NPS to share information so they can create formal class lists.  Log in to access the Aspen Family/Student Portal: https://www.newton.k12.ma.us/Page/3129

2. Update your information in the Lincoln Eliot Membership Toolkit.  Log in and update your child’s class, teacher and cohort here, as well as your contact information: https://lepto.membershiptoolkit.com/home 

3. Send me an email (elizabeth@stepcare.net) with your child’s name, grade, cohort, and at least one parent/guardian email contact.  To keep things organized, please use “Lincoln Eliot DLA [indicate your child’s/children’s grade]” as your subject line.

For those that do not already have this, our DLA principal is Jennifer Shore.  Her direct email is: shorej@newton.k12.ma.us 

Once I have everyone’s contact information I will send out a welcome email and we can start to build our DLA community, as well as stay connected to everyone attending Lincoln Eliot in person.  Let’s have a great year!

Thank you,

Elizabeth DePasquale
Lincoln-Eliot DLA Liason

Mark your calendars for our first PTO meeting of the year on Tuesday, October 6th, at 6:30pm!  We’ll send out a Zoom link closer to the date, and we hope everyone can join us to learn about the PTO, meet the PTO board, and talk about ideas for the upcoming year.  Please reach out anytime with questions or things you want us to discuss by emailing secretary@lepto.org!

Hello families,

It’s back-to-school week, and we know it’s a really strange one this year!  We would love your help to try and make the first days of school exciting and welcoming for all our kids and teachers, and hopefully a bit less stressful.

We’re looking for families to make and hang up welcome signs around the outside of the school — we’d love it if your kids can help, too!  We’re hoping for messages along the lines of “welcome back to school,” “welcome, new kindergartners!”, “we appreciate you, teachers!”, “hello, friends!” etc. — feel free to be creative!

Once you have your sign, please stop by the school to put it up this Tuesday or Wednesday (before kids start arriving on Thursday).  Please don’t tape anything to the doors or the glass windows, but feel free to use the fences all around the school and parking lot, and wherever else you can safely put a sign!

And then we encourage all our families, including our DLA kids, to walk, bike, or drive by the school sometime this week to see the messages — we know a lot of kids miss the building and we hope it’ll be a fun reason to visit and feel connected to the school, even if only from the outside.

Let us know if you have any questions or need help!: president@lepto.org

We also wanted to share this back-to-school guide for families in the hopes that you might find something helpful in here, as we’re all going to be navigating the challenges of remote learning — and in particular, we thought this article might be helpful this week!:

Parent Tips and Tricks for Distance Learning

Thank you all, and we wish you a peaceful, safe, happy first week!

Your L-E PTO

As mentioned in David Fleishman’s email on Friday, class lists cannot be shared until everyone has had a chance to review their data release settings in Aspen.  We know everyone is looking forward to these lists, so we encourage you to check in to your Aspen account when you have a chance — and we also know it’s a little confusing, so we wanted to share these instructions in the hopes that they might be helpful!

There’s also another way to start creating our class lists!  If you are in the LE family directory, you can sign in to Membership Toolkit and add your child’s teacher to their profile (by going to “My Account” in the top menu).  This is a quick, easy way to start sharing class information, and the more people do it, the sooner we’ll all be able to find our classmates!  (Thank you to those of you who have already done so!)  If you have any trouble adding your teacher, or would like us to do it, please feel free to email secretary@lepto.org for help anytime.

Thank you so much to everyone who signed up for sending a letter to one of our new students!  You’ll be hearing from us this week with more instructions and who to write to — we’re waiting for the most final list of new students we can get!

There’s still time to sign up!  If your kid would like to help us out by writing a letter or postcard to one of our new students, fill out this form, and we’ll be in touch soon.

Thank you again — and welcome, new families!