A Message From Our Principal:  Mrs. Keval

Dear Parents and Guardians,

A warm welcome to all of you for our 2008-2009 school year. I want to thank all of you for the smooth transition into the new school year. Our parent community had a big turnout for our Back to School Night the first week of school. Thank you so much for your support! I also want to thank you for sending your children to school on time. This year we are working on increasing attendance again but with a focus on being in line for the morning assembly by 7:55 a.m. For kindergarteners, students have to be in class by 7:40 . We are offering several incentives for classes that have the best attendance, and one such incentive is for the entire class to go to Home Town Buffet.

Students received their Parent/Student handbooks the first week of school. Please make sure to go over the handbook with your children as it goes over the school rules. The pages in the back should be filled out and sent back to the classroom teacher to allow the students to check out books from the library, use the internet, etc.

This year we have several wonderful things in store for our students. Every student will receive six weeks of dance instruction from our dance teacher. C and D tracks have the dance instruction in July and August. Students will perform for their families on September 4th. A and B tracks will have their dance classes in May and June and will perform for their parents on June 23rd.

We are also having a “Bring Your Parent to School Day” this year. Parents will be able to come and hang out with their children on campus for as long as their schedule allows for that day. Our annual community barbeque is on Sept. 11, and we will also be having a “Garden Day” on Sept. 6 where we will need community involvement in building our new garden. Our children will be growing and planting vegetables and flowers in the garden and learning about taking care of the environment.

We are very excited, too, about our new science program starting this year. Our teachers have received extensive training in utilizing the new adopted science curriculum. Prairie elementary school is also a recipient of a huge grant that will allow our fourth and fifth grade teachers and students to be extensively trained in technology this year. Each teacher will receive training in blogs, wikis, podcasts, and multimedia applications that will “power up” Open Court ( Language Arts) lessons and engage students in the learning process of digital literacy. Classrooms will receive the hardware necessary for the lessons, video conferencing etc. Fourth grade will begin with the training this year and fifth grade will receive the training the following year.

As always, you are warmly invited to join us the first Thursday of each month to join the vice-principal and myself for coffee and donuts from 8-9 a.m. This gives us all a chance to get to know each other and get updates and input about our school.

Sincerely,

Fawzia Keval
Principal