Village

Village Committee Meeting – Wednesday – August 20, 2008 Attending: Kathy Bryan, Barbara ClenDening, Karen McIntyre, Lee Mayberry, Darlene Nall We discussed continuing our goal of helping create a positive unified atmosphere centering on a **manageable number** **of goals** for this year which would integrate with existing curriculum – thus making it easier for teacher buy-in. Ms. Mayberry discussed the emphasis that is to be placed on **character education**. She had attended Project Citizen this summer which was a detailed and impressive program. She was looking for ways to involve the faculty in meaningful extension of those principles. We discussed using Constitution Week as a time to incorporate a lot of the material on citizenship. // Action: Ms. Mayberry will be a Monday guest on WMES – to remind teachers and students of the week’s emphasis. // Ms. McIntyre will work with Ms. Mayberry to create a variety of experiences for that week—to inspire students to good citizenship--- and will also tie it to the work students will be doing soon for primary resources. Discussion also focused on ways to involve family/school connections. Possibility of planning parent teacher conferences/PTO/and other activities in North Nashville were discussed. NAACP – might be helpful in making good things happen for our North Nashville kids – Inman Otey of the IMF expressed interest in what might be done collaboratively at a meeting Ms. McIntyre attended earlier this month. //Action:// //Mr. Breese --- what do you think?// Ms. McIntyre brought three things to the table; **Continuing and building on the school recycling** **effort and environmental awareness for the year.** //Action: We will solicit teachers by grade level to collect their blue bins each week.// It was suggested that each grade take a week and have two students appointed to take the bin to the recycle dumpster. One could stand at the door and keep it open while the other took that bin to the dumpster! The program is taking all plastic in addition to the paper and cardboard this year! Community Gardener Joe Boyd (also an employee of MNPS) will come and make recommendations on our garden – to make it a tenable project that would replace weeds with indigenous plants that the children could participate in tending based around their units on plants – Ms. McIntyre will investigate having the recycle people continue their involvement with our school…. **Culture Fair -** In conjunction with our emphasis on learning about other cultures and the world we could plan a Culture Fair – to be based in the 3rd grade’s Country unit. Children would bring Pennies for Peace which would be submitted to the foundation which supports schools in rural Afganistan. At the same time Ms. Timmis has agreed to chair the family – International tasting & recipe book for people to share on the evening of the program. The purpose would be solely to bring families together and enjoy each other’s experience. Vanderbilt is willing to have students come if we give them enough of a heads up and do things like --- Chinese calligraphy bookmarks for each child --- their name written in Chinese --- etc….. //Action: Mr. Breese will need to approve the idea—// 1. Erin Timmis will collect and compile the recipes. 2. Teachers will need to send home a note to find out what families are willing to share recipes --- from their heritage.. 3. Ms. McIntyre will secure folks from Vandy to participate in sharing their countries with us. 4. Ms. Hollis will teach us all songs from various countries. 5. //Teachers will have to approve this and the Pennies for peace project// 6. Dates need to be set around third grade program --- Darlene brought the **Building Doors**, **Music City Kids Marathon**, and a desire to set the goals for 30 minutes of exercise each day for our students. While they have participated in this program – just like the Sounds program --- most of our students never got to attend the free game – because parents didn’t have the money to buy their tickets and get themselves to the game and pay for parking etc. Darlene would like to find a way to fund the program so that students would get to attend the game. //Action: Mr. Breese --- What do you think? Darlene do you know where we might apply for grant funding?//