Join us on the LE playground on Thursday, September 30th from 5-7pm. Feel free to bring your own picnic or purchase pizza, desserts, and water at the tables with all proceeds going back to support our school. Mr. Hani’s ice cream truck will also be back with treats to purchase!
We still need volunteers to help table to sell pizza and drinks or to provide baked goods! Please sign up here to volunteer!
We are still missing a room connector for many of our teachers and would really love a few more volunteers! Our goal is to have two parents/guardians, but we need at least one per class, to make sure every teacher is supported.
The classes which do not have any room connector at all yet are:
1 Malavase
1 Ward
1 Warren
2 Rooney- need one more
2 McDonald
3 Gueye- need one more
3 Penczar
3 Crist
4 Levin- need one more
4 Monopoli
5 Foster/Bruns- need one more
5 DeNoble/Evans- need one more
Please reach out to our Room Connector Coordinator, Emily Núñez, at nunezemily77@gmail.com if you might be interested or want to know more (and please include your name, your child’s name, and your teacher & cohort!).
Thank you so much for your help, and thank you to everyone who has volunteered so far!
Thank you so much to everyone who donated bags of clothing to our FUNDrive! We now have 264 bags, which is amazing and surpasses our goal — every little donation added up to one big difference!
We will be loading all these bags to transport them to Savers next Saturday, June 5, at 9:45am and would love a couple of volunteers to help move the bags onto the truck! It will only take at most half an hour of your time and will go much faster with a few helpers. Please reach out to Ronda Morra at 781-589-7226 or rbmorra@gmail.com to volunteer, and thank you again!
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!
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!
Thank you very much to the parents who have signed up to chaperone some of our DLA-hybrid connection Zoom times! We are hoping to host the first grade, third grade, and fifth grade this Wednesday — watch your inboxes for a Zoom link.
We would love to make sure we can offer these at some point to all the grades, so if you’re interested in volunteering — especially if you’re a 2nd or 4th grade parent — we’d really appreciate it! Please visit our SignUp Genius to choose a grade & time slot:
https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0E44ABA72EA2FD0-lincolneliot3
We’ll provide the Zoom link and email everyone; you just have to sign in and be an adult presence for the kids. You can decide the length — the slots are an hour long, but if you’d like to make it a half-hour chat, or whatever amount of time works for you, that’s OK, too! If you’d like to read to them or organize a game, that would be great — but it’s also fine to sit nearby and let them chat.
Please email Elizabeth or Tui at dla@lepto.org anytime with any questions, and thank you so much for your help!
We are looking for people to help plan a virtual Science Fair event this spring, to replace our usual Family Science Night. If you’re interested in joining the Science Fair committee, or if you have any connections to cool science-related activities, please reach out to us at secretary@lepto.org — we’d really appreciate your help to make this as creative and fun for the kids as possible!
It was really great to see all the kids who joined us for our book fair storytime socials, and we’d love to keep that going with lunch bunch / social snacktimes to connect our DLA and hybrid kids! Based on the survey that went out, the best time for most people is Wednesday lunch, so we’re going to set up some Zooms for 1pm on Wednesdays in January and February, and see how they go!
In order to run any of these, though, we need at least one parent chaperone — so if you’re available and willing to volunteer, we’d appreciate it so much! Please visit our SignUp Genius to choose a grade & time slot:
https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0E44ABA72EA2FD0-lincolneliot3
We’ll provide a Zoom link from our PTO account, so you just have to sign in and keep an eye on the kids. You can decide the length — the slots are an hour long, but if you’d like to make it a half-hour chat, or whatever amount of time works for you, that’s OK, too! If you’d like to read to them or organize a game, that would be great — but it’s also fine to sit nearby and let them chat; we just need to make sure there’s an adult presence.
Please email Elizabeth or Tui at secretary@lepto.org anytime with any questions, and thank you so much for your help!
The Lincoln-Eliot PTO board needs a volunteer for a new position: liaison to the Newton Schools Foundation. The time commitment is minimal but the impact can be significant. Click here for a more detailed description of the liaison role: NSF Liaison Description
NSF funds grants in the Newton Public Schools that support professional development for educators, new approaches in the classroom, and programs that address both racial and income inequities and enable all students to achieve their full potential. Their mission is to advance excellence and equity in the Newton Public Schools.
You may have heard of them through NSF fundraising programs like Newton Inspires and Honor Thy Teacher. NSF-funded initiatives that have impacted elementary school students in particular include: Instrumental Music Programs, a program for students piloted at Lincoln Eliot where professional instrumentalists support ensemble music programs and give individualized instruction to students who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity for private lessons; and district-wide initiatives such as AuthorFest, a one-day event bringing authors and illustrators to all middle schools to engage students in the writing and illustrating process; Integrated Arts Curriculum; Positivity Training; Therapies for Severe Speech Sound Disorders; and Families Organizing for Racial Justice. NSF has more recently funded programs that address our unique times with the purchase last spring of Chromebooks for distribution district-wide to those in need of a device for remote learning, and this past summer’s National Educator Anti-Racist Conference.
The NSF Board would like to collaborate with PTOs to strengthen the relationship between the schools and the NSF donors who fund these programs. With a better understanding of NSF’s mission and available funds, PTOs will be able to encourage principals and teachers to apply for NSF grants that will enhance educational opportunities in our school, and advise NSF of supplemental programs our school is exploring that might be grant-eligible.
For more information about NSF and the programs it supports across the Newton Public Schools, you can visit the NSF website. If you have any questions or need more information about NSF, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
We are still missing a room connector for many of our teachers and would really love a few more volunteers! Our goal was one parent per cohort, but we need at least one parent per class, to make sure every teacher is supported.
The classes which do not have any room connector at all yet are:
K Bradley
K Kremer
K Jang
1 Ward
2 Rooney
2 Gayle
2A McDonald
3 Gueye
5 Foster
5 DeNoble/Triest
Please reach out to our Room Connector Coordinator, Emily Núñez, at nunezemily77@gmail.com if you might be interested or want to know more (and please include your name, your child’s name, and your teacher & cohort!).
We absolutely understand that this year is really overwhelming for everyone, so we want to make this role as easy and not time-consuming as possible! Our hope is just to have one point person per class to help connect parents and support our teachers, in whatever small way you can.
Thank you so much for your help, and thank you to everyone who has volunteered so far!