ACORN BLAST
Empire Oaks Parent Newsletter
August 16, 2020
Hello Empire Oaks Families!
Welcome back! I’d like to thank everyone - students, families, and teachers for a successful first week of school! Our back to school parade and materials distribution was a hit! Thank you to our amazing PTA and staff for Thank you all for your patience and perseverance as we are navigating and figuring out Distance Learning. Our Empire Oaks families have been so patient and so supportive, so thank you for that! It will continue to get better as we work out the technology kinks and as we get comfortable with our new routines.
First Day of School Photo Challenge Thank you to all of the Acorns who participated in the first day of school photo challenge last week. It was so fun to see all of your smiling faces and beautiful pictures. We have hundreds of pictures to go through, but are working hard to put together a slideshow of pictures that we’ll post on our school website!
Kindness Matters This month’s character trait focus is on Kindness! Please have a discussion about kindness with your children and ask them questions like, “What does it mean to be kind?” and “What does it look like to be kind?” Our Sunday Stories this month will focus on kindness.
Sunday Story For families new to EO, each week I record a read aloud that you can watch and listen to with your child on Sunday night. HERE is this week’s Sunday Story. You can find archived Sunday Stories on our YouTube Channel.
Weekly Challenge This week’s challenge is a KINDNESS Challenge. The challenge is to listen to the Sunday Story, Kindness Snippet Jar, and create your own kindness snippet jar, box, or container. As your student does acts of kindness, have them write it on a snippet and put it in the jar. HERE are some additional ideas from the author. Visit our Empire Oaks Flipgrid - where your student can share a quick video response telling us about something they did this week that was kind. Other family members and Empire Oaks staff are welcome to participate, too. I can’t wait to hear about all of your acts of kindness!
Monday Morning Message HERE is this week’s Monday Morning Message.
Principal Parenzin’s Virtual Office I invite you to visit my Virtual Office where you’ll find links to the Sunday Story, Monday Morning Message, Weekly Challenge, Acorn Blast Newsletter, and more! HERE is a brief explanation of the Virtual Office and the resources embedded there.
Reminders on a couple of items sent out last week:
Back to School Night BTSN presentations are posted on our school website. You can view them HERE. Please reach out to your child’s teacher if you have any questions.
School Lunches To order lunch at Empire Oaks, you'll need to visit our school website and click on the "LUNCH" link under "Additional Links" before 10am on the day you want to buy lunch. If you have multiple children buying lunch, please respond to the survey as many times as you need to. In other words, one response = one lunch. This will give our Food Service worker an idea of how many lunches to prepare each day.
Stay Connected! Lastly, I encourage you to stay connected with us. Bookmark our website - which we update almost daily, follow us on Instagram, our Empire Oaks PTA Facebook page, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss out on anything! As always, please call or email us if there’s anything you need!
Sincerely,
Principal Parenzin
Food for Thought: How parents can mentally prepare themselves for a school year like no other (article)