This year during Willy Reads (February 4th – 8th), we will be holding a Book Drive to collect books for The Children’s Book Bank. Willy Reads promotes reading within our school community and the book drive will help us to spread that love of reading to the Greater Toronto Community. Here are the details:

Purpose: To raise awareness with our students that reading is essential to learning and is connected to mindfulness and well being, but that not all students in the GTA have access to books.

Mission: To collect books over the week of February 4th – 8th and to deliver them to The Children’s Book Bank (www.childrensbookbank.com), which is a non-profit organization in Toronto that provides free books for students throughout Toronto and to Community Organizations in Toronto. For details, please follow the link posted above.

What Books Are Appropriate?

Here are the guidelines set by The Children’s Book Bank for Donations:

Suitable Books

Book donations should be:

• Children’s books for kids aged birth to 12 years old
• In new or gently used condition, meaning no missing covers, torn pages, or pages with colouring/writing on them
• Printed within the last ten years, so a print date of 2009 – present

Unsuitable Books

Books that are unsuitable:

• Adult or YA books or novels
• School, library or text books and encyclopedias
• Books printed more than ten years ago
• Self-published books
• Magazines
• Damaged books

This is a reminder that the 2nd Session of pizza lunches will be available for purchase until Jan 25th through School Cash Online. We have just one more pizza lunch remaining from the 1st Session, which is Jan 29th.

This is the last week to support the Teen Angel Program of Centre 55 and “coins not cans” for the Daily Bread Food Bank. The Teen Angel bulletin board is in the main hall by the office – please see the list of suggested places to purchase gift cards. Feel free to take a tag off the line, purchase a gift card and return to the office by December 14.