A note from our Newton PTO Co-Presidents:
Next week we celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week! Please join us to say thank you to all Newton Public Schools teachers by submitting a thank you card, photo or video. Use this form to submit your creation and look for it on our social media channels next week!:
Alix de Saint-Aignan, a junior at Newton North, has founded a new program called Girls Connecting. The goal is to connect 4th-8th grade mentees with high school mentors (from 10th grade to college) for an hour a week of video chat for support, help with schoolwork, game playing, etc.
She has successfully recruited enough high school-age volunteers to accommodate ~100 mentees, and they are now reaching out to find any 4th-8th grade girls who’d like to participate. In such an isolating time, Girls Connecting offers mentors and mentees an additional outlet and source of connection to the community.
Check out the website www.girlsconnecting.com or email girlsconnectinginfo@gmail.com with any questions or to sign up.
FORJ (Families Organizing for Racial Justice) is a coalition of school-aged families in Newton coming together to teach our children – and ourselves – how to stand up for racial equality. The next (online) meeting is not yet scheduled, but if you’d like to be notified, please feel free to contact our Lincoln-Eliot FORJ Liaison, Lanni Isenberg, lanni_harris@yahoo.com.
In the meantime, here are some COVID-19 related resources and tools FORJ compiled for reference:
RESOURCES and TOOLS
FORJ is also inviting everyone to fill out the FORJ Survey: Community Reflections During Coronavirus. They are using this virtual tool to plan further programming and learn how the community is doing.
Dear LE Community,
I hope you are all doing well and staying healthy. Even though we have not physically been in school, there have been some of the exciting things happening this week. Teachers and students have been connecting through digital meeting platforms, LE staff came together to create the video greeting for families and students. Additionally, many of our families have supported each other during this unsettling time.
Thank you for your patience and understanding as we all adjust to this new situation. My colleagues and I across the district are hearing a range of feedback that reflects the wide variety of circumstances our families are facing. This feedback is useful as it informs our plan for the extended school closure. We know our plan must include an acknowledgment and respect for the diversity of situations our NPS families are experiencing, including the time and resources they have available to them.
While we just learned on Wednesday of Governor Baker’s plan to keep schools closed until May 4, we had already been planning for a longer closure. Our planning process was outlined in David Fleishman’s March 22nd email to the community.
By the end of next week, you can expect a structured plan that includes opportunities to connect with teachers and classmates as well as content specific work. This schedule will include the opportunity to connect with adults and peers, and to practice, process, and reflect on learning.
In preparation for the rollout of this plan, this week we have been focused on the following:
In reality there is no replacement for the rich learning that happens within our classrooms each day. Remote learning (at the elementary level) will not compare to being present in the classroom and learning from teachers and peers. However, we plan to employ resources to make the best of this situation and continue the learning of our students.
Teachers do things differently and have their own style; this may create differences in the way remote teaching happens from classroom to classroom. We will try to be as consistent as possible. Also, please be aware that, like all of us, your child’s teachers are dealing with various situations at home from childcare, eldercare and illness.
We will be back in touch with you next week with our updated plan to support learning during this extended school closure. In the meantime, please encourage your student to participate both in the opportunities for connection with their teachers and the enrichment activities. This will serve them well as we prepare for the next phase of our remote learning plan.
Stay well!
Principal Morrissey
Hello lovely LE community!
We miss you all very much and hope you’re all doing OK and staying connected. If your child could use a virtual playdate with someone but you don’t know where to start, please reach out to us at secretary@lepto.org — we’d be happy to matchmake some playdates and help you find your friends or join a group!
Just a few ideas and links that we hope might help this week:
Have you heard about the teddy bear hunts kids are doing while social distancing?:
Social-Distancing-Friendly Bear Hunts (Time)
Neighborhood “Bear Hunt” Adventures (Woman’s Day)
Neighbors across the country, including in Newton, have started putting teddy bears in their windows to give kids something to look for while they’re out on their walks. If you have a moment to put a bear (or any kind of fluffy animal!) in your window to brighten someone’s day, that would be awesome — and then we can each take our kids on a “bear hunt” to see how many we can spot!
(If you’re on Nextdoor.com, you can find a partial list of some streets to check on here!)
* Mommy Poppins has a great roundup of virtual events, storytimes, concerts, and classes to entertain our kids while we’re all stuck at home.
* Scholastic will be hosting Virtual Book Fests with visiting authors and fun activities in their free online book-world, Home Base, including one this Thursday, April 2, from 3-5pm.
* The Mosesian Center for the Arts/Watertown Children’s Theatre is offering online classes for the next few weeks, including making comics, creativity club, playmakers, and others, plus Free Dance Fridays every Friday at 5pm.
* The Newton Arts Calendar has a collection of links to virtual museum visits and online events, including many of our Boston favorites, and the Newton Cultural Alliance is posting online concerts, art projects, and ways to support Newton artists.
* And finally, try this list of great podcasts for kids (or this one!) — we listened to one while one kid colored and the other did a jigsaw puzzle this week, and it was a great mental break for all of us.
Stay well and safe, and let us know if there’s anything we can do to help! A big thank you to our teachers who are working so hard to figure out this challenging situation — love and (socially distant) hugs to all of you, too!
The Lincoln-Eliot PTO
Newton PTO’s are attempting to compile a comprehensive list of the various community groups that are providing any type of support to the Newton community. The hope is to connect group leaders so that they might communicate, collaborate, and/or support one another as the COVID situation develop evolves. If you are participating in these kinds of activities please consider completing this brief google form to share contact info, services they may be providing, and any additional comments or questions you have: https://forms.gle/vegGxyLK9E1oyPrq5
Dear Families,
I hope that all of you are remaining safe and finding meaningful and engaging ways to spend your days during this uncertain time. As you heard from Dr. Fleishman, we are providing you with resources that will provide continuity for our students while school is closed. As you work to develop schedules and routines that work for your family, we encourage you to access the site below for grade-level appropriate activities that complement and reinforce our curriculum: www.newton.k12.ma.us/covid19.
We are committed to helping families that may need access to devices at home in order to engage in online learning opportunities. If you do not have a web-capable device at home other than a cell phone (such as an iPad, Chromebook, PC, or Mac) please complete this request form: https://forms.gle/K3SgotNY38V1ncNe9 Our technology support team will be in touch with you to discuss next steps.
You can expect to hear from your child’s teacher on a weekly basis starting tomorrow, Monday, March 23 (end of day). Each week, teachers will be reaching out with a personal message for students and specific recommendations for activities that students and families can complete. These activities are grade-level appropriate and can be completed by students independently or with support from their family. Special education staff, English language learning teachers, and counselors and other staff are also available to communicate with students and families through email. Please understand that we are all doing our best to support our students, while, like you, adjusting to the realities of our current situation and supporting our own families.
Again, if you are in need of a device (such as a Chromebook) for your scholar to complete work at home, please use the link below to request one through the district:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf3CfIZg8duH1Mh592zAmkKYv-tClngx3bj7fGb_fuTk3j6Og/viewform
Stay well!
Principal Morrissey
As noted on the Newton Public Schools’ COVID-19 website:
“We know school closures may significantly impact families in many ways, especially those experiencing food insecurity. Beginning on Tuesday, March 17th, Grab ‘n Go meals will be available to NPS students in need at both Newton North and Newton South High Schools. Please see details below:
Time: Between 10 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Location at South: Front parking loop
Location at North: Parking area near auditorium entrance”
You can also visit the NPS site for more information on local food pantries and Project Bread.
Hello everyone,
We hope you’ve all made it through this first week safe and healthy and are hanging in there! We’ve rounded up a few more ideas and articles that we hope will be helpful or fun or at least give you a moment to breathe. And we’re always looking for more — please feel free to send anything you think we could share here to secretary@lepto.org!
Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems, where the author/artist of the Elephant and Piggie books gives a daily drawing lesson; these are are a delightful break (and a great art class, too!).
The New England Aquarium is posting Virtual Visits, presentations, and activities to try from home.
Cosmic Kids Yoga is a fun, playful introduction to yoga for little ones, with a ton of videos available online.
The Smithsonian has a page of great stuff for kids, including live animal cams from the zoo, games, apps, and video presentations.
KiwiCo (the makers of KiwiCrate) also has a page of resources and ideas you can do from home…
…and so does the Boston Children’s Museum!
Here’s a list of educational shows on Netflix that your kids might enjoy (while learning something!).
Also, for our LE community in particular, there is a Little Free Library on Pearl St., across from the corner with Emerson St. It looks like a small red house on a pillar, and you can open the front door of it to find books inside.
The idea is to take books for free if you need them or leave books if you have any to give. If you’re decluttering some of your books right now and could leave some there for friends and neighbors, that would be very lovely — and if you’re missing our local and school libraries and need more books to read, stop by and see what you can find! (Just please make sure to wash your hands before and after!)
A useful resource (for grown-ups) for scientific, fact-based answers about COVID-19: Ask a Scientist
For anyone who is feeling a lot of stress about how to teach our kids at home, I found this article and its message (don’t stress!) very reassuring: Advice from a Homeschooling Mom
And finally, for anyone else who needs a laugh (and might find it reassuring that Jimmy Fallon and Lin-Manuel Miranda are also facing some work-at-home-with-kids challenges):
The Tonight Show: At Home Edition with Jimmy Fallon and Lin-Manuel Miranda
That’s all for this week — we miss all our teachers and school friends!
Sending love and hope and light to all of you,
The Lincoln-Eliot PTO
We know this is a tough time financially for a lot of people everywhere — if you’re able to offer any help or support, these are just a few suggestions:
The Newton COVID-19 Care Fund has been set up to help people who have been financially impacted by the pandemic — you can donate at that link or request help if you need it. There’s also the Boston Resiliency Fund to support Boston residents most affected by COVID-19.
No Kid Hungry: Donate to help this organization make sure kids around the country are fed even while their schools are closed.
Save the Children has launched a #Savewithstories campaign to get food and books to kids who are out of school (and provide free stories read online by celebrities)
Rally for Restaurants: At this link you can find a local restaurant, buy a gift card, and keep these struggling businesses afloat until they can open again (or search for your favorite restaurant’s website and buy gift cards from them directly).
And if you’re ordering new books to keep your kids reading, you can support a local indie bookstore that might otherwise have to close forever (or donate directly to help booksellers in need through the BINC Foundation) — even while their physical stores are closed, many of them will ship to you, including:
Or find an indie bookstore anywhere in the country by searching here
If you can’t afford a monetary donation right now, just checking in on friends, relatives, and elderly neighbors can also be an enormous help to keep people connected and alleviate loneliness — every little bit makes a difference! One way to connect with others, offer help, and ask for help is by joining your neighborhood on Nextdoor.com, where you can communicate directly with neighbors and see what others are posting.
We wish you all the best in this difficult time — stay safe and be kind to yourselves!