Alpine Elementary News and Announcement Archive

In the month of March, Mrs. Herman was awarded by WGVU their "Cool Teacher" award. One of Mrs. Herman's students, Hannah Haines, found out about their Cool Teacher Contest and decided to nominate Mrs. Herman due how much she cares for Mrs. Herman and how much she enjoys being her in class.

Hannah Haines submitted a letter to WGVU for their Cool Teacher Contest about Mrs. Herman (a copy of the letter is attached below). They choose about 25 teachers to honor per year. Hannah's letter was chosen and WGVU came to tape at Alpine Elementary on March 28th. In addition, to the recognition, the class won a Papa John's Pizza Party. Furthermore, Mrs. Herman's family and the Haines's family both got four Amtrak train tickets to Chicago.

Applications

Kenowa Hills participates in both the Kent Intermediate School District Schools of Choice Plan and the Section 105c State plan. All students residing within the Kent Intermediate School District may apply for enrollment in any Kent ISD school that has available openings during the advertised timeframe (usually open during the spring). Students who reside in a district that is within a different ISD which borders the Kent ISD, may also apply under the Section 105c plan depending on available openings. Students who have been suspended or expelled may be excluded. Applications for both types of Schools of Choice are below.

At Alpine Elementary in Physical Education class, students will be learning about their hearts and all sorts of fun jumprope skills and tricks. In order to give back to the community students will be raising money for the American Heart Association.

Kids can collect donations at home and bring them to school on or before Feb. 14. Students can give their donations to their classroom teacher or place them in their "Silver Saves" jars.

Mrs. Bradley is organizing the event and fundraiser for our school. She will be recognizing the classroom who raises the most money by a classroom celebration. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact her.

Students in Mrs. Guczwa's and Mrs. Fussman's class have been developing their reading skills by performing Reader's Theatre plays for our younger students. Reader's Theatre is a great tool to engage students in reading and to develop reading fluency and expression. In addition, it is a great way to demonstrate good reading for the audience.

Alpine Elementary's annual food drive has come to end and we are excited to share the results! Our students were able to collect approximately 900 pounds of food. The food was organized into 14 food baskets that were delivered to families before Thanksgiving break. Each basket included a $20.00 gift card to purchase other necessary food items that may be needed.

Students donated non-perishable food items and raised money to buy food for the baskets by bringing a dollar to wear a hat on hat day. In addition, Alpine staff raised money by donating to wear jeans on jean day. As a school we raised $280.00. Assisting us in our drive was our community partners Crowe-Howrath.

Boys Youth Basketball registration forms and details can be found online at www.kenowahillsbasketball.com. Click on "K-6 Basketball" at the top of the home page for links to all the flyers. This year we are offering skill development workouts for K-1st graders and skill development/league play for 2-6th grades. We hope to see you at signups!

In order to celebrate Halloween and our school community, we will be having a Multi-Age day and our annual Halloween parade on Friday, October 29.

In the morning, students will be divided into multi-age groups and will be rotating to various teachers for fun activities. This is a great way for our older students to be a role model for our younger ones as well as help all students build relationships with new friends and different teachers. If you are interested in volunteering, please contact your child's teacher. We look forward to a day filled of fun and learning!

Kids Health and Safety Day

Join us for a fun filled informative day!!

When:October 2, 2010
12:00PM-4:00PM
  
Where:Zinser Elementary School
1234 Kinney NW
Grand Rapids, MI 49534
616-453-2461

We will have the following informational booths:

Walker Police Department
Walker Fire Department
Canine Unit
Chemical Bank
DC Chiropractic
Logical PC Solutions
and more…..

In order avoid other district conflicts and to allow more time to plan for our annual Carnival, the PTO has decided to move back our school carnival to November 5. Our PTO will be looking for volunteers and there will be more information coming home soon. Please do not hesitate to contact the school or our PTO officers with any questions. Thank you for your flexibility!

In order to improve student learning in mathematics, our district has made a commitment to use Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Math Expressions in Kindergarten through Grade 5 for the 2010-2011 school year. Math Expressions will provide teachers with better resources and tools for helping students understand difficult math concepts. In addition, it will create consistency in each grade level as well as across all grade levels.

Our annual open house will be held this year on August 31 from 6:30PM to 7:30PM. This is the first year it has been held prior to the beginning of the school year. We felt that this was crucial due to the numerous transitions within the district and the various new families joining our Alpine Elementary community.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
*Parents and students will have the opportunity to meet their teachers and to take a tour of the building.
*Kindergarten will be having a kindergarten curriculum and procedure overview starting at 6:40 if you are interested.
*We will have volunteers from our Parent/Teacher Organization present to answer any questions you may have. Parents will have a chance to win a gift certificate if they stop by!

Students were reading up a storm here at Alpine Elementary School this
past year. We had the best participation ever in Third grade with 42
out of 50 students earning enough Accelerated Reader points for the
Pizza Party. All of Mrs. Mortimore's second graders earned the
required amount for the Pizza Party this past Spring.

This picture displays the twenty student leaders of the school year
2009-2010. All of these students acquired over 100 points and 2 of
the earned over 200 points in AR. We are so proud of their reading
achievement!

Top Row: Fourth Grade, Katherine Westfall (164.6), **Sidra Elvey
(258), Nicole Lin (113.4), Kaylee Bui (149), Kaleb Ferguson (112.4),
Madison Overholt (112.0).
Middle Row: Third Grade, Fatima Alonso-Chavez (103.5), *Isaac Steers

HAISLN Recommended Reading Lists 2010 - NEW!

About the HAISLN Recommended Reading List:

This list of titles has been compiled by librarians at member schools of the Houston Area Independent Schools Library Network (HAISLN).  It includes both fiction and nonfiction books by some of the best authors for children and young adults. This list is for entering Preschool through 12. You may print off the grade levels that you need. Scroll down to the documents. Scroll a bit further and you can see pictures of the titles on those documents.

Here is the HOT Link. to the Book Lists (We’re saving paper)
http://www.haisln.org/recommendedreadinglists.html

Mrs. Wade is excited to announce that starting in the fall of 2010, students in K-6th grade will now have access to Accelerated Reader – Enterprise (AR Enterprise). This is a web-based AR program. It offers unlimited access to more than 140K quizzes from publishers around the world, plus the availability to new quizzes as they are created. Students can now choose books from their school library, public library and even from home. Recorded voice quizzes are available for many primary-level books too! The voice quizzes provide a narrator that will read the questions and the answer choices aloud (this includes Spanish recorded voice quizzes as well).

Third graders from Mrs. Kimble's and Mrs. Hartley's class received small paperback personal dictionaries from the DICTIONARY PROJECT, a nonprofit organization, whose goal is to give dictionaries to elementary students throughout the United States. Pictured here is Shirley Anderson, the organization representative, helping Mrs. Kimble's class with their "dictionary explorations!" Everyone really enjoyed the activity! They couldn't wait to get their dictionaries home and start putting them to good use!! What a terrific way to help them expand their vocabularies!

Throughout March, students at Alpine Elementary have been collecting books to donate to the United Way Schools of Hope program. Students were able to donate a new or gently used book that will be used to help tutor struggling students in needy areas. Classrooms had collection boxes located outside of their classroom doors.

At the close of the collection, students had to gather, count and organize the books to be delivered. As a school, we collected almost 1,000 books! This event continues to be a wonderful service learning project for our students and another great way to celebrate reading month.

As we continue to prepare for the 2010-11 school year, we are looking at alternative schedules for next year. A survey will be conducted after spring break asking for feedback. Your feedback is important as we try to finalize our Fabulous Five and Kindergarten schedules for next year. The majority of students will be registered by spring break. Therefore, when we return from spring break we will send out a survey and collect results which will help us better serve the community.