Picture Retake Day is this Thursday, October 27 at QAE! Students who were absent on 9/22 (Picture Day) will have a photo taken for the school yearbook and the school district database.

If your child's photo turned out wild, you can sign up for a complimentary retake, you can sign up for a retake here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKTYQaV6dslV1SPEWTOfIT4wb-BPcGHCMu1_1ZS0AQJlPKIg/viewform

We ask that students getting retakes return their original package to the photographer on retake day (the picture package has all the original order info our photographer will need to process the complimentary retake order).

Class group photos will be delivered to the school on Thursday. Class Group photos are complimentary - every student will get one!

It's the spookiest time of the year! The annual tradition continues as our community has its Halloween Parade and class celebrations on Monday.

We'll be parading around the school grounds this year. Classes will meet on the blacktop and the parade begins at 12:30 pm. with our Kindergarteners leading the way. In case of rain, we'll gather in the indoor play area. Parents and families are welcome to come watch the parade. Our 2nd graders will be inviting neighbors as part of their 'Neighborhoods and Community' curriculum. Teachers will escort their students back to their rooms for class parties from 1-2 p.m. School dismissal the usual 2:05 p.m. time.

Class parties are planned individually, so if you'd like to help out please contact your classroom coordinator or teacher. 

A couple details to make sure the kids remain safe while having tons of fun: it's a regular school day in the morning, so make sure your child's costume doesn't stop them from learning. We love costumes, but please leave toy guns at home. Also, costume masks shouldn't be worn throughout the day (we can save them for the parade).

Have a happy Halloween and don't each too much of your kid's candy!

Neighborhood haunt Targy's will be hosted a Halloween party on Friday, October 28th.

There's no cover charge but they'll be collecting donations at the door that will be split between Hay, Coe and QAE. Proceeds to our school will go towards the 4th graders' trip to IslandWood next year.

There's no obligation to donate though, it's meant to be a casual costume party to build community. The DJ's include a QAE parent!


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All QAE parents are invited to attend the first PTSA general membership meeting of the year on Wednesday, Oct. 26 at 6:30 p.m. in the school cafeteria.  

Topics to be covered include:

• Review of the expanded and extremely popular enrichment program
• Facilities update, including the timeline for the renovation project
• Legislative update
• Principal Roy on Creative Approach status, assessments, Reading Horizons and more

Come learn more about what's going on at QAE and share your thoughts.

Childcare will be available for a suggested donation of $5. In order to plan our childcare staffing, you MUST reserve a spot in advance. Reserve your spots here:
https://qaeptsa.wufoo.com/forms/s1hfemfl02qh9vn/

See the agenda for Wednesday's meeting:

​What is positive discipline? Why is it good for my child? Will it work in my family? What does it look like at QAE?
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Join us for a conversation lead by our very own school psychologist Julietta Skoog. This is a great opportunity to learn how to teach kids important social and life skills based on encouragement and mutual respect. Ms. Skoog is a certified Positive Discipline trainer with over 10 years experience working with student in Seattle Public Schools. Hope to see you on Wednesday, Oct. 19th, 6:30p.m. at the QAE Cafeteria!

All QAE families welcome -- this conversation is for families from all grade levels. Childcare is available for kids 4 years and up, for a suggested donation of $10 a family.

What is ParentNet?
At ParentNet meetings, parents of children in the same grade level meet up for meaningful conversation about their kids and parenting. Parents lead the meetings, pick the topics, and do all the talking. It’s fun! See the ParentNet site for more details...

About Juliette Skoog
Julietta has been a school psychologist and counselor with Seattle Public Schools for over ten years, supporting schools including Graham Hill, Muir, McDonald, John Rogers, Dunlap and Salmon Bay K-8. She joined Queen Anne Elementary in their inaugural 2010. After five years as both the psychologist and counselor the school grew enough that had she had to pick just one role. She loved the Social Emotional Learning program and has focused on building it at our school. She is also a certified Positive Discipline Trainer, offering parenting classes for parents and trainings for teachers and parent educators.  See Julietta's site to learn more...

What Is Social Emotional Learning?
Social Emotional Learning is a process of developing social and emotional skills, for academic success as well as life success. Examples of social and emotional skills are being able to recognize, understand, and express one’s own emotions; controlling impulses; and establishing and maintaining positive relationships. Learn more about SEL at QAE...

Oct. 17th – 22nd: #CloseTheGaps Initiative
Eliminating opportunity gaps and ensuring educational excellence for each and every student is a key area of focus for Seattle Public Schools. While our district outperforms similar districts academically and is considered a high performing urban district, we still have unacceptable opportunity and achievement gaps. Our district is committed to doing better.

As a result, the district announced a new campaign that demonstrates our collective commitment to eliminating opportunity gaps and accelerating learning for all students – specifically for our black students and other students of color. The campaign is called #CloseTheGaps. We are kicking it off the week of October 17-22. You can learn more about the district-wide initiative by visiting the webpage highlighting Seattle Public Schools’ work to eliminate opportunity gaps. Together, we are united in our commitment to each and every student.

During this #CloseTheGaps Initiative Week, at Queen Anne Elementary we have our first PTSA-funded Book-It Theatre performance on Oct. 18th: “Last Stop on Market Street”, based on the 2016 Newbery Medal winning book by Matt de la Peña. This play focuses on seeing beauty in the world around us through the eyes of a child and his grandmother. Diversity is also a theme in the book as it explores the beauty in every neighborhood.

Also during this week, Seattle Education Association (SEA) is promoting October 19th as a day of solidarity to bring focus to racial equity and affirming the lives of our students. QAE staff and QAE Families of Color have been working together to educate students about the importance of equity and recognizing and celebrating diversity. On this date, many QAE staff will be wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts to show their commitment to students in a coordinated effort. Teachers and staff will be talking with students about the shirt they are wearing to bring focus to racial equity and address how racism impacts the lives of Black people in the US. SEA is leading this member driven effort and working to promote transformational conversations with staff, families and students on this issue. This is an important conversation to have with our students as we support students, as citizens of the world, to work together as a community towards racial equity and unity. These events will be part of QAE’s continued efforts to support students' social and emotional learning particularly in regards to cultural competency.

Oct. 18th: “Last Stop on Market Street” Performance
We have our first PTSA-funded Book-It Theatre performance on Oct. 17th: “Last Stop on Market Street”, based on the 2016 Newbery Medal winning book by Matt de la Peña. This play focuses on seeing beauty in the world around us through the eyes of a child and his grandmother. Diversity is also a theme in the book as it explores the beauty in every neighborhood.

As we need to alter our performance area to accommodate the needs of the theatre company, we are unfortunately unable to have parents and preschoolers join us for this performance due to space restrictions. The play needs to be performed on the floor of the cafeteria with 5th graders seated on the stage and K – 4th grade students sitting horizontally across the length of the cafeteria to view the performance. We appreciate the support of the PTSA to provide this performance for our students, and we appreciate parent understanding and support of our space restrictions for this show.

Lost and Found
We delayed sending off the lost and found for one week, as we have 3 HUGE garbage bags of clothes that will be leaving QAE on Monday. If you have suddenly realized that your child’s precious coat, sweatshirt, or hat is missing, please dash to QAE on Monday before it is too late. All Lost and Found will be sent to a needy community agency each month, so we need to get this completed ASAP. If you are a parent who would like to help with this process, please contact Jennifer Connolly at jaconnolly@seattleschools.org.

Parent Help Needed for Lunch Time Clubs
We need your help to get some student-requested clubs underway. If you are available one day per week during the following times, we would greatly appreciate a parent to supervise a club for the following grade groups:

• 10:00 – 10:40 – 4th – 5th grade
• 10:20 – 11:05 - 2nd – 3rd grade

​Students have clubs they want to create, but we need a caring parent who will be a supervising adult in the room. No expertise needed! Please contact Janine Roy at jbroy@seattleschools.org for more information. Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!

It's Fall in the Garden. A great time for some pumpkin fun!

Please join us on Sunday, Oct. 16 from 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. for a Pumpkin Carving Party at the Garden. Dress for the weather and bring a pumpkin, carving tools and a picnic lunch. Some snacks and drinks will be provided.

To RSVP for the event and for any garden questions connect with Andrea at garden1@qaeptsa.org.

See the QAE Garden page to learn more about how you can help the garden grow!

** We're planning to be there, but we will reschedule if the weather is really bad. We'll update this post and the QAE PTSA Facebook site if there's too much rain and wind on Sunday! **

The annual lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Families Dinner will be held Thursday, November 3rd from 6-8pm at Washington Middle School. Members of the school board will be there to welcome LGBT families and their friends. All SPS families and staff are welcome to attend! This event is brought to you by the Health Education Office and the Office of School Family Partnerships. Dinner and entertainment will be provided.

​To reserve space at this popular event, please RSVP with the number of people in your party to Lisa Love in the Health Education Office at 252-0982 or llove@seattleschools.org.

The Robinson Center for Young Scholars at University of Washington is offering a Saturday enrichment program for 2nd-8th graders. Topics range from philosophy to astronomy and biology. The program is intended to explore topics outside of the normal curriculum abd provide students with challenge, inspiration, and fun, in a collaborative, supportive learning environment.

There is a cost for this program, but is free for any child who receives free or reduced-cost lunch.

Registration is now open. Classes begin on Saturday, October 15th and end on December 10th. Interested families can learn more at the Robinson Center website.

See also the attached flyer that has more details about the program.

 Interdisciplinary Learning in Action: Combining meaningful reading, writing, math and social emotional learning at QAE:
What goes on at QAE each day? Here is an example of the rich learning opportunities at our school. Here are 1st and 2nd grade students reflecting on their reading using a growth mindset model, writing their reflections on post-it notes and then graphing their post-it note reflections to develop data analysis skills in math. This is a wonderful example of how QAE teachers set learning goals using our data, teachers then analyzed our data to identify specific targets in learning, and combined this work to support students with our social emotional learning goal:

Lunch Update: Science in Action
In response to feedback from older students, this year we aligned our lunch schedules so that students of similar age can eat and play together each day. 4th and 5th graders, 2nd and 3rd graders and K -1st graders have recess and lunch breaks together. This means that we have a large number of students eating lunch simultaneously in a very cavernous space. This gave our staff and students the opportunity to involve science to solve our noise conundrums. At first we grouped students by class while we helped students learn how to clean up their lunch area independently after eating. Once these responsibilities were mastered, our creative staff implemented responses to our sound challenges: we moved tables around so that students were sitting beside peers rather than across from peers and we faced the tables in the same direction. Then we taught the students about sound waves and explained our thinking about our cafeteria reorganization to reduce the volume. By involving students in solving the problem using science, we helped students to generate multiple solutions to our common problem. Our collaborative problem solving will continue throughout the year. We are proud of our student and staff collaboration on problem solving our real-life challenges together.

Thank You, 5th Grade Leaders!
5th Grade Tour Guides: Thank you to the following 5th grade students for being Tour Guides for our Oct. 3rd visit from Superintendent Dr. Larry Nyland and Director Sue Peters:

• Mary
• Sadie
• Esther
• Juliet
• Olivia
• Jack W.
• Jack S.
• Jackson
• Zane
• Margaux
• Owen

We had so many volunteers to help with this visit. If your name accidently was left off the list, please let Ms. Roy know and you will be included next week!

5th Grade Greeters and Ushers for our Monthly Assembly: Fitting 18 classes into the cafeteria is a challenge this year, and we thank our 5th grade leaders for modeling and guiding younger students during our monthly assemblies:

• Juliet
• Ella
• Mary
• Owen
• Bailey

5th Grade Jog-A-Thon Supporters: Thank you to the following 5th grade students who helped to count laps, assist runners, hand out water and cheer students on:

• Sydney
• Lachlan
• Hudson
• Finn B.
• Rowan
• Jackson
• Kieran
• Santiago
• Mackenzie
• Emerson
• Matteo
• Dean
• Anna
• Abigail K.
• Abigail L.
• Clara
• Parker
• Bailey
• John
• Lily
• Finn P.
• Nicholas
• Reed
• Chloe S.
• Corri
• Charles
• Marley
• Andrew
• Warren
• Chloe C.
• Audrey
• Luca
• Gabriella
• Cameron
• London
• Alejandro
• Esther
• Mary
• Colson
• Alex
• Owen
• Max
• Finn M.
• Aloysius R.
• Angela
• Sadie
• Teka
• Olivia
• Margaux
• Jack S.
• Juliet
• Jack W.
• Finn W.
• Jackson Z.

Questions?
If you ever have any questions, please feel free to contact our school. Classroom teachers are happy to answer your questions about your child’s learning. Principal Janine Roy is happy to answer any questions parents have about our school, programs, initiatives and events. Please let us know how we can best support your child and family.
​Janine Roy: jbroy@seattleschools.org
QAE Phone: 206-252-1302

The weather was perfect on Friday for what turned out to be an amazing Jog-A-Thon! with many changes to the district budget, the PTSA was counting on $40,000 in donations, just to maintain our level of support staff and other essential programs. Our Jog-A-Thon saw students focused on their running goals as they reached out to friends and family. Thanks to the generosity of QAE friends and family we exceeded our fundraising goals and had a record year! These contributions help support programs from tutoring to art to teacher training. 

Thanks to all the parents and families who helped organize and make the the Jog-A-Thon run smoothly. And to all those who were kind enough to donate. And especially to all the kids (and staff) who ran their hearts out! Our 5th graders worked extra hard: serving as running mentors, course monitors, water helpers, lap markers, and more. We saw students finding their own pace, encouraging one another, recovering from setbacks, and celebrating goals hard-won.

We also couldn't have done it without the generous donations from these local business who believe in support our community:

Some photos from the Jog-A-Thon below! If you have any others you'd like to share, please send to communciations@qaeptsa.org