HEMLOCK SCHOOL NEWS

Here we are in February, and we are halfway through the school year! As a community, we have done such a wonderful job keeping our children, our families and our Hemlock staff safe, and I encourage everyone to stay strong, stay positive, and know that we will get through this pandemic together! We have so much to look forward to in February and I hope you will take advantage of the opportunities to participate in our PTA initiatives from the comfort (and warmth!) of your home.

This month, our Health & Safety Committee, led by Kerrin Prewett, Rainy Foote and Shannon Giuffrida, provided our Hemlock students with some new items to use during indoor recess! Our Kindergarten students received a variety of BINGO cards (including sight words, numbers, and rhyming) while our First Grade students received classic BINGO cards. The Committee also provided 200 stacking cups per class for the kids to enjoy too! We thank the Committee for providing these items for our students.

Our Bad Weather Games Representative, Maria Khawaja and our Site-Based Representative, Gillian Burns, have also been hard at work brainstorming ways that parents can help with indoor recess this year! While the Hemlock children do go outside whenever the real-feel temperature is 32 degrees or above, there are plenty of days in which they are indoors due to precipitation or chilly temperatures. Their first two projects include the 100th day of school tee-shirts and the marble mazes.

The 100th Day of School is approaching on February 24th and the children will be making tee-shirts during indoor recess days to celebrate. Each child should bring in a plain white t-shirt by Thursday, February 4th.  Shirts should be labeled with the child’s name and placed in a Ziploc bag.  Each child should also bring in markers/sharpies to use to decorate their shirts. We still have some open slots for parents to record videos with suggestions for how to decorate the shirts! See

https://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e084fa5a72aab9-100th to sign up. All videos should be submitted by Friday, February 5th! We are sure your child would love to see you make a special guest appearance at recess!

We also plan to have the children use their imagination and STEAM skills to construct “marble mazes.”  We are asking that each child bring in a shoebox (or a similar sized box – generally 12” x 9” x 5”) by Monday, February 22nd. Please fill the box with “upcycled” household items that he or she can use to build a marble maze.  We suggest including items such as toilet paper rolls, paper towel rolls, buttons, bows, fabric scraps, ribbon, wrapping paper scraps, etc.  Please only include items that can fit in the box you send in with your child. 

We have requested a few additional donations to make these projects a success - thank you to everyone who signed up on https://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e084fa5a72aab9-hemlock21 to help! Please note, tee-shirt items are needed by Thursday, Feb 4, and Marble Maze items by Monday, Feb 8.

We thank Maria and Gillian for all their efforts in brainstorming and coordinating how to best facilitate these projects for our kids and all the parents that signed up to provide additional support for this program.

There are quite a few PTA District-Wide initiatives that will be of interest to Primary Parents. I encourage you to review our main PTA Newsletter for information about Parent University and PARP, which both have a variety of events taking place this month! Thank you to the members of these committees for your efforts in bringing these exciting PTA programs to our parents, even in a pandemic. We also encourage all PTA members to attend our next All Schools PTA Meeting at 7:30 PM on Wednesday, February 10. You can also visit https://gardencitypta.org/ to learn more about these events.

Finally, looking ahead this month, if you choose to send in Valentine’s Day cards for your child’s class, please make sure any treats are non-edible. They do need to be sent in by Friday, February 5th to allow the cards time to quarantine safely. 

We wish everyone a safe and healthy Winter Break!

Jillian Berbari

Hemlock PTA Director

hemlock@gardencitypta.org