Messenger Newsletter Archives

What a day we are having to close out the week before Winter Break, not to mention all the celebrations we’ve been enjoying in the Middle School! Today we’ll take to the ice skating rink to get the whole Middle School skating, we’ll do some community engagement and make Cards for Hospitalized Kids, and we’ll sing/yell our hearts out at the OES Winterfest to close out the day. We also celebrated this week with our student-created Middle School version of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” including some favorites like “Ms. Verenna gave to me. . . six fire drills” and “Mr. Siegel gave to me. . .  two chocolate chip cookies.” 

Thanks so much to all the parents who joined us earlier this week for our December Parent Partnership meeting in person and on Zoom. Our focus this month was to look at the bigger picture of the Middle School student experience from many different perspectives. We got to hear from an excellent Upper School student panel who shared their Upper School experiences in everything from their wide range of academic options to their experiences with extracurricular and co-curricular activities like athletics, student government, and Winterim. It was great to hear their firsthand perspectives to give our middle school parents a sense of the arc of the OES program. Our eighth graders got to have a similar conversation with an Upper School student panel last month to have their questions about the Upper School experience answered. 

As we head into a wonderful week of Fall Break, we have been thinking about what we are most grateful for and how we can offer that to others. In Chapel this week, teachers were invited to share a gratitude voicemail. If you were to leave a message for someone with a message of gratitude, who would you call, and what would you share in your message? We even had a rotary phone in Chapel to introduce that artifact from the past to our students!

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Thanks so much to everyone who was able to join us for our Parent Partnership meeting earlier this week. We got to hear from Aline García Rubio, Associate Head of School, Tara Verenna, Middle School Assistant Head of School of Curriculum and Instruction, and Steve Brennan, who leads our Middle School Academic Learning Support. They spoke about the MAP testing we have piloted with our Middle School students for the past two years. This Friday we will share student achievement and growth scores with families through the Parent Portal.