Santa for a Day is our holiday plan that gives the children a great, fun-filled way to share with each other.  This is how it works:

• We will display each child’s stocking in our classroom. (Stockings are provided by the teachers)
• Each child is assigned a day to be “Santa” (see schedule below).
• On the assigned day, each “Santa” will 1) bring small toys (no edibles, please) for each classroom friend; 2) wear a Santa hat (if desired); and 3) make jolly deliveries to each friend’s bag. (Examples of small toys:  pencils/pens, matchbox cars, and very small stuffed animals).  It will be best if Santa delivers the toys from a bag that hides the items inside.
• By the end of the schedule, the stockings will bulge with goodies, and the children are so excited they can’t stand it!
• The children will dig into their stockings during the holiday party.
• Everyone is happy!

Please follow a few guidelines:  1) Choose small toys.  The stockings must hold 16 deliveries.

2) Choose something that all children will enjoy OR an item for boys and another for girls.  We have 9 girls and 7 boys.  3) There is no need to write student names on gifts nor do gifts need to be wrapped.  This will cause Santa much trouble with finding/matching names with stockings.  Then, it becomes a CHORE instead of a fun-filled activity.  However, you may write FROM whom the gifts come.

HO!  HO!  HO!

Hey PreKPals and Families-

Welcome Back!! We are so excited to see all of the PreKPals tomorrow after our Thanksgiving Break! This month we will be learning about families and different holiday traditions from all over the world! Let us know if you have a special tradition that you’d like to share with us! In science, we will be exploring gingerbread and peppermint with our senses. We will make gingerbread playdoh and see what happens to a gingerbread man when he gets wet!

This week, we will be working on the letters Gg and Ll and the sounds they make. We will work on rhyming words and in math we will work on making 5 and finding the missing parts of 5.

If you have some magazines or sales ads with toys, please send those to school on Monday! We are doing some holiday projects and need to also practice cutting! Magazines and sales ads are awesome for that!

Tomorrow is the last day to order books before Christmas vacation. We sent a flier home before the break. We will send some new fliers home after the first of the year. I will submit the order on Tuesday and it will take about 2 weeks for the books to arrive if you are having them shipped to school. You do have the option of having them shipped to your home.

The place to order is www.scholastic.com/bookclubs and our class code is GRCDC. Happy Ordering!

As a reminder: We are asking Santa, Grands or Moms and Dads to bring each PreKPal a Candyland (or similar game) where you have to take turns, count spaces as your marker moves (great one to one correspondence there!) and practice being a good sport when you win and lose! Great practice and skills needed for big school, plus, you can start family game night at your house if you don’t do that already!

Yearbooks are on sale. The price is $30 and you have until January 8^th to order. Take my advice. Go ahead and order as soon as you get the flier. There will be very few extras ordered and they always go fast. No one has ever told me they wished they didn’t order a yearbook, but I have had plenty of tears over people who did not order and who wished they did!

Don’t forget to find these things tonight:

• your backpack (we kept your ROCKET binder)
• A winter set of clothing including undies and socks
• your nap-mat
• your snacks (you can send 4 snacks on Monday so they will have them ready to eat and that will be one less thing you have to worry about!). Try to send a variety so they can pick what they’d like for that day. They complain if they have goldfish every day!
• Get your water bottle with a valve (WATER only. No juice!)
• a jacket that zips or buttons, (we will paly outdoors at 10 and 12:30 daily unless it rains)
• lunch box if you are eating lunch from home. Remember that breakfast and lunch are FREE, so check out the menu I sent earlier on Dojo (subject to change) and decide if your child would like to have lunch from school

Santa for a day information: (we will send the schedule home on Monday, November 30

• During December, we will be learning about holiday traditions around the world. If your family celebrates a special holiday and you would like to share some of your traditions, please let us know. We will not exchange names for gift giving in our classroom, but will participate in a super fun Rock Quarry tradition called “Santa for a day”. It goes like this: Each child is assigned a day to be “Santa”. Stockings are provided by the teachers!
• On the assigned day, each “Santa” will 1) bring small toys (no edibles, please) for each classroom friend; 2) wear a Santa hat (if desired); and 3) make jolly deliveries to each friend’s stocking.  (Examples of small toys:  pencils/pens, matchbox cars, and very small stuffed animals).  It will be best if Santa delivers the toys from a bag that hides the items inside.
• It is super affordable because you can get packs of fun things from the dollar spot with multiple items in the pack. We only have 16 friends, so it should be super easy to do.
• By the end of the schedule, the stockings will bulge with goodies, and the children are so excited they can’t stand it!
• There is no need to label the items with the name of each classmate. This just makes it harder for the Santa to deliver. You can put From: (Your child’s name) if you’d like but there isn’t really a need to wrap the items at all! It is your choice.
• The children will dig into their stockings during the holiday party.
• Everyone is happy!

Stuff you may need to know:

Winter Break: December 18-January 4 (more info coming soon about our holiday party before we get out for the break)

PreK Jacket Flip instructions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wRKDeKbAcI

Class Wish List:  https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1NIMKDO4OUN7A?ref_=wl_share

Meal information: Meals are available for TCS students 18 and under on Monday and Friday from 10:30 a.m. until noon. Meal pick-ups will be available at any of the school locations listed below:

Local School Sites Include:

• Southview Elementary School
• Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School
• Northridge Middle School
• The Alberta School of Performing Arts
• Eastwood Middle School
• Central High School
• Skyland Elementary School
• Arcadia Elementary School

Have an awesome week! We are so glad you are in PreK! Alicia

Hey PreKPals and Families-

This week, we will be learning about families and comparing the first Thanksgiving to the way we celebrate today! In science, we will make and taste butter! So fun!! We are going to have a yummy and funny snack at school this week. We can’t wait to show you! It is our last week of in person school until November 30! We will have 9 days of Fall Break. We hope you get to spend some time with your family! We will keep the Rocket Binders on Thursday afternoon. We have learned from experience that some of the binders go missing over long breaks and it just keeps us from scrambling to make a new one. We will send mats home and if your child’s extra change of clothing is “summerish” we will send that home so you can replace it with a winter set. Don’t forget socks and undies with the change of clothes.

This week, we will be working on the letters Nn and Xx and the sounds they make. We will work on rhyming words and in math we will continue with solid shapes: Sphere, cube, rectangular prism, cylinder and cone.

If you have some magazines or sales ads with food items, please send those to school on Monday! We are doing some Thanksgiving projects and need to also practice cutting! Magazines are awesome for that!

We are asking Santa, Grands or Moms and Dads to bring each PreKPal a Candyland (or similar game) where you have to take turns, count spaces as your marker moves (great one to one correspondence there!) and practice being a good sport when you win and lose! Great practice and skills needed for big school, plus, you can start family game night at your house if you don’t do that already!

Yearbooks are on sale! You are getting a flier on Monday. The price is $30 and you have until January 8^th to order. Take my advice. Go ahead and order as soon as you get the flier. There will be very few extras ordered and they always go fast. No one has ever told me they wished they didn’t order a yearbook, but I have had plenty of tears over people who did not order and who wished they did!

Don’t forget to find your backpack and your ROCKET binder, your nap mat, your snacks (you can send 4 snacks on Monday so they will have them ready to eat and that will be one less thing you have to worry about!). Try to send a variety so they can pick what they’d like for that day. They complain if they have goldfish every day! Get your water bottle with a valve (WATER only. No juice!), a jacket that zips or buttons, lunch box if you are eating lunch from home. Remember that breakfast and lunch are FREE, so check out the menu I sent earlier on Dojo (subject to change) and decide if your child would like to have lunch from school Disregard the Friday option, although it may be substituted on another day during the week. (We do not know when the menu will change. We don’t have any control over meal prep or distribution.) 

PreK Jacket Flip instructions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wRKDeKbAcI

We will be sending a book order form home coming home on Monday. Every book ordered gives us free books for our class (and helps us to provide free books to the PreKPals for their red book boxes!)

Y’all, we are soooo excited! Our Donor’s Choose project got fully funded and it was just in time! (Our big laminator fell off a shelf last week and is broken beyond repair!) We were so sad! Our project included a small laminator and we are ever so thankful to those of you who donated!

Class Wish List:  https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1NIMKDO4OUN7A?ref_=wl_share

Santa for a day information: (we will send the schedule home on Monday, November 30

• During December, we will be learning about holiday traditions around the world. If your family celebrates a special holiday and you would like to share some of your traditions, please let us know. We will not exchange names for gift giving in our classroom, but will participate in a super fun Rock Quarry tradition called “Santa for a day”. It goes like this: Each child is assigned a day to be “Santa”. Stockings are provided by the teachers!
• On the assigned day, each “Santa” will 1) bring small toys (no edibles, please) for each classroom friend; 2) wear a Santa hat (if desired); and 3) make jolly deliveries to each friend’s stocking.  (Examples of small toys:  pencils/pens, matchbox cars, and very small stuffed animals).  It will be best if Santa delivers the toys from a bag that hides the items inside.
• It is super affordable because you can get packs of fun things from the dollar spot with multiple items in the pack. We only have 16 friends, so it should be super easy to do.
• By the end of the schedule, the stockings will bulge with goodies, and the children are so excited they can’t stand it!
• There is no need to label the items with the name of each classmate. This just makes it harder for the Santa to deliver. You can put From: (Your child’s name) if you’d like but there isn’t really a need to wrap the items at all! It is your choice.
• The children will dig into their stockings during the holiday party.
• Everyone is happy!

Meals are available for TCS students 18 and under on Monday and Friday from 10:30 a.m. until noon. Meal pick-ups will be available at any of the school locations listed below:

Local School Sites Include:

• Southview Elementary School
• Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School
• Northridge Middle School
• The Alberta School of Performing Arts
• Eastwood Middle School
• Central High School
• Skyland Elementary School
• Arcadia Elementary School

Have an awesome week! We are so glad you are in PreK! Alicia

Hey PreKPals and Families-

This week, we will be learning about America and American symbols and we will celebrate Veteran’s Day (no school on Wednesday, November 11) with all things red, white and blue!

Fall Break (no school) is the week of Thanksgiving: November 21-29.

On MONDAY, November 9 we will have school pictures made. If you are a virtual student, you will still have the option to have your picture made from 12-1 pm. Parents will pull up to the multipurpose room on the side of the building and someone will get your child and take them in for photos. Parents will not be allowed in the building, but your child will be escorted to and from the picture session by RQES staff.

This week, we will be working on the letters Cc and Ff and the sounds they make and we will introduce word families (cat, hat, mat, sat) and continue with rhyming. In math we will continue with solid shapes: Sphere, cube, rectangular prism, cylinder and cone.

Don’t forget to find your backpack and your ROCKET binder, your nap mat, your snacks (you can send 3 snacks on Monday so they will have them ready to eat and that will be one less thing you have to worry about!). Try to send a variety so they can pick what they’d like for that day. They complain if they have goldfish every day! Get your water bottle with a valve (WATER only. No juice!), a jacket that zips or buttons, lunch box if you are eating lunch from home. Remember that breakfast and lunch are FREE, so check out the menu I sent earlier on Dojo (subject to change) and decide if your child would like to have lunch from school Disregard the Friday option, although it may be substituted on another day during the week. (We do not know when the menu will change. We don’t have any control over meal prep or distribution.) 

PreK Jacket Flip instructions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wRKDeKbAcI

November 8 is the last day for the online book fair at RQES. The link is

https://www.scholastic.com/bf/rqes

We will be sending a book order form home later this week from our classroom. Every book ordered gives us free books for our class (and helps us to provide free books to the PreKPals for their red book boxes!)

Thank you to all of you who have sent in items from our wish list, for our Donor’s Choose project (we are so close to being fully funded!) and to those of you who have sent cleaning supplies! You are all so generous and we are so thankful!

 Laminated Learning on Donors Choose

Class Wish List:  https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1NIMKDO4OUN7A?ref_=wl_share

• During December, we will be learning about holiday traditions around the world. If your family celebrates a special holiday and you would like to share some of your traditions, please let us know. We will not exchange names for gift giving in our classroom, but will participate in a super fun Rock Quarry tradition called “Santa for a day”. It goes like this: Each child is assigned a day to be “Santa”. Stockings are provided by the teachers!
• On the assigned day, each “Santa” will 1) bring small toys (no edibles, please) for each classroom friend; 2) wear a Santa hat (if desired); and 3) make jolly deliveries to each friend’s stocking.  (Examples of small toys:  pencils/pens, matchbox cars, and very small stuffed animals).  It will be best if Santa delivers the toys from a bag that hides the items inside.
• It is super affordable because you can get packs of fun things from the dollar spot with multiple items in the pack. We only have 16 friends, so it should be super easy to do.
• By the end of the schedule, the stockings will bulge with goodies, and the children are so excited they can’t stand it!
• There is no need to label the items with the name of each classmate. This just makes it harder for the Santa to deliver. You can put From: (Your child’s name) if you’d like but there isn’t really a need to wrap the items at all! It is your choice.
• The children will dig into their stockings during the holiday party.
• Everyone is happy!

Meals are available for TCS students 18 and under on Monday and Friday from 10:30 a.m. until noon. Meal pick-ups will be available at any of the school locations listed below:

Local School Sites Include:

• Southview Elementary School
• Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School
• Northridge Middle School
• The Alberta School of Performing Arts
• Eastwood Middle School
• Central High School
• Skyland Elementary School
• Arcadia Elementary School

Special thanks to Ms. Hoffman who handled my sudden absence on Thursday and Friday like the pro that she is! It is so wonderful to have a teaching partner who always has your back! My daddy was taken by ambulance to the hospital and I left super early on Thursday morning to be with my family. Luckily, the doctors identified the cause and he got the antibiotics he needed. He is still very sick, but he will be able to recover (Which was something we were not sure of on Thursday!) I appreciate all of you who checked on me, those of you who just were able to roll with the flow (in PreK we are flexible if nothing else!) and for those of you who sent prayers and well wishes. I am back in Tuscaloosa and looking forward to a great patriotic week with the PreKPals!

Have an awesome week! We are so glad you are in PreK! Alicia

Hey PreKPals and Families-

It’s November!! I cannot believe it! This week we are learning about all kinds of transportation and the different ways we get from one place to the other. We have some fun and interesting centers planned. We will make a name train, paint with cars and make and race balloon rockets for science.

We are asking that all children participate in two great local fund raisers! “Caps and Cans” will be on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2020. We would love for students to wear a cap to school and bring $1.00 (no change please) to donate to the United Way, and bring a canned good to donate to the Food Bank of West Alabama.

Next week, we will be learning about America and American symbols and we will celebrate Veteran’s Day (no school on Wednesday, November 11).

Fall Break (no school) is the week of Thanksgiving: November 21-29.

On November 9 we will have school pictures made. If you are a virtual student, you will still have the option to have your picture made. I will send that information to you as soon as I receive it.

This week, we will be working on the letters D and K and the sounds they make. Solid shapes: Sphere, cube, rectangular prism and cone, and working on identifying words that begin with the same sound and words that do not begin with the same sound (i.e. “which words have the same beginning sound? Bed and boy or bed and cat?”)

Don’t forget to find your backpack and your ROCKET binder, your snacks (you can send 4 snacks on Monday so they will have them ready to eat and that will be one less thing you have to worry about!), your water bottle with a valve (WATER only. No juice!), a jacket that zips or buttons, lunch box if you are eating lunch from home. Remember that breakfast and lunch are FREE, so check out the menu I sent earlier today on Dojo (subject to change) and decide if your child would like to have lunch from school Disregard the Friday option, although it may be substituted on another day during the week. (We do not know when the menu will change. We don’t have any control over meal prep or distribution.)

This is a copy of the letter Mrs. Jockisch sent last week-

We have observed many of you stopping in the bus lane during morning drop off and afternoon pickup.

This is not a safe practice for our PreKPals and families. We are requesting that you park in the front parking lot, walk across the crosswalk and down the sidewalk to the PreK doors for your child to be scanned in each morning.

Please remember that if you arrive after 8:00 am, you will need to check your child in at the front office. At 8:00 am, all PreK teachers are in their classrooms.

If you prefer to use the carpool lane, you may do that instead. Your PrekPal will need to be ready to exit the vehicle when the adult comes to the car to check their temperature. They will walk down the hallway to the PreK classrooms once they enter the building.

PreK dismissal is daily at 2:20.

You will need to pick up your PreKPal and then get in the carpool line to pick up older siblings. Older students cannot be dismissed with PreK.

Thank you for helping us keep your children safe.

Thank you to all of you who have sent in items from our wish list, for our Donor’s Choose project (we are so close to being fully funded!) and to those of you who have sent cleaning supplies! You are all so generous and we are so thankful!

Laminated Learning on Donors Choose

Class Wish List:  https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1NIMKDO4OUN7A?ref_=wl_share

Meals are available for TCS students 18 and under on Monday and Friday from 10:30 a.m. until noon. Meal pick-ups will be available at any of the school locations listed below:

Local School Sites Include:

• Southview Elementary School
• Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School
• Northridge Middle School
• The Alberta School of Performing Arts
• Eastwood Middle School
• Central High School
• Skyland Elementary School
• Arcadia Elementary School

Have an awesome week! We are so glad you are in PreK! Alicia