Dear Tigres,

As we open week 3 of our Hispanic Heritage celebration, we want to celebrate a successful Early Bilingual Literacy Night at Oyster, and a huge debt of gratitude to our faculty and Gina Ou-Sanchez, our new instructional coach at Oyster who led the Early Literacy Team's initiative.

Families got a chance to participate in a mini conference where they had choices among five workshops on the core strategies to promote bilingualism and literacy in young people at home, regardless of the family's home language. The families we spoke to felt more prepared, more excited, and much more curious about being multilingual. This will serve as a model for how we could potentially do future family workshops.

At Adams, students had an uproarious and joyful sing-along with choreography of anthems that powerfully represent our contemporary Latin-American reality, including a fantastic dance-rap anthem in Quechua (courtesy of Sra. Delgado). Sr. Moreno's team sang Celia Cruz and had a choreographed dance, complete with costumes and bucket percussion! All week, students have read daily announcements profiling famous figures in each of the countries we're celebrating. It's a beautiful thing to hear at 8:45 am.

Let's keep celebrating! Each day, we’ll spotlight a different country, and we encourage students to wear a shirt representing that country. This could be a shirt with the country’s name or flag. Don’t have a shirt from that country? No problem! You can still participate by wearing the colors of that country’s flag to show your pride and support. For the full list of days, check out the Hispanic Heritage links on your respective campuses. Here's this week's celebrations below.

Let’s come together to celebrate diversity, heritage, and unity!

Monday, September 29- Puerto Rico

Tuesday, September 30- Spain

Wednesday, October 1- Bolivia

Thursday, October 2- Cuba

Friday, October 3- Colombia

Un abrazo fuerte,

Carolina Brito