Greetings Fairmeadow Community,

 

What makes you unique ? While celebrating Inclusive Schools Week last week, our students and staff discussed this question and shared hundreds of individual attributes about themselves as one way to capture the diversity of our community. Through this simple exercise, we emphasized that every person contributes to our school in distinctive ways, and that everyone has strengths we can capitalize on in our classrooms. The display of bright colored cards capturing these unique attributes attracted much attention last week, and I encourage you to stop by and read some of the comments our children shared. Our school of diverse language, ethnic background, interests, perspectives, abilities, religion, and experiences is a great strength of Fairmeadow, and a strong unifier in our community.

 

In a discussion with an engaged group of parents at our Principal's Coffee last week, we examined how the concept of inclusion relates to a safe and welcoming school climate, as well as to addressing diverse academic needs in every classroom. For our children, it is very normal to be with an incredibly diverse population of people at our school, though every child can benefit from inclusive modeling, and safe spaces to ask questions. Parents hold significant influence in the way we talk about differences, and the way we model inclusive behavior and practices for our children. Some members of our parent community may feel isolated from the mainstream culture at our school, and it could benefit all of us to consider actions we can take to improve the sense of belonging for all in our parent community as well as our student community. I would love to hear ideas that you may have about how to improve and enhance our inclusive school climate for children and parents alike!

 

More than 180 countries across the world participated in last week's Hour of Code challenge, and many Fairmeadow students participated as well! Celebrated as one of the largest education events in history, millions of students spent time at school last week learning the basic process of coding with both digital and non-digital options. Many Fairmeadow children practiced sequential problem solving and outside-the-box thinking while engaging in coding fundamentals in classrooms. In a special partnership with our neighboring school, J.L. Stanford Middle School, four upper grade Fairmeadow classes joined 7th and 8th graders in Computer Science Class, and together they created thousands of lines of code! If you would like more information about coding activities you can explore with your child at home, please visit code.org.

 

We are prepared and excited for two engaging and fun final school weeks of 2017 at Fairmeadow!

 

With kindest regards and appreciation,

 

Tiffany and Olivier Aubin ( [email protected])

As the holidays are upon us, please consider making a donation to the Fairmeadow  Families Holiday Fund. We would would like to come together to provide assistance to families in our school community who need a little help during the holiday season. The office will be accepting donations in the form of cash or checks (please make them out to Claire Kirner). You can also contribute via PayPal ([email protected]). Our Fairmeadow office staff will then purchase gift cards to distribute. If you'd like to participate, please do so by Wednesday, December 13th.

Feel free to contact Claire Kirner or Alicia in the front office with any questions.

The staff luncheon this month is on  Thursday, December 14th, and is being hosted by 3rd grade families. These monthly luncheons give us a chance to show our appreciation for all that the Fairmeadow staff does for our children. It allows the entire faculty and staff to come together over a meal and they really enjoy and look forward to it. This month's theme is Brunch. 

Please consider signing up to contribute food to the luncheon. In addition, we need a few people to come to the luncheon to help with set-up and clean-up. These jobs do not take long. Click here to sign-up to contribute a dish or help out!  If you have trouble accessing the Google doc, please email  Sachi Messerian  with the dish you want to bring.

Is your child not in 3rd grade?  Click here for a list of staff luncheons scheduled for this school year.