If you already completed your Volunteering Commitment, please visit our nifty, nerdy* new Parent Volunteer Binder, pick the calendar that fits your commitment, and sign up! (The binder sits at the Homework Station, just outside the Amethyst 3rd-5th grade classroom).
If you haven't completed your Volunteering Commitment yet, please do! Forms are next to the Parent Volunteer Binder. Remember, we're only asking for one hour each month helping your children and their friends in the classroom and on the playground. If homework works for your family, please visit the *NEW* Home-Work Station in the elementary classroom! (Located just outside the Amethyst 3rd-5th grade room).
Parents: flip through the Language Arts and Math binders to choose home-work for your child, make a photocopy, submit to the Homework Basket by Tuesdays and it will be returned on Wednesdays! Directions are written on the cover of each binder. Please collect Bike-a-Thon pledges!
(Extra pledge sheets are in the classroom, if you need a new one). We're leaving after lunch on Thursday! The four-letter word that terrifies teachers most draws not from the usual lexicon of banned words, but rather involves a culprit no larger than the tip of our fingernails, one who hatches its mayhem on our children's scalps.
Here, I'll just say it: L-I-C-E. On Friday after school, we learned that one of our kindergartner's siblings came down with a case of lice. When we returned Monday morning, parent volunteers inspected the beautiful heads of our children, and unfortunately had to send one 1st/2nd grade child home. The 1st/2nd grade class was checked again this morning, with nothing found from the lice-realm. Please check your children for lice, and make sure that our children don't share hats, combs, or bike helmets. To read about the myths and misconceptions surrounding lice, go here. Well, we cancelled the Bike-A-Thon when the smoky skies meant rough weather for the lungs of our young ones. Then the rains came. And parents complained. "Why risk losing this time-honored Dome School tradition?" they sang, and so we listened, and thought, and listened, and thought, and then we checked the Air Quality Index and begged Ariel Swatez to coordinate everything (with a newborn slung around her chest, no less!), and so now ... so long as the Air Quality Index stays in the safe zone (50 or below), Bike-A-Thon is good to go! The Bike-A-Thon letter went home today, along with a Pledge Sheet on the back side. If you need another copy of the letter, here you go: Busy bodies busting through concrete blocks on bikes between other busy bodies busting on bikes makes for big, big, BIG bumps.
Last year we had a pile of bike helmets stuffed inside the shed. Each day children spent many minutes searching for a helmet that fit their head, then adjusted (or needed help adjusting) the size, then complained that the helmet didn't fit their heads just right and so returned to step one, searching for another helmet to sort-of fit their head, and finally they used that helmet on their hopefully-free-of-lice heads to cruise around the playground slab, and when the bell rang to signal "Recess is over!" a big pile of bike helmets was either (a) tossed onto the slab in a crushing crunch of release, or (b) thrown back into the bike shed among the pile. It was a mess. But we will not give up! Never :-) Henceforth, our New Plan: One bike helmet per student! Bring a helmet from home, or use a spare helmet at the school (we have about 12 helmets to share). Label the helmet. Keep the helmet in the Bike Helmet Bin. And may our Bike Helmet Protocol be organized forevermore. (That was a joke). With only four days remaining before the 11th of September, the Dome School grown-ups have been swimming through the depths of our Takilma ocean, surfacing for air, submerging, re-surfacing, then diving deep again. Moon jellyfish drift by. Giant clams rest on the bottom of the sea. The tides roll in, then out again. This is the way the moon and Brookings' Pacific Ocean are communicating today, Dome School Orientation Day: Welcome back, families. The dive of the grown-ups has done much to ready our school for another year, yet there is one thing missing: your children. We are so excited for their return!
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