Note from the Principal

January 31, 2017

Greetings Imagine Andrews Families,

It’s a great day at Imagine Andrews! There have been several concerns regarding the process for birthday celebrations at Imagine Andrews. Many families have made requests to come to the school with cupcakes and other refreshments to celebrate birthdays in the classroom and the lunchroom. Some of the recent rules implemented by PGCPS makes this process difficult to allow without extreme restrictions.

In order for a parent or guardian to be permitted into the classroom or lunchroom with scholars he/she must have the $56.57 fingerprinting check which is from PGCPS. If parents/guardians do not have both background checks, they are not able to bring in birthday celebration refreshments to the classroom or in the lunchroom.

If you would like to have a birthday celebration in the classroom, it can only take place if the classroom teacher is in agreement with having the celebration during instructional time. These celebrations can only take place after 2:00 p.m. in the classroom. Teachers must be contacted 48 hours in advance to make this request.

If birthday celebrations take place in the lunchroom, the parent/guardian must stay to serve the refreshments and clean up after. The lunch monitors are not responsible for this task. The office staff must be notified 48 hours in advance. Please be sure to speak to Ms. Wilson or Ms. Brinson. They may request evidence of your fingerprint receipt prior to the visit.

Birthday celebrations at school are not encouraged. They can be disruptive to much needed instructional time and they are often a disruption to the lunchroom process. We are strongly considering eliminating school birthday celebrations all together in the 2017-2018 school year. Birthday celebrations in grades 7-8 are prohibited.

Thank you for your continuous partnership with Imagine Andrews Public Charter School.

Regards,

H. Douglas Rice II

Flower Grams

Flower Grams 
Sponsored by the Imagine Andrews PTO

Flower Grams will be sold Feb 6-9 before/after school and during lunch. We'll also have an order dropbox in the school office available anytime. 

Buy flowers for your children, friends, or teachers!

Flowers are $1.00 each and a valentines pencil can be added for an additional $1.

Flowers will be delivered to the student's homeroom class on Tuesday February 14th.

For any questions/concerns or if you could volunteer to help with the order table shifts or delivery, please contact the PTO at imagineandrewspto@gmail.com  . 

All volunteers must have fingerprinting on file with the school.

School Fundrasier

Double Good formally known as Popcorn Palace


Imagine Andrews PCS will be raising funds by selling popcorn. All orders will be due on Friday, February 17th.

Only cash or money orders (made out to Double Good) are the only form of payment that can be accepted.

Thanks so much for helping to raise money for our school!

This Week in Mrs. Kirchner's Class

This week is another full week of school.

In Writing, we will be going over how to write sentences using transition words. We will also go over how to organize a story.

In Grammar, we will discuss how to identify the noun, verb, and adjective in sentences. We also have a new list of spelling words. The students received their spelling yesterday.

The students also should have a new reading log for this week.

This week in Mrs. Zimmer’s Class!

*It’s been a couple crazy weeks with a lot of testing, and we are not quite done yet! Students will be taking the STAR Math test next week 2 / 7 / 17. 

In Math we are continuing to work on solving/creating story problems with unknown partners and totals.  We will begin to start working on problems with 3 addends towards the end of the week.  Students will be using a strategy to solve story problems by finding partners that make a 10-group. 

Example: 4 + 3 + 7 =

Students will see that 3+7 make a 10, and then add 4 to 10 to make 14.

On Friday, we will be celebrating the 100^th day of school!!! We will be doing a math related activity that day to celebrate! J

In Science, we are talking about properties of solids and liquids.  Last week, we did an activity to describe the properties of solids, so this week we will be doing the same for liquids.  Students will be observing laundry detergent, fabric softener, colored water, cooking oil, and hand soap in their groups and will try use words to describe them.  During our whole group discussion, I will introduce properties of liquids such as transparent, viscous, bubbly, translucent, and foamy to describe the liquids they are observing.  Towards the end of the week, we will discuss how matter can change to different states, and examine what happens when we mix solids and liquids.

In Health, we will be focusing on dental hygiene because February is Dental Hygiene month! We will read books and do interactive notebook activities to identify daily dental hygiene practices.  

STEM Fair Gallery Nite - Thursday 1/26 @ 5:00pm

It's a great day here at Imagine Andrews!  This year we will be hosting our STEM Fair Gallery Nite on this Thursday, January 26th from 5:00-6:00pm.  Our scholars have worked very hard on their science fair projects and we encourage all of them to come back that evening to participate.  

On Wednesday, the best STEM Fair projects featuring 3rd-8th grade will be displayed in the multipurpose room.  At this time, judges will come in and evaluate the projects.  Thursday, Grades 3rd-8th will be displaying the other science fair projects in their home room during the evening from 5:00 - 5:30pm

.  After the gallery walk, we will have an awards ceremony for all parents and students in the multipurpose room. Please come out and show our scholars your support.  We look forward to seeing you this Thursday!

Welcome to 3^rd quarter! We are halfway through the year, so in order to start preparing students for 2^nd grade and teaching responsibility, we are no longer accepting late homework.  Student’s should be in the routine of writing down their homework in their agenda book every day, putting their homework in their blue folders, and bringing it back the next day completed.  The homework is updated on the blog every week so parents and students can expect when homework will be given. J

This week in Mrs. Zimmer’s Class!

*We have OLSAT testing on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week! Thursday will be the makeup day for the test if any students are absent.  Send your child with a good nights rest and a healthy breakfast! J

In Math, we are playing roll, climb, & slide to 120!  This game is similar to snakes and ladders. This game is a great exercise for practicing place value, addition, and subtraction.  The students write down their equations on a separate sheet of paper so they are showing all their work as they play!  Hopefully they will begin to see patterns and make predictions, which will help them develop a better math sense. 

In Science, we finished up our chapter on weather today by taking our test! Hopefully the review was helpful to those who completed it! J  We are jumping into our Physical Science unit, which starts with a chapter about observing matter.  Students will be learning about what matter is and how it can be described and changed.  We will start by talking about how we can describe objects.  I will have 5 bags that students will reach into, and then they will try to describe the object using 3 adjectives.  In their table groups, they will communicate to guess what they think the item is by using their descriptive words. At the end of the week, we may begin to talk about solids, liquids, and gases.

We will also learn new vocabulary words for this chapter.  Help your child make these words a part of their vocabulary when you talk together about different types of matter:

Matter

Solid

Liquid

Gas

Dissolve

Evaporate

In Health, we will discuss decision-making.  We will identify initial steps for making simple personal and/or guided decisions regarding home and classroom situations.  We will have a whole group discussion about specific scenarios to identify the problem, discover possible solutions, and pick the best choice. Then, students will do the same activity but in a small group, and they will complete their interactive notebook activity as a group.  Then, we will share the different scenarios of each group and the solutions they came up with.

Spirit Night Tonight!

Tonight at the Chick-fil-a in District Heights, we will be having spirit night for our school! Come out and support our school! Make sure to mention Imagine Andrews or bring the flyer that the students brought home last week. The spirit night is from 6:00pm- 8:00 pm.

This Week In Mrs. Kirchner's Class

Hope you all enjoyed your long weekend! Today starts a new quarter so I hope the kiddos are ready!
This week in our class we will be doing the following:

Social Studies: We will be discussing Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad.

Grammar: We will go over adjectives and writing in complete sentences.

Writing: We will go over transitional words like first, then, if,etc.

This week, we have new spelling words. The students will have their copy of their spelling words and a reading log today in their blue folders.

Last week, a lot of the students were asking for a reading log. Reading logs are only sent out when we have a full week of school.
If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me.

This week in Mrs. Zimmer’s Class

It is going to be a short, very flexible week! The blog website was blocked from our network last week, so I am updating the blog with last weeks entry as well down below!

In Math, we are taking our OLSAT practice test on Wednesday and Thursday to prepare us for next weeks test! After we finish testing, we will play math dice games with a partner to help us practice place value, addition, and subtraction facts.

In Science, we are discussing the order of the seasons and using our 5 senses to describe them! We will be doing an interactive notebook activity and watching the videos about the season on BrainPop Jr.!  I will send home a test prep review sheet on Thursday to help prepare students for their tests on Monday.   This will be collected as a homework grade

In Health, we are finishing up the last part of our anger lesson.  Students are creating a skit that illustrates someone getting angry, but using a healthy way to overcome their thoughts and actions.  They will share/act out their skit for the rest of the class.

  

This week in Mrs. Zimmer’s Class! 1/9-1/13

In Math, we are working on solving unknown partner story problems again, but now we are building on previous knowledge and using the “make a ten” strategy.   Children break apart the lesser number to make a ten with the greater number, because it is easier to add onto 10.  It is very important for students to practice addition and subtraction problems using numbers up to 20 at home.  They can also create their own story problems with an unknown partner or unknown totals and then solve. We are using Math Mountains, Making a Ten strategy, and counting on to solve our problems in class.

In Science, we are learning about the different types of weather and tools that are used to measure weather.  We have started talking about what temperature is, when do we take temperature, and how to measure the temperature using a thermometer.  We will also talk about different forms of precipitation such as rain, snow, sleet, and hail.  We will also talk about how to measure wind direction, precipitation, and wind speed at the end of the week!

In Health, we will be finishing up our interactive notebook activity about anger since we ran out of time last week.  Students will be illustrating a happy thought/memory they can think of when they become angry to help calm and control their bodies thoughts and actions.  Students will share their illustration to the rest of class.

This week in Mrs. Kirchner's class

This week will be a very short week. We will be reviewing grammar action verbs and nouns. In Social Studies, we will talk about Martin Luther King Jr. The end of the quarter is Thursday January 19th. The students will be off on Friday January 20th. There will only be reading for 15 minutes for homework this week. Hope you enjoy your week! If you have any questions, please contact me.

This week in Mrs. Kirchner's Class

Hello This is Ms. Hayes. As you know, Mrs. Kirchner is now on maternity leave until the end of March. I will be the teacher until she comes back. She has left me with the information for the classroom dojo so if you have any questions I will be able to assist you. Also, my email address is cyntera.hayes@pgcps.org.
This week in class, we will review nouns. We will be going over plural nouns and possessive nouns. We also will not have a reading log this week since it is a short week of school.

If you have any questions or concerns, do not hesitate to contact me via classroom dojo or email. I hope that we have an enjoyable next few months. :)

This week in Mrs. Zimmer's Class!

Welcome back and Happy New Year! :)

This week in math we will be finishing up our Chapter 4 unit on place value.  We are focusing on adding 2-digit numbers, such as 43+6.  Students are counting on from the larger number and adding the ones of the smaller number.  We are still continuing to compare numbers to determine which ones are greater than, less than, or equal to.  The goal is to take our Chapter 4 test on Friday.  Depending on how the rest of the week goes, if I feel we need to push the test to Monday to allow students with more practice I will.  For extra practice, students can figure out how many tens and ones are in each number 1-99, draw ten sticks and ones for each number, write the number in expanded form, and practice adding two digit numbers for fluency.

We will be taking our Chapter 6 Science test tomorrow over land, water, and air.  Student should be bringing home their science journals and a review sheet today that will help prepare them for the test tomorrow.   Don’t forget to also watch some BrainPop Jr. videos as a great refresher! The videos under the land tab and conservation tab would be most beneficial! We spent a long time reviewing everything we learned from this chapter since it has been a long break! We will also do a mini review before the test tomorrow!  We will begin a short chapter over weather to make sure students grasped the main ideas from the beginning of the year.

In Health, we will be doing a lesson on anger.  We will identify what can happen when someone becomes angry (red face, tense muscles, loud voice), and healthy ways to deal with anger (e.g. take time to think about it, talk about your feelings to the person who made you angry, ask an adult for help, go for a supervised walk/run).  We will do two interactive journal activities where students will describe ways to express anger in a healthy way, and then they will illustrate a happy thought they can think of in a time that would help them calm down.