Dear EVCS Students,

Welcome back to another week!  I hope you all stayed warm and cozy this weekend.

Our core value is social action.

Social action involves identifying things that are wrong in our world and then taking steps to make them better.  One of the best ways we can make a difference in the world is by making an impact right here in our own community.  Every year our school collects cans and boxes of food for our annual Harvest Festival.  This food is donated to a local soup kitchen that helps to feed people in our neighborhood who don’t have enough to eat.  This is a form of social action! When we visit the soup kitchen next week, please say a big “Thank you!” to the kind women and men who work there.  They are also doing a kind of social action by preparing the donated food for our hungry neighbors.

Last week when students had a day off for Election Day, teachers came to school to learn new things together.  One of the things we spent time exploring last Tuesday was breathing exercises and other things we can all do to help promote mindfulness, calm and focus in our classrooms.  Before we all go up upstairs to get to work, let’s try one of these breathing exercises together!  This one is called “Candle Breathing”.

Thanks very much to our 1st graders for hosting today!  Thanks, as always to the amazing EVCS SWMM House Band!  And thanks to everyone who joined us today and sang loud and proud.  Have a great day.

Love,

Bradley

Dear EVCS Students,

It was so much fun to see so many of you in your costumes on Saturday at our annual Fall Ball!  Somehow the Fall Ball continues to get better and better every year, and it’s all thanks to the amazing parents of the East Village Community School.  So much effort goes into this event, and I want to recognize some of the people who worked very hard to make it happen. So many parents volunteered their time, too many to name all of them, but it could not have happened without the following individuals: Sharon Blumenkranz, Marta Polo, Catharine Lyons, Marla Rosenthal, Pippa Barak, Anne Buovolo, Tazeen Raza, Julie Lansky, Crystal Perry, LaraLipof, Buzz Evers, Emily Goodman, Ron Bromberg, Gunti Singh, Cresta Kruger, Tristan Waldroop, Alessandra Carbone, and Nina Ablan.  A Huge shout out to Erik Frank for the amazing Haunted Hallway, and to Hagit Schwartz and Noel Saltzman for orchestrating the entire event.
Continue reading →

Dear EVCS Students,

Our core value is social action.

Just like we sang this morning in Free to Be you and Me, we are committed to doing all we can and making a change in the world.  One way we can do that here at school every single day is by recycling, composting, and reducing the amount of trash we produce.  You may have noticed that our cafeteria has three different bins to throw your garbage in.  Different stuff belongs in each one and it’s really important that we all try our best to learn how to do it correctly.

There are separate bins for food scraps which are composted, recyclable materials such as plastic, metal and glass, liquids which are poured down the drain, and trash which ends up in a landfill.  Our goal is to put as little trash as possible into the landfills!  

Learning how to recycle our plastic, metal and paper, compost our food scraps, and reduce the amount of stuff that goes into landfills will make us better stewards of our planet.

My good friend Jacob Pearleman in the 3rd grade has also brought something to my attention that he is concerned about.  Jacob has noticed that a lot of kids are throwing away perfectly good food!  While we work to reduce the amount of garbage that goes into landfills let’s also please try to reduce our food waste.  Thanks for looking out, Jacob.

Big thanks to our second grade hosts, to all of the parents who came this morning, to the SWMM house band, and thank you to everyone who sang loud and proud this morning.  Have a great day and great week everyone.

Love,

Bradley

Dear EVCS Students,

Welcome back!  It’s great to be with all of you again for our second School-Wide Morning Meeting of the year.  Our weeks get so busy, it’s really nice to spend this time, all of us together as one community, singing joyful songs and reflecting on our core values.

Last week we visited many of your classes with our school comfort dog, Lola.  Give me a quiet thumbs up if we visited your class with Lola.  If we haven’t visited with Lola yet, we will this week for sure!  Lola really seems to love meeting all the students in our school, and I think she is starting to love her new job as EVCS comfort dog.  Now, I have a request for all of you.  You will see us with Lola in the hallways very often.  We know you will want to say hi to Lola but we need to ask that you do that by waving a quiet hello.  Please don’t leave your class line to pet Lola! Continue reading →