Category Archives: School Event

Lincoln-Eliot Online Auction!

We’re closing out the year with one last fundraiser: a Lincoln-Eliot Online Auction!  The bidding opens TOMORROW, May 31, and stays open through June 11.  Last year’s auction — normally one of our biggest fundraisers — had to be cancelled, so we’re hoping this year’s will help us raise some money for next year, to support creative arts and sciences enrichment programming, vital classroom technology investments, field trip transportation funds, and much more!

Click here to visit our auction website!

Bid on hand-painted scarves, picnic baskets, family fun baskets, and lots of other great items!

FORJ Meetings and Juneteenth Celebrations!

Upcoming FORJ City-Wide Meeting:
Wednesday June 16th 7:30-9pm – Fostering Equity-Focused Family Engagement with Immigrant Families  RSVP here

At the May 25th FORJ City-Wide Meeting about “Building Bridges thru Advocacy for a Racially Just Newton,” a panel of Newton teachers, school, community and district leaders provided guidance and experience on how to bring up issues affecting our community to the Newton Public School District and City for results.  The FORJ Board shared a tool that members developed to follow for effectively addressing issues.  They highlighted that progress is more important than perfection (you don’t have to know all of the questions to ask, but it’s important to speak up and connect!), be specific about what you are trying to address (while some issues feel urgent, think about what you want to achieve and who to talk to), and make sure to have stakeholders in the conversation (don’t speak for other people, listen to and engage with them).

LINCOLN-ELIOT FORJ KIDS BOOK CLUB – Wednesday, June 9th at 4:30pm (ZOOM) (Note date change from original schedule)

The L-E FORJ Kids Book Club selected A Place at the Table by Saadia Faruqi and Laura Shovan to read for the next meeting on Zoom on Wednesday, June 9th at 4:30 p.m. ET.  This book is recommended for 9-12 year olds, but all family members are welcome.  Please RSVP to L-E FORJ Coordinator Lanni Isenberg if you’d like to join the chat: Lanni_harris@yahoo.com  (The book is available to borrow from Newton libraries, electronically and for purchase on a variety of online bookstores.)

Join Lincoln-Eliot’s FIRST Juneteenth Celebration – Friday, June 18th from 4-6p, Lincoln-Eliot Playground

Juneteenth is the celebration of the freedom of formerly enslaved people in the United States.  The Lincoln-Eliot PTO and L-E FORJ will host an afternoon of fun activities, including music and games.  Join friends and learn the Electric Slide and Double Dutch, too!

Newton North High School continues the festivities through the weekend!

Juneteenth is on Saturday June 19th.  FORJ, Newton Community Pride, and the Harmony Foundation are co-sponsoring a city-wide community event at the Hyde Playground in the Newton Highlands on Sunday, June 20th, commemorating this historic holiday.  (Requires Registration – see NNHS flyer for scan code to register)

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 equity.  We seek to generate understanding and curiosity about the differences in our society.

We strive to achieve safe and welcoming environments that enhance the well-being of all people.  We promote healing and connection between individuals and communities.  We speak out against injustice, support our kids to be upstanders, and take action to address bias and inequity.

One Book, One Community Wishtree Celebration

Lincoln-Eliot Elementary School invites you to our 

One Book, One Community Celebration

Please join us outside on Friday, May 28, 2021 at 10:30 a.m. to watch Lincoln-Eliot students tie their wishes to our very own Wishtree in front of our school. 

   

DLA families are encouraged to participate as well!  Look for a message from your teachers this week with more information, and there will be wish tags and ribbons provided for all our DLA students.

For 6 weeks, the Lincoln-Eliot Elementary School has enjoyed listening to members of our community read the book Wishtree, by Katherine Applegate. This charming story has themes of being welcoming to everyone and respecting “otherness” in our neighbors.

In the book, the main character, Red, is the town’s Wishtree.  Each year, townspeople of all ages write a wish on a piece of fabric and tie their wish to Red.

If you haven’t seen it already, there was a lovely write-up about this project in the Newton Tab:

https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/newton-tab/2021/05/18/newton-schools-book-club-brings-students-together-read-wishtree-lincoln-eliot-wishes-tree-friendship/5093722001/

Don’t forget to check out our LE Wishtree Website for more information and resources about the book!  Thank you to the LE PTO and the Frugal Bookstore for providing the books for each family, and a big thank you to Ms. Jeanne Conley and the literacy team for putting this all together!

 

Fifth Grade Graduation: Thursday, June 17th, 1:30pm

We are so thrilled to be able to have an in-person graduation ceremony this year, and can’t wait to celebrate with all our awesome fifth graders!  Plans are in the works, but here’s what we know so far:

Date: Thursday, June 17th, at 1:30pm  (Rain date June 21st)

Location:  On the field outside the playground.  There will be chairs set up for the graduating fifth graders; families are asked to bring their own seating / picnic blankets.

How to help:  We would love some volunteers to help decorate the field/fence/basketball court ahead of time, to make it even more festive and exciting for the kids!  Please email Tui at secretary@lepto.org if you’d like to join us!

Gift bags:  We are working on gift bags for all the kids, which will include the yearbooks and a middle school sweatshirt.  We know not all the graduates are going on to Bigelow Middle School, so we are asking all 5th grade families to fill out this very brief form for us to let us know which middle school your child will be attending and what size sweatshirt we should get for them:

https://forms.gle/qL32V8gT6WcJRzzw8

Please respond by this Friday, May 28th, so we can be sure to order and have the sweatshirts in time for graduation!  (We understand information is going out this week to families who are waiting to hear if they’re going to Day or Bigelow — if you haven’t heard by Friday, please let us know!)  We have also included a “Lincoln-Eliot” option for anyone who is not sure or not going on to a Newton middle school.  If we do not hear from you, we will order your child a Youth Large Bigelow sweatshirt.

Thank you for your help, and hooray for our fifth graders!

One Book, One Community: Wishtree

We are so excited about the launch of Lincoln-Eliot’s One Book, One Community initiative, and we want to especially thank Jeanne Conley, L-E’s Literacy Specialist, for her amazing work putting this together!  Over the next month, everyone in our school will be reading Wishtree, by Newbery Medal-winning author Katherine Applegate.

We hope you’ll take a moment to check out the L-E Wishtree website the literacy team has put together, which is also where you can find the daily read-alouds.  (If you have trouble accessing them, please try logging in as your student!)

Thanks to support from the PTO and Frugal Bookstore, each family in the school has received a copy of the book.  Over the next few weeks, students will be listening to a few chapters a day, read aloud by members of our teaching community.   As a reminder, please only read or listen to the chapters for that day — don’t read ahead, so we can all experience the book together!

Highlights of the initiative:

* L-E wishtree website

* Listening to chapters read by members of our teaching community each day

* Watching the bulletin board change each day (pictures are linked on the google site daily)

* Creating our own Lincoln-Eliot Wishtree right outside of our school in May

We hope you all enjoy the book!  Happy reading!

Trees can’t tell jokes, but they can certainly tell stories. . . .

Red is an oak tree who is many rings old.  Red is the neighborhood “wishtree“—people write their wishes on pieces of cloth and tie them to Red’s branches.  Along with her crow friend Bongo and other animals who seek refuge in Red’s hollows, this “wishtree” watches over the neighborhood.

You might say Red has seen it all.  Until a new family moves in.  Not everyone is welcoming, and Red’s experiences as a wishtree are more important than ever.

Funny, deep, warm, and nuanced, this is Katherine Applegate at her very best—writing from the heart, and from a completely unexpected point of view.

Thank You for a Wonderful Science Fair!

We had such a wonderful time seeing everyone at our Lincoln-Eliot Science Fair this week!  Lincoln-Eliot students from every grade did a fantastic job sharing slides, posters, videos, and live presentations.  We were so happy to see so many teachers show up to celebrate the kids, too!  You can still visit our Science Fair Padlet Page and see all the amazing work everyone did by clicking here:

Lincoln-Eliot Science Fair!

Students made lemon batteries, volcanoes, small motors, robot hands, slime, eclipse models, and rockets; taught us about scientists like Ynes Mexia and France A. Cordova; demonstrated how to build a compass, swing a pendulum, make a rainbow, or create a floating stick man; measured how much sugar is in our snacks, what numbers come up the most in dice rolls, and how high people can hear as they age; and prepared presentations on Minecraft biomes, Skittles, mold, and four-stroke engines — and so much more!  We loved the projects and conversations about bird beak differences, surface tension, and acid rain that went along with the experiment kits generously provided by Merck.

Pilot Josh Haddad also gave us a super-fun “Build a Paper Airplane” Zoom activity on Wednesday, and our “Ask a Scientist” parents and guardians told us about new science discoveries in recent years and answered everybody’s burning questions.

If you missed the “Build a Paper Airplane” activity, you can find the instructions in this video:

A big thank you to our amazing Science Fair committee and brilliant scientist parents for all their hard work making this happen: Brigitte LaMarche, Foster Hoyt, Fernando Vieira, Spencer McMinn, Brett Isenberg, Heather and Kwok Yu, Josh Haddad, Fhynita Brinson, David Proia, Casey Hayward, Jennifer Monopoli, Julie Loh, Leah Chan, and Felicia Wilburn — we really appreciate you!

FUNDrive Clothing Donation Drive!

Fundraising for the PTO has been tough this year, given the restrictions with COVID, but we are kicking off a socially-distanced and environmentally friendly fundraiser to close out the last few weeks of school and we need your help!

Did you know that 26 billion pounds of clothing and textiles pile up in landfills each year?  95% of which could have been re-worn or repurposed?  Or that it takes 1,800 gallons of water to make just one new pair of jeans?

This Earth Month, there are lots of things you can do to reduce your environmental footprint, like buy only thrifted items for the month or remember your reusable bags.  But because the fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters in the world, hosting this FUNDrive® can make a big impact on our planet.

By hosting a FUNDrive®, we are not only helping to keep 700 million pounds of usable items out of landfills every year, but we are raising money for the Lincoln-Eliot PTO!  And because we don’t have to sell anything door to door, like wrapping paper or chocolate bars, our FUNDrive® earns our PTO money without adding waste to landfills in the future.  The wins just keep coming!

Start by asking friends and family if they can help out by donating any clothing or household items they no longer use.  Savers West Roxbury location will weigh those items on our drop-off dates, pay our PTO by the pound of donations collected, and give others the chance to love your gently used stuff.

So if we set a fundraising goal of $1,000 we would only have to collect approximately 220 lawn-sized trash bags of donations in order to reach that goal!

What better time to tackle your Spring cleaning and kick-off this environmentally friendly fundraiser than Earth Month!

Ready to reduce, reuse, and raise money!

Details:

Savers FUNDrive® Clothing Drive

Dates:

Donation collection begins NOW thru May 29th (one week before the drop-off date at Savers – tentatively scheduled for Saturday, June 5th).

Approved Items for Donation:

  • Gently used clothing and footwear of all sizes (babies thru adult), including socks, bathing suits, undershirts and bras. Doesn’t have to be seasonal, they are accepting winter clothes too.

  • Jewelry & accessories (belts, purses, wallets, bags, fanny packs, ties, scarves, hats, gloves, etc)

  • Bed and bath items: linens, curtains, pillows, towels, tablecloths, blankets, sheets

Items NOT accepted:

  • stuffed animals

  • furniture

  • appliances

  • books, magazines or media (CDs, DVDs, etc)

  • sports equipment

Collection location to gather donations: TBD, more details on scheduling a pick-up or drop-off location to follow in future newsletters.  Please collect in lawn-sized or kitchen-sized trash bags at home for now.

What we need:

  • Volunteers – interested in helping organize this FUNDrive®, do donation pick-ups or drop-offs?  Organizing a team?  Helping to get the word out thru social media or advertising (promo materials will be provided)?  Contact Ronda Morra: 781-589-7226 or rbmorra@gmail.com

  • Ideas: should we make this a competition with teams divided by grade?  Ice cream party for the winning grade?  Or something to make it competitive and involve the kids?  We’d love to hear everyone’s ideas!

  • Storage location(s) for bags of donations until the drop-off can be made on June 5th.  Do you have a garage or shed or basement/spare room that could be used as a donation collection point?  Let us know!

  • A U-Haul or other van-sized moving truck for a few hours on the morning of June 5th to drop the donations at Savers in West Roxbury.  Does anyone in our school community have a connection here that could get us the use of a truck donated for a few hours?

  • Donations of the approved items in kitchen-sized garbage bags or lawn-sized garbage bags ONLY

Stay tuned for more details as our plans come together, but start collecting items in your own home or ask neighbors, friends and relatives for donated items now!

The Science Fair is THIS WEEK!

Make sure you upload your projects before Tuesday, April 13, 2021.  Here’s how:

Students can take a photo of their project, create a Google Doc or Google Slideshow, or make a short 2-4 minute video, and then upload it to our PADLET.  All students will get an opportunity to share their project with a Teacher & Scientist team on Thursday April 15, 2021, our Student Project Day, although presenting is not required.

Upload here: Science Fair Padlet https://padlet.com/nuneze2/xtlrkq2vtrpofmgw
Need some tips? PADLET directions here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S-Zg1xqC4Jy0aMHHT61hH_LGZK1QEiJFO0tMhb25NCo/edit

Wednesday, April 14, 2021: Science Activity Day

We’re running two events this evening!  Please join “Ask a Scientist” when you aren’t building a paper airplane with parent and pilot Josh Haddad.

5-6:30pm HOW TO BUILD AN AMAZING PAPER AIRPLANE!

  • 5-5:30pm Kindergarten & first-grade
  • 5:30-6pm Second and third-grade
  • 6-6:30pm Fourth and fifth-grade

https://zoom.us/j/94470141591?pwd=WUxsNWhLR1BSUjM1RzU3cDhKN0gxQT09
Meeting ID: 944 7014 1591
Passcode: science

Anyone who wants to learn how to make an awesome paper airplane with parent and pilot Josh Haddad should join the Zoom call!  Kids should come prepared with:

  1. Paper  (2-3 sheets of printer paper or lined paper)
  2. Pencil
  3. Tape
  4. Crayons or markers

5-7pm ASK A SCIENTIST!

LINK: https://zoom.us/j/95933401737

Join scientists from our own community as they talk about fun, gross, cool science.  Kids are invited to submit their science questions.

Special thanks to our scientist volunteers!

  • Felicia Carrington Wilburn, Scientist at Biogen
  • Josh Haddad, Pilot and Flight Instructor
  • Brett Isenberg, Ph.D. Scientist at Draper Laboratory
  • Spencer McMinn, Ph.D. Scientist at Merck
  • David Proia, Ph.D. Scientist at C4 Therapeutics
  • Fernando Vieira, M.D., ALS/Lou Gehrig’s Scientist at ALS TDI
  • Heather Yu, Ph.D., Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at Stonehill College

Thursday, April 15, 2021: Student Project Day

Kids can submit projects, photos, notes, or videos in advance on our PADLET.  Then join us Thursday night from 5-7:15 PM to celebrate as students present their projects!  (Note: presenting is optional!)

Presentation Schedule

All the information and links for the science fair can also be found here: https://lepto.org/virtual-science-fair

We hope to see you there, and we can’t wait to see all the kids’ projects!

L-E Family Science Fair: April 14-15!

Our annual Lincoln-Eliot Family Science Event will be held over ZOOM this year.  Start brainstorming now and mark your calendars for Wednesday, April 14th, and Thursday, April 15th!

Key dates:

Week of April 6-9, 2021: Do-It-Yourself Science Kits Distributed (these will be given out at school or in the DLA supply pickup bags for those who requested them)

Wednesday, April 14, 2021: VIRTUAL Science Activity Day

5-6:30pm: How to build a fast, cool paper airplane with pilot Josh (see times for your grade level here: https://lepto.org/virtual-science-fair)

5-7pm: Ask a scientist!  It’s a forum just for Lincoln-Eliot kids to ask their weirdest science questions.  Send us your science question now to be answered on the 14th by real live scientists!:  https://forms.gle/g3jNTfWDfR96kPoz7

Thursday, April 15, 2021: VIRTUAL Student Project Day

5-7:30pm: Get creative! Kids can submit projects in advance on PADLET (LINK coming soon!) and/or present live via ZOOM with their classmates

Here is the link with the latest info & details: https://lepto.org/virtual-science-fair

Have questions? Feel free to email: Brigitte LaMarche @ brigilam@gmail.com

Lincoln-Eliot Science Fair!

Our annual Lincoln Eliot Family Science Night will be held over several days this year.  Start brainstorming now and mark your calendars for Wednesday, April 14th, and Thursday, April 15th!

If you haven’t already, please complete the form below by March 19 (one form per child):

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfJZHiB7GD0BC-rzJJ6IMwNTlLLoX4NJfV_ZJbUNNwRJeJUxg/viewform

Below is the preliminary agenda for Lincoln Eliot Virtual Science Week

Do-It-Yourself Science Kits:  April 5-9

DIY science kits will be available for pick up, generously provided by Merck.  We will have a variety of kits to choose, appropriate for all grades (K-5).  Need a science project kit?  Request one in the form above!  Deadline for requests is March 19.

Science Activity Night:  Wednesday, April 14

Activities will include a hands-on workshop on how to make the world’s best paper airplane and the science behind it!  This session will be taught by a Lincoln-Eliot parent, who is a pilot.  There will also be other activities, such as “Ask a Scientist”, featuring local scientists.

Student Project Night:  Thursday, April 15

Students at all levels are invited to present the projects in supervised breakout rooms.  We will also be providing an online platform for students to post their projects, which will allow the school community to view all of the projects.  More details to come!

Past projects have included investigations/experiments (e.g. How fast do apples rot?, What do dogs remember?), models/demonstrations (e.g. the Solar System, Lemon battery), research reports (e.g. Marie Curie, Snails), and collections (e.g. Slime).  Google is an excellent place to look for ideas — for example: https://www.education.com/science-fair/.

We welcome projects at all levels and abilities!  Feel free to work in teams!  And even if your student is not doing a project, we encourage everyone to pick up a DIY science kit, participate in the activities/workshops, and view their classmates’ projects online.  We look forward to celebrating our young scientists together!