Spring Fair 2023 Sponsors

The Hastings Spring Fair is made possible by the generosity of our community sponsors!

Join us Friday, May 12th from 3-6pm, rain or shine, for the Hastings Community Elementary School Spring Fair. This is a community event and everyone is welcome.

Activities include: Cake Walk, Jolly Jars, Carnival Games, Bouncy Castle, Face Painting, Glitter Tattoos, Live Music, Food & Drink, and more. Admission is free. Activity and raffle tickets will be available for purchase at the event.

Platinum Sponsors

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

Bronze Sponsors

Community Cares Sponsors

Matrix Production Services	The Learnary	VCC Baking and Pastry Arts
Chard Development	Hill & Harbour Real Estate Group	Dolce Amore – Little Italy
Caliper Print & Signage Solutions	George Vergette Studio	Real Canadian Superstore
Save-on-Foods	Bosa Foods	Templeton Secondary School
Dachi	F45 Training Sunrise East Village	Fresh Slice
Grow Speech and Language Therapy	London Drugs	Iron Dog Books
Karin Davidson Personal Real Estate Corporation	Mindful Brains Learning Support	Lululemon
Makehaus Fabrications	Shopper’s Drug Mart	Pacific National Exhibition
Save-on-Foods	Costco Wholesale	Stong’s Market North Vancouver
Sunrise Health Massage Therapy & Acupuncture	Wally’s Pro Sports Cards and Novelties	Tot 2 Teen Dental
Rio Friendly Meats

Hastings Reads! 2023

We are so excited to announce that we have 16 groups signed up for
the final event! We will be publishing a list of the championed books shortly, and
we are so pleased it includes a wide range of topics, with students
representing almost every division in Grade 6/7!

And the latest tally of our classroom reading competition between all
the grades 4/5 and 6/7 students is in! Division 14F is in the lead for the
Grade 4/5’s with 258 books read, and division 20F is in the lead for the Grade
6/7’s with 88 books read! Way to go! We will be doing a FINAL tally on
Friday, April 28th before morning recess, so KEEP READING! There has been
some great enthusiasm among the students, so we are feeling very excited about announcing
the winners at the final event on May 1st!

Please find all reading lists HERE,
separated by grade tabs.

For logistical reasons, we are unable
to track grade K-3 progress for prizes at this time, but look forward to
welcoming those students to participate once they reach grade 4! We invite
parents to print a copy of the K-3 list and follow along as your children
discover these wonderful titles!

Ask your children to tell you more
about Hastings Reads and let's talk about books!!

On behalf of the Hastings Reads!
subcommittee, the Hastings Anti-racism Committee, and the Hastings PAC

Hastings Reads! 2023

Hello Hastings parents and caregivers!

Hopefully your kids have come home excitedly
showing you their cool new Hastings Reads! bookmark and told you about the
great books the school is showcasing from our very successful diversity Book
Drive! The Hastings Reads subcommittee thought families might like to check out
some of the titles themselves, to read along and encourage their children!

All grade 4-7 students have been
given reading lists, and all K-3 students are being read to by our school
librarian, Chris Donegan. A display in the library features some of the titles
for students to check out on their own, and all the titles are also available
at the Vancouver Public Library, many in various formats including, ebooks and
audiobooks.

Please find all reading lists HERE,
separated by grade tabs.

**Prizes will be awarded to the
students and classrooms from grades 4-7 that read the MOST BOOKS! Winners announced at a special final event on Monday, May 1st in the gym! Stay tuned
for more info in the coming weeks!**

Ask your children to tell you more
about Hastings Reads and let's talk about books!!

On behalf of the Hastings Reads!
subcommittee, the Hastings Anti-racism Committee, and the Hastings PAC

Hastings Reads! 2023

Hello Hastings school community!

Many
of you will remember in 2021, Hastings held a library diversity book
drive. It was incredibly
successful, with hundreds of book titles suggested by students,
care-givers, and teachers and over $5000 raised to purchase those books
and more. The intention was to ensure that the books in our school
library reflected the diversity in our school community
and around the world. Since then, much work has gone into purchasing
and cataloguing many of those books, and now we are ready to get going
on a second project…….. HASTINGS READS!

As
the book drive
happened during a time when restrictions were in place and care-givers
weren’t allowed into the school, we want to make sure that all kids (and
adults) know about and take the opportunity to dive into these great
new books! So, using the popular yearly event
CBC’s Canada Reads as inspiration, we are going to have our own ‘Battle of the Books.’ 🎉

Learn about
Canada Reads.

All classes and children will be involved and to kick things off,
everyone will receive their own Hastings Reads! 2023 bookmark. There is a
spot on the back where kids can write their name and division number, to
prevent them getting lost. 😉 Participation for the
different grades will look like this:

Kindergarten to grade 3: The school librarian, Chris Donegan, will read from the new book list to each of the classes during their library time.

Grades 4 and 5: Children will each have their own checklist of
the new books, which they will be able to borrow from the library. Once a
book is read, they’ll check it on their list. Prizes will be awarded to
classes when they reach certain milestones
of books read in total.

Grades 6 and 7: The Hastings Reads! the subcommittee has been very
busy behind the scenes. The librarians on the subcommittee (we are lucky
to have several), have chosen 5 books for each of the 6/7
classes. From those five books, children will be able
to choose which book that they’d like to ‘champion’ as a group. A class
is welcome to have multiple groups championing a book. Children are
welcome and encouraged to read more than just the book they’d like to
champion, as the class that reads the most books
will earn a class prize. Classes have five copies of each of their five
books. While some were purchased through our awesome neighbourhood book
store –

Iron Dog Books on Hastings St – half the books were either donated or heavily discounted by the publishers. And then in May, the final event, our very own ‘battle of the books,’ will take place! Date to be announced soon! As
we would like to make the final event as inclusive as possible, the
logistics of what that will look like are still being determined, but
we are already lining up local personalities from the book community, as moderators.

The grades 6/7 teachers have received their books and checklists, the
grades 4 and 5 children will receive their checklists this week, posters are up, Hastings Reads book
displays are set
up in the library, and
all children will soon be receiving their Hastings Reads bookmarks. So,
everything is ready to go and the challenge is on!

Ask your children to tell you more about Hastings Reads and let’s talk about books!!

On behalf of the Hastings Reads! subcommittee, the Hastings Anti-racism Committee, and the Hastings PAC

Lost & Found Trolley is out!

Our Vice Principal Susan would like to remind families that the Lost & Found Trolley is out!

On most mornings as school commences (unless it’s raining), the trolley is wheeled out to the sidewalk in front of the main entrance on Franklin. Parents are welcome to come take a look and hopefully retrieve those lost items!

Susan says the best way to keep your kids stuff out of the lost & found is to LABEL YOUR CHILD’S BELONGINGS. It’s as easy as using a permanent marker in the neck label. While staff make every effort to unite lost items with their owners, they can only do that if the item is labelled.

An alternative to marker, are stickers with your child’s name. If you plan to label your child’s items before the start of September, please consider ordering Mabel’s Label’s and supporting the Hastings PAC’s ongoing fundraiser! 20% of every order goes to the PAC’s operating account, and is used for many important initiatives at our school. With the lack of fundraising events due to COVID this year, such as Spring Fair, Burger & Bevvie, and Bingo Night, small fundraisers like Mabel’s Labels help a lot!

Click above and look for ‘Hastings PAC (Vancouver)’. Thank you in advance for your support!

School Streets Pilot Project Video

To share the success of the Hastings School Streets Pilot Project, the City of Vancouver would like to make a short video of the project in action while highlighting Hastings students’ and parents’ perspectives. The City is looking for a few parents/students to participate in the video which will take place either this Thursday May 6th or Friday May 7th. Participation may include an interview with questions such as:

What has been different about the street in front of the school?
Can you describe what it’s been like not having vehicles on one block in front of the school?
What do you like about biking, walking or rolling to school or on the school street? How do you feel?
What is something you liked about having one block in front of the school closed to cars?

If you are interested in participating, please contact Tracy Wilkins at Tracy.Wilkins@vancouver.ca

The Hastings Podcast – A message on Behalf of the Grade 7 Students!

Hi! I’m Avery, grade 7 student at Hastings and co-founder of the Hastings Podcast.
I started the podcast with my friends Lillian and Nasja, also in grade 7. We wanted to both give some students at Hastings a chance to share some things about them personally and about things that go on the school. We also thought the parents would appreciate an inside look at things that are going on in Hastings right now, because of the Covid restrictions and also because of course they can’t follow us around all day. (Although I know my moms would probably love to)

So far, we have three podcasts out. The first is on slang; slang words that kids use that parents might not understand. The second was released in February and is about how the students we interviewed spent their winter breaks. (Spoiler alert: nobody went anywhere!) And the most recent one is about wether students prefer cats or dogs—a very controversial topic in elementary school!

Please check out our podcast on Teams or wherever you get your podcasts! (But actually just Teams). Click on the link below, sign into Teams, and it will take you to the episode.

Episode 1 – Slang Words
Episode 2 – Winter Break
Episode 3 – Cats & Dogs

School Streets Pilot starts Tomorrow!

The School Street Pilot will be in effect on Franklin Street between Penticton and Slocan from 8:40am-9:10am and 2:40pm-3:10pm, Monday to Friday (on school days), April 12th, 2021 until May 7, 2021 (4 weeks).

All of Franklin Street in front of the school will be car free during pick up and drop off for the next month! We encourage kids and parents to skip, bike, scoot or skate to school and enjoy the use of the street before and after school. There will be prizes throughout the month!

Volunteers Still Needed

To make this pilot possible, more volunteer ‘School Street Coaches’ are still needed! As a School Street Coach you will be responsible for setting up, taking down and monitoring the School Street barriers during drop-off and pick-up (Shift will be approximately 40 minutes total). The School Street Coaches will receive instruction prior to their shifts and there will be a volunteer training session. There will also be prizes for volunteers who commit to the full month (2 shifts weekly).

To sign up for a volunteer shift please click on the following web link (or copy it into your web browser if clicking doesn’t work) to go to the signup sheet:

volunteersignup.org/JWJYE [volunteersignup.org] [eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com]