Good Morning Memorial Families,
We had a terrific week of learning last week, and introduced our new recess “zones”. We have a lot of space at Memorial for recess, and a lot of it is unstructured, without “equipment”. This has resulted over time in many variations of tag-like games that inevitably get too rough. We recognized the need, as a school, to do a restructure and resetting of expectations with our students. In addition, we would like to say thank you to our PTO for the donations of new sports equipment, fun games, and quiet zone activities, and to the Potsis family for donating a terrific flag football set that our students are just loving.
Essentially, we have created many different play zones for kids to stop different games from running into one another. There is a space for basketball, soccer, flag football, running, dancing, kickball, jackpot, and jump rope as well as two separate calm zones for kids who do not want to be as active at recess time. We have also delineated the expected behaviors and the logical consequences that will occur for our children who are not using the expected behaviors. We are attaching the slides that we have shared with the students so that you can review them at home with your children and remind them of what we all expect when playing and interacting with others. This past week has gone really well and it is so nice to see more kids coming in from recess happy with how the time went. Recess is a crucial time for kids to learn how to interact positively with others and how to respond when something unexpected happens. We want to provide those opportunities in a safe and structured environment for them, and the new space, equipment, and expectations helps us to accomplish just that.
As a reminder, we have a full day professional development day on Friday, March 17th, so there will be no school for students. We hope everyone has a wonderful week ahead!
Warmly,
Lauren and Wendy
