Despite COVID-19 and students not coming to school, teachers at Forest Grove Elementary wanted to make sure they kept things as normal as possible by continuing their monthly birthday celebrations, according to principal Mark Doolan.
“During normal times, we celebrate birthdays regularly at a month-end assembly. We invite all students who had a birthday that month to the front of our gymnasium. We then sing happy birthday to them as a group then afterwards, each student gets to select a present from our birthday treasure chest.”
Coming back from spring break, Doolan noticed Bobby Christopher’s birthday was coming up on April 9, which was also the day they were planning to distribute student belongings to each of the families.
“We arranged the celebration ahead of time with Bobby’s mother. We took a picture of the gifts in our treasure chest and e-mailed it to mom ahead of time so that Bobby could pre-select his gift.”
They placed the gift in the treasure chest and left it for him to open when he came to school to pick up his belongings, according to Doolan.
“Staff made signs to hold up when he arrived and sang happy birthday to him while maintaining our appropriate physical spacing. It was a wonderful moment in a very unusual and challenging time.”
Doolan says they plan to continue this tradition and are looking forward to more of these happy moments in the days and weeks ahead.
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