The last week of May was certainly busy: we all enjoyed having Monday off, in honor of Memorial Day. Thank you to our United States service men and women, fighting for our freedom and American democracy. Our teachers have been meeting this week at their Professional Learning Community meetings, working hard on their supply orders for the fall of 2015. Thank you very much to our wonderful West teachers! We practiced a safety bus evacuation drill on Wednesday morning. I observed students being safe, responsible, and respectful during this important drill – thank you boys and girls! Safety is our most important priority at West School. We celebrated our Westie Awards on Thursday morning – congratulations to all of our proud Westie winners. Remember boys and girls: we practice respect, responsibility, kindness and compassion at West School – these are expected behaviors, every day – on the bus, in our classrooms, in the cafeteria, at recess, and in our specialist classes. We had a Music Immersion program on Thursday afternoon for third, fourth and fifth graders. Thank you to Mr. Caple and the Visual Performing Arts program for bringing this to West. And, we all collectively breathed a huge sigh of relief, completing our PARCC testing for third, fourth and fifth grades this week. Thank you to Ms. Perry, our Assistant Principal, for her hard work in administering this very important state test, and thank you to our West staff and students for doing their very best to perform well on this test! Phew!
Looking ahead to June, we are kicking off our “Read-A-Thon” reading challenge on Monday, June 1st. Students will be challenged to read a certain number of books or minutes at home during the month of June. We have raised the bar from last year, increasing the amount of minutes required at each grade level to meet the challenge! I don’t want to give away the surprise, but let’s just say that if students meet the reading challenge that I am proposing to them, I will be doing something extraordinary this year - something very different from anything I’ve ever done in the past. I will do almost ANYTHING to promote literacy at West School to inspire our children to read!