Welcome Back

August 2009

Welcome Leawood Families,

I am so excited to welcome our new families as well as our returning families to the 2009-2010 school year. This is my third year here at Leawood and I continue to be impressed with the students, families, and community members and how great they make this school. As always, my summer was filled by revealing various connections to Leawood through friends of friends, and random connections through other people. It really states how strong the Leawood community ties are beyond the neighborhood boundaries.

We started this year off great with our open-house and two assessment days. These assessment days really help our teachers get to know your kids before school starts, and they help us identify where the students are instructionally so that we can work to meet every child’s instructional need. Our welcome Back Carnival is Friday, August 28th and Back to School Night will be Thursday, September 3rd. Back to school night will be an opportunity for you as parents to get a brief picture of what the instructional day looks like and any other important information from the classroom teachers. In addition, this year we will be offering curriculum nights. These nights will allow you as parents to understand better the resources that we use at Leawood to support the expected learning of our students. In addition, you will get to sit through an actual lesson so that you can better understand what your students experience here at Leawood. Our first curriculum night will be in math and how we use Every Day Math as resource to teach math. This night is scheduled for Thursday, September 24th. We will do a night for our writing approach Every Child a Writer in October, Fundations and word-work in December, and reading with MONDO Reading in the spring. We look forward to helping parents better understand the resources that we use at Leawood.

Our school is filled with so many opportunities for your students and you as a family. As always, I want to personally invite you to attend our PTSA meetings which are scheduled the 3rd Wednesday of the month starting at 6:00pm. Our school accountability meetings will be the 3rd Monday of the month starting at 4:15pm. These are two great opportunities to support all of the great things that happen at Leawood. In addition, as many of you have experienced, before and after school get very busy and our number one priority is the safety of EVERY student. We are always looking for parents that are here before and after school to volunteer to help us at our cross walks and to ensure that we are all looking out for the safety of our children. Stop by the office if you are interested. We will always welcome parents to volunteer at various levels of interest, such as in the work room to do busy stuff for teachers, in the library to help our kids develop the love of books, and at all of our activities.

You may have heard or will hear the term 21st century learner. This is a common term used to describe our current students and the learning that they are surrounded by every day. We as parents have to remember that our world is so different for our kids as compared to when we grew up. Our kids are living in a digital era where communication, skill sets, and expectations are so drastically different from our expectations as a student, that we can no longer predict what our students’ future holds. We cannot predict what new jobs will be available, the technology that will be available, and the simple things that we most often take for granted. We live in an era of immediate communication, instant gratification, multiple opportunities, and technology and expectations that change daily. As you will experience at Leawood, we will do our very best to insure that we are supporting all students with these opportunities to be independent and lifelong 21st century learners. What we need from you as parents is to support the learning at home. Ask questions and be involved in helping your students understand what they are learning. This partnership will ensure our students to be successful.

And finally, a few reminders that Leawood does our best to be environmentally conscious as we try to keep a paperless trail whenever possible. This means that our website at www.leawoodlions.us is our central location for information and communication regarding Leawood information, class and teacher news, school events, the calendar, the lunch menu, and anything else we need to let you know about. In addition, we send out our newsletters and information via email. If you do not have internet access, make sure to fill out the attached form on this newsletter to let us know. And at last, remember to schedule a night out for our one and only fundraiser, the silent auction. This event will be on Friday, November 6th at the Columbine Country Club. Tickets will go on sale soon. We hope everyone can join us to help make this night a huge success!

Have a great Year Leawood Lions,

Ari Goldberg