January 3, 2012 • First Newsletter of 2012!

For your calendar:

• Jan. 4, Wednesday: Girls Basketball (Playworks) at Edison, 6:30pm
• Jan. 6, Friday: FREE DRESS DAY
• Jan. 11, Wednesday: PTA Meeting, 5:30 – 7:00pm
• Jan. 11, Wednesday: Girls Basketball (Playworks) at Edison, 6:30pm
• Jan. 13, Friday: Wushu Performance (morning)
• Jan. 13, Friday: MLK Peace March (after lunch)
• Jan. 19, Thursday: Mandarin Curriculum Committee, 6:00pm
• Jan. 27, Friday: Deadline for Middle School applications (5th graders)
• Feb. 11, Saturday: Chinese New Year Parade
• April 17, Tuesday: Skating at Yerba Buena
• April 28, Saturday: Spring Fling

Ask Campaign Update

We exceeded the goal by raising close to $75K! Thanks to every single one of you who supported this effort.

Book Passage Update

The November book fair at Book Passage raised $572 for the PTA — thanks to all who participated and helped with the fair. The book fair raffle proceeds, $510, are being used to buy approximately 80 new books at cost from Book Passage and our order is expected to be completed within the next couple of weeks.

In addition, at the event parents and friends of Starr King donated more than 70 new books to the library. By the end of January, our library will have copies of all the most popular children books and book series as well as several books requested by our teachers. We are looking forward to our second annual book fair in the next school year, and also to an onsite Mandarin book fair in March.

Fresh & Easy Fundraising Update

We raised over $300 at our shopping night in December. We will be submitting all of our Fresh & Easy receipts into their corporate office to be reimbursed in a week, so if you’ve got any receipts lying around, please bring them in to the office this week!

Thanks for your participation in this fundraiser!

Mandarin Curriculum Committee

On Thursday, January 19th at 6PM, the principal together with Kevin Chavez from the District Office will convene the Mandarin program’s first ever Curriculum Council. This meeting will be the beginning of a series and will begin with an overview of the Mandarin Immersion Curriculum at Starr King, Jose Ortega and planned for Aptos.

• The reading, writing and speaking levels Mandarin immersion students are expected to attain by 5th and 8th grade
• What the levels attained by students at Alice Fong Yu, West Portal and other MI programs in the state are and how our program compares.
• How well MI students are able to access higher-level subject area material in Mandarin such as science, social studies and math, and how it works at other Chinese-immersion programs.
• What materials are used in our MI program, why they were chosen, what new has become available since our program began in 2006?
• The level of student effort necessary to reach those goals and how students can be supported to excel.
• How the District, staff and parents can work to further strengthen our program and make it even stronger and more academically rigorous.

This presentation will be followed by an opportunity for input from community members. An agenda will come out after the start of the year, but for now, if you have a passion about curriculum, please mark this date.

Ms. Chang’s New Baby!

Baby Logan finally arrived. If you didn’t get a chance to get to sign Angelica’s baby card, it will be near the sign by the office this week. Contributions for a gift are also still being raised, Contact Mary Gow for details.

Compiled by Beth Weise, Starr King PTA Newsletter Chair. If you have items you’d like to have in an upcoming newsletter, please email me at weise@well.com or call 452-0311. Deadline is Tuesday morning. If you’d like to profile a staff person, please drop me a line! We’d love to cover the entire staff.