Weekly Blog 9/18

Dear Wines Families,

This will be a fairly lengthy post today. But that is good news because it means there are a lot of great things happening at Wines!

Final Call for ThinkStretch Books
If your child has not turned in his or her ThinkStretch workbook, there is still time! We will be passing out medals on Friday. As a reminder, every child who completes any part of the workbook will receive a medal. If you have a book lying around your house, have your child bring it to their teacher by Friday.

Show Your Support
I want to remind everyone of the Show Your Support fundraiser happening at the Ann Arbor PTO Thrift Shop this week: Please shop at the Ann Arbor PTO Thrift Shop this week (through Saturday 9/21) to earn money for Wines and Lunches with Love. For every $5 you spend, you'll earn a token that you can put in a jar for Wines. Wines and the 3 other schools will split $1000, based on the proportion of tokens in their jars. The money we earn will go toward the Lunches with Love program, which provides lunches to needy families. The PTO Thrift Shop is located at 2280 S Industrial Hwy.

Run-a-Thon Oct. 11th
The Run-a-Thon is coming up on October 11th. This is one of the most exciting days of the year here at school and it is also one of our two large fundraisers. Attached to today’s email is a flyer with information about the Run-a-Thon. If you have any questions, please contact Frances Carlson at fslcarlson@me.com or Liz Marek at ajkeam@aol.com. More information will be coming home over the next couple of weeks.

Wines Speech Team
As I mentioned last week, we have a new club for students to join: the Wines Speech Team. If your 4th or 5th grade child loves to argue and perform, or would just like to improve their confidence, speaking and thinking abilities, this is the club for them. It's like track and field for the brain. All students love the Team Debate and Improvisation events, but a brave few also compete in literary performance events like Original Prose & Poetry. Here's how Improv works: Imagine you and a partner are given a topic and have only a few minutes to plan out a funny skit on that topic. The topic could be something like "How do you manage bossy parents? Go!" It sounds hard, but it's actually quite fun, and kids even do it better than professionals a lot of the time. This is a fun competitive activity with the side benefits of challenging kids’ intellectually and reducing their fear of public speaking for the rest of their lives. The club will meet on Wednesdays after school 3:45-5:15pm in room 100. Contact Shawn Batt at (517) 281-8521  shawnbatt@gmail.com to sign up and/or volunteer to help out.

Cub Scout Round Up
The annual Wines Cub Scout Round Up is next Wednesday, September 25th at 7:00 here at Wines. Scouting is available to boys in grades 1-5. If you are interested in learning more about our scout troops, please come to the round up. An informational flyer is attached to today's email with contact information for the scout leaders.

Back to School Paperwork
One final reminder about the back to school paperwork that was sent home the first week of school. If you are like me, you may still have a small pile of papers sitting on a countertop. If everyone could please make sure everything that needs to come back to school comes back, we would really appreciate it!

Finally, I want to let everyone know that both Robin and I will be out of the building on Friday afternoon. We have the office covered by a very competent person. However, if we could please limit the amount of last minute changes to kids’ schedules, it will help us out a great deal. Thanks!

David