Lewis Elementary
This morning over 55 students, parents and staff members came out to work on the school grounds as part of our Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service. Under the direction of our Garden Coordinator, Kathleen Witter, our volunteers worked to prune trees, clean out our garden beds, and do a general clean up of the school garden and the school grounds in the front of the building. We would like to thank all of our volunteers for their work today and for making this a very memorable Dr. King Day.
Working in Mr. Vestal’s classroom.
Lunch recess...
One of the decisions that I have to make is calling a rainy day recess. Basically if it is raining significantly during our lunch time recess, we do not send the students out for recess, but rather call a rainy day recess. A rainy day recess consists of various indoor activities for students during lunch. This involves the movement of students to various locations such as our library, our gym, our technology lab, the music room, and classrooms. Basically rainy day recesses are harder to organize and involve the moving of students from the cafeteria to their particular rainy day recess location. It is a lot of work.
For the past few years I have been using an iOS app called Dark Sky to help me with my decision making process regarding whether to call a rainy day recess or not. Dark Sky is an app that provides a macro forecast for a particular location and provides a visual representation of the probability of rain or snow for the upcoming hour. It calls upon local weather stations to predict precipitation for your particular location. From my experience it works very well. I use it daily in the winter months to help make the rainy day recess call.
A companion web site that provides similar information is called Forecast.io. I highly recommend both.
Annual Beavers vs. Ducks cookie survey:
Each year before the Oregon State vs. Oregon football game, our school district Nutrition Services department provides a cookie treat as part of lunch before the big game. Students are offered a choice between an orange OSU cookie, or a yellow University of Oregon cookie. This year, our informal survey concluded that Duck fans edged our Beaver fans by just a few crumbs.
A semi weekly audio update on news and events taking place at Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Oregon.