Happy November!

It was nice to have that extra hour of sleep this weekend to recover from last week’s Halloween festivities. Although the weather didn’t cooperate, we didn’t let it rain on our parade. Our students paraded throughout the classrooms in the school, down the hallways, and around the perimeter of the gym giving everyone the opportunity to see the wonderful costumes. Thank you to all of the parents who volunteered in the classrooms helping to put on costumes and providing fun parties for the students.

Our PARP (Parents as Reading Partners) two-week celebration begins today. We will have a kick-off ceremony this morning that has been planned by our Reading Celebration committee. Your child will be bringing home some information today regarding these two weeks which will feature guest readers, DEAR, an author visit, teacher switch and read day, television blackout, and more!

Work is being done in our parking lot to make arrival and dismissal safer for all of us at East Hill. We are adding roughy 10 more parking spots in the back for our staff. In addition, we have entered into an agreement with the town that will let parents park in the ski hill parking lot when they are dropping off students, picking up students, or visiting during the day. Once the paving at the ski hill is complete, there won’t be any parking on the circle opposite the school, and the area between the ski hill and the entrance on Blackmore will be two-way. I’m excited about these improvements and very thankful to the town as well as our buildings and grounds crew and district administrators for making this possible.

Speaking of drop-off and dismissal, we are noticing that more and more students are being dropped off too early to school. Please know that our school does not open until 9:00 and therefore there is no supervision for the students until 9:00. If they eat breakfast at school they are allowed to enter the building at 8:50, otherwise they need to wait outside, unsupervised. We do, however, have a YMCA before and after school program if you are interested. To get more information about the program, please call Liz Horne at 474-6851, ext. 315.

Congratulations to Andrew Bush, Ella Watts, Arianna Nguyen, Anton Kudrytski, and Abigial Ray who will be representing East Hill this Thursday in the District Spelling Bee which will be held at Camillus Middle School Thursday morning. These students received the top scores on the written test which made them eligible to participate in the bee. Good luck spellers!

This week’s math words of the day are: addend (M), sum (T), difference (W), multiplication (Th), and factor (F).

I hope you are able to join us tonight for our PTA meeting where Dr. Brown will discuss the upcoming capital project. The meeting begins at 6:30 in the library. Have a great first week of November!