News from the Nest — May 7, 2021

Posted May 7, 2021

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Vol. 5, No. 33

Help Us Plan for Next School Year

We’re already hard at work on plans for the 2021-2022 school year! We’d like to ask all our families to help us with this by completing this five-question survey to share their plans for next year. This information is especially important if your family is not planning to return to McKinley-Thatcher. It helps us fill empty spots and make sure that our school budget is accurate. (5th grade families do not need to respond.) Families may read the latest information on remote learning options for next school year here.

We are also hoping to offer morning before-school care through our Discovery Link program next school year! If this care option would help your family, please let us know by filling out this short Discovery Link survey. Hearing from you now will help our Discovery Link program to best meet the needs of our students and families!

Our Book Fair Is Next Week!

We are so excited to be holding an outdoor, physically distanced book fair after school next week from Wednesday, May 12 to Friday, May 14! If you need some summer reading for your kids or want to thank a teacher with a book for their classroom library, come to our fair and do some shopping! Families can check out our fair catalog here.

Dates & Hours

  • Wednesday, May 12, 2:00pm-4:30pm 
  • Thursday, May 13 and Friday, May 14, 2:00pm-6:00pm

Location & Health Policies

  • The fair will be held OUTSIDE in the art room courtyard.
  • Families will enter through the alley on the west side of the school.
  • Masks, occupancy limit, and physically-distanced shopping will be required!

Our Annual Talent Show Is Friday, May 14!

We’re excited to be hosting a live-stream Talent Show on Friday, May 14 from 12:45pm to 1:45pm! For more information and to learn how to submit a talent video to be considered for the live-stream show, please check out our Talent Show info sheet. Talent videos are due by the end of the day on Sunday, May 9. We will share more Talent Show information early next week!

McKinley Community Garden Volunteer Days

All McKinley students and families are invited to participate in our community garden this summer! We’re excited to host two garden volunteer days in May (Saturday, May 15 and Saturday, May 29). Our volunteer days include education on best practices for organic gardening, great advice from other home gardeners in our neighborhood, and working to prepare our garden for summer. We’ll share planting, maintenance, and harvests from the garden with all volunteers and our school community.

For more information and to sign up for a volunteer day, visit our SignUpGenius! (Please note that, to maintain proper physical distancing, we are limiting capacity to 10 volunteers per time slot.)

Extra News 

  • Class photos for remote students: remote students will have their class photos taken as a screenshot on Google Meet on Wednesday, May 12 at 8:00am. Please make sure your students are in Google Meet on time to ensure they don’t miss out! If you have questions or would like to opt out of class photos, please call our office at (720) 424-5600. Thank you!
  • McKinley families should have recently received an email with the annual DPS Family Satisfaction Survey link (also available here). If you haven’t already, we ask that you please take a few minutes of your time to complete the survey, which asks you to reflect on this school year, and let us know what went well and what we can improve for next year. The last day to complete the survey is Friday, May 21. If you have any questions or need help while filling out this survey, please email FACEHelpline@dpsk12.org.
  • We are holding our annual Field Day event on Friday, May 21. Due to DPS’s current health and safety policies, families will not be able to attend Field Day. Instead, students will complete Field Day activities with their classmates and we’ll share photos and videos via ClassDojo. Thank you for your understanding!
  • Our May PTA meeting is happening on Zoom next Thursday, May 12 at 7:00pm! We’ll post our Zoom meeting link in ClassDojo on the day of the meeting.
  • Reminder: class pictures and individual student portraits are available for ordering on the Bloom Photography website!
  • Due to pandemic-related delays in our yearbook processing, our 2020-2021 yearbooks will not be available until July 2021. Returning families will receive their yearbooks in August 2021. Families who are leaving our school will receive more information about how to request their yearbook next week. Just a reminder, our yearbooks are FREE for all families, but our PTA appreciates any online donations to help offset costs!
  • As part of our annual Cultural Festival on April 23, we started work on a McKinley-Thatcher school cookbook where we could share favorite recipes from our community! We’ve finally finished up adding the recipe submissions that we received, and families can see our completed cookbook here. If you submitted a recipe that didn’t make it into the final cookbook or would like to submit a late recipe, please email Ingrid Hoff, our community liaison, at Ingrid_Hoff@dpsk12.org. 

Upcoming Events

Click here to view the McKinley-Thatcher school calendar.