Be Kind

Kindness and Collaboration

With this week centered around kindness each grade level worked on a lesson which incorporated an element of kindness or collaboration. Kinder discovered that being nice to someone, even if they are not nice to you can create an impact. First grade learned about Enemy Pie and developed recipes to make friendships instead of enemies. Second grade learned of one man's dream and kindness to entertain others and began their planning for sharing the joys of Thanksgiving through their very own Balloons over Bandera parade. Third grade began their designs for our Traveling Mural Project. Here we are sharing with 9 other schools, throughout the US, our school motto and our images that represent our town and our school. In return we will be receiving pieces to create a mural, from those same schools, in our hallway. While fourth and fifth graders worked on being helpful to one another and to themselves by learning our library's catalog system, no longer will they have to wait on other to help them find books they are looking for! 

Kinder

First Grade

Second Grade

Third Grade

2018 Project 

Fourth and Fifth Grade

Commanders of Coding

Mrs. Rardin and I are so excited about our recent grant winning! The coding bots have been ordered and are steadily making their way in to the library! Prior to Christmas break all students on Alkek's campus will learn to use the different bots and how to code with them through various means. At the beginning of the new semester we will be opening our coding club to students for participation and practice in coding before school several days and after school once a week. We look forward to all of the cool activities and the opportunity for our students to explore the use of computational thinking and computer coding. With these experiences our students will be better prepared to make elective choices at the middle school and high school level that could lead to their future careers in such technologies. 

Book Fair Bonanza

Our Scholastic Book Fair was an Arctic Blast!

This was my first book fair to run, and I will say that I am looking forward the future of our book fairs! We had an eventful start up with our truck of goodies arriving in the rain just before Halloween. Set up took the entire day with continued additions throughout the week to make the scenery just right for our arctic theme. The students then spent the remainder of the week coming in with their classes to learn the expectations of the upcoming week and got to make their wish lists in hopes to be able to buy a book from the many to choose from. Seeing the excitement on the faces of the students filled with anticipation of  the shopping days to come made all of the hard work well worth it! 

Tuesday night brought Family Math and Reading Night where families gathered to enjoy Alkek's world famous hot dogs and treats, then venture off to the classroom hallways to enjoy math and reading activities. Families were caught laughing and having a great time! Final destination for most was the book fair, where families worked together to pick out reading material to build their own home libraries. Many also tended to the wish lists of the teachers, adding to their classroom collections as well.

I want to send out a huge thank you to all of the PTO and parent volunteers for helping make this all possible! Without you it would be impossible to keep the library open for student checkouts and for book fair purchases. 

Book Fair Fairy Visits

The ever mysterious Book Fair Fairy also paid a visit, delivering some books to students during this week. We appreciate her helping out some of our students who couldn't afford to buy books at this time from the fair. I'm sure she will return with the next fair in February!

The Grade Finale!!!

Thanks to all for buying books and items at the book fair. Our grand total in sales was over $10,000 which turns into approximately $4,000 in Scholastic Dollars for us to purchase books and library items! I'm so excited to be able to fill some of our students' wish lists of reading material for the library!!!