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Dear Westbriar Families,
The weather has gotten cooler and the leaves are changing colors, welcome to October and the fall season. We have been in school for about six weeks and continue to find success with virtual instruction and scheduling – thank you for your continued collaboration and flexibility. I have a few updates and information to share, feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.
Virtual Wednesday Folders
When we were in school, teachers would send home Wednesday folders with flyers detailing information of events or announcements from our school and PTA. With our virtual opening, we have transitioned to sending Wednesday Folders home to you electronically. Classroom teachers have sent home weekly links to Wednesday Folders for almost a month now and we wanted to be sure all our families were aware of this change to Wednesday Folders.
I want to bring your attention to this week’s Wednesday Folders link. You will note several PDFs starting with “YAG” which stands for Year at a Glance. We are sharing Year at a Glance for each grade level so you can see what our teachers will be covering over the course of this school year. We hope this information will be helpful to our parent community.
Return to Learn
You may have read that FCPS has started to invite a small number of students to return to school for in person instruction. May parents have asked me about when their child would be returning to school for families who selected face to face instruction, hybrid model. I want to let you know that once the Return to Learn plan has been share and approved by our School Board, I will provide you guidance on when students would be returning to school in the hybrid model.
Food Distribution
Each morning at 8:05am, a school bus will pull up to entrance #1 at Westbriar and will distribute food to any families waiting in line. This is open to our community and anyone who wants to pick up breakfast and lunch can come to Westbriar each morning at 8:05am. I wanted to be sure our parent community know this continues to available to all families.
Thank you for your continued partnership. We look forward to seeing you at our virtual PTA meeting scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, 10/15 at 7pm.
Take care,
Ms. Mary Tam, Principal - mhtam@fcps.edu
Ms. Chris Butzer, Assistant Principal – cmbutzer@fcps.edu
Mr. Amos Simms-Smith, Assistant Principal - AOSimmsSmith@fcps.edu
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Library News
Westbriar’s Annual Pumpkin Decorating Contest is going virtual! Students will be able to share their decorated pumpkins via Flipgrid. Check out all the details here.
Curbside Checkout is underway. We are excited about how many students are checking out some of our more than 12,000 books. Video tutorials on the process, as well as tutorials on Destiny and MackinVia, can be found on your student’s Library Google Classroom or in virtual Wednesday folders. Contact Mrs. Fuselier at kmfuselier@fcps.edu with any questions.
From the Public Library: The LEAP (Library Equity Access Pass) has launched. Here is the FCPL page for LEAP. It includes downloadable flyers in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Vietnamese, and English. You can contact FCPL with any questions.
Author Visit: Westbriar welcomes author Keri Graff. Mr. Graff will visit with students in grades 3-6 on Monday, Oct 26 at 1:00 via BBCU (link coming soon).
If you would like to purchase copies (with a signed bookplate) of Mr. Graff’s books follow this link to Bookworm and then use “westbriar” as the organization code. A portion of the sale goes to Westbriar’s PTA. Check out this flyer with more information.
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From our PTA
Westbriar Family,
October is such a lovely time of year when the trees and weather change and students get excited to plan their Halloween costumes!
Your PTA continues to work together with our caring and creative administrators and teachers to bring your family student events and parent programming that directly impacts our students. By now most classrooms should have identified a homeroom parent who will work with our new RISE and Homeroom parent co-leads, Sun Sull and MaDiha Mahmood. Working together as a team, your PTA is helping homeroom leads virtually plan, share resources and bring our teachers and classes fun ways to come together in the current school year!
Thank you to Jenny & Tom Sellers for organizing our first teacher appreciation project- many parents and students took the time to tell us why they love Westbriar teachers – check it out on our website – we have the best teachers! Thank you to Ms. Karen Fuselier for speaking at our last PTA meeting and for bringing us so many great author visits! A big shout out also to Ms. Elisa Clifton, who championed Walk to School Day last week.
If you missed the October Chaos to Calm presentation by Mary Turos, one of our favorite tips was to keep a bottle of bubbles at your student’s desk. The act of blowing bubbles uses the diaphragm and helps calm and alleviate stress. A two-pager on her presentation with resources can be found on the PTA website once logged in as a member.
Not a member yet? Please join today by going to www.westbrairpta.org/join - joining does NOT commit you to volunteering or “having to do x, y or z” rather it means you want to support your PTA who is advocating and working for all students, including yours! We want all teachers and parents to be PTA members!
Please check your SPAM to make sure your PTA emails are not going to spam, if they are, please mark them as “not junk!” This month be looking for information on the following PTA sponsored events:
Dining for Dollars – Wed, October 14th from 4 to 8pm at Vienna Chipotle – Take a night off cooking this week! Dine in, order online and pick up Chipotle for our fundraiser by using the Promo Code Y76E9R2 or mentioning our fundraiser when ordering. 33% of sales go to the PTA. Time to eat burritos!
PTA Meeting - Thursday, Oct 15th 7pm - We hope to see you logged in at our upcoming Zoom Meeting. Logged in members can find the link on our website and a link will be emailed to all current members.
Odyssey of the Mind Information Session - Tuesday, Oct 20th 5:30pm - being held virtually (Detail are HERE). Previous Westbriar Odyssey teams have won top spots at the World Finals. Join this fun, mind growing STEAM oriented challenge and work in self-directed teams (with a parent-coach) to participate in the regional competition!
Author Visit – Monday, Oct 26th at 1pm Author Keir Graff will visit students in 3rd-6thGrade via BBC – his books can be purchased at https://www.bookwormcentral.comusing the code ‘westbriar’ and a percentage of sales will return to the PTA!
Halloween MAD Science SPOOKTACULAR, Monday, Oct 26th at 4pm – Don’t miss this spook-tacular Mad Science Halloween STEM show where the scientist creates a Mad Science Brew filled with foggy effects and flashes of light. They will teach our little ghouls the science of Halloween while watching colorful indoor fireworks.
Finally, it’s that season where we start thinking about the holidays and order decorations, gifts and more, pretty please, set up your Andriod or Apple Amazon App to allow Amazon Smile and a percentage of your purchases return to the PTA at no expense to you! Here is the HOW TO video! Be sure to choose Westbriar Elementary School PTA.
You can also find warm, cute and customized holiday gifts at www.WestbriarSpiritwear.com and each month there are new coupon codes.
In Health,
Your PTA Board
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Natalie Lueders
Westbriar Elementary PTA President, 2020-2021
(501)658-2488 cell
wesptaprez@gmail.com
Stay Connected & Join the Westbriar PTA Today at www.westbriarpta.org
PTA Mission: PTA's mission is to make every child’s potential a reality by engaging and empowering families and communities to advocate for all children
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