G.P.E. Families,

It is hard to believe that it is time for Spring Break. This quarter is flying by due to all the hard work that is happening in every classroom in our school. Teachers are working to make sure that all grade-level material is covered and that all students are achieving their maximum potential.

Students will be taking a variety of tests in the coming months. These are all important tests and provide our teachers with data that helps them meet your student’s needs. Please encourage your students to study hard and do their best work over the coming weeks and months. We want to be able to celebrate our students’ wonderful achievements.

Speaking of testing, it is EXTREMELY important that your students get plenty of rest, healthy foods, and lots of encouragement during testing time. We also need for ALL third, fourth and fifth-grade students to be at school every day and on time during the FSA. It is difficult to make up the test for students who are absent. Research shows that students generally do better if they test with their classmates in their own classroom. It is to your child’s advantage to be at school on time during testing days. Please refer to the attached schedule so that you are aware of when your child will be testing.

Lastly, I have some important reminders. If you choose to drive to the front parking lot in the morning to drop off your child, you must park and walk your child into the school. Please do not drop your child off and have him/her walk into the building alone. Also, as a reminder please do not park in the handicapped parking spots unless you have a handicapped designation.

I hope everyone has a fun and safe Spring Break (3/9 – 3/13)!

~ Beverly Walker

Principal

Mar 5 - 1st Grade Music Program (6:00 pm)

Mar 9-13 - Spring Break

Mar 21 - Spring Fling PTA

Mar 24 - End of 3rd Quarter

Mar 25 - Early Dismissal Day (1:15 pm)

Mar 26 - Spring Pictures

Mar 27 - Planning Day (No School)

Apr 3 - 9 - Book Fair

Apr 8 - Book Fair Family Night (5:30 - 6:30 pm)

Apr 8 - School Advisory Committee (6:00 pm)

April 10 - Spring Holiday (No School)

April 29 - Early Dismissal Day (1:15 pm)

May 11 - 15 - Teacher Appreciation Week

May 13 - SAC

May 14 - 3rd Grade Music Program (6:00 pm)

May 20 - Early Dismissal Day (1:15 pm)

May 25 - Memorial Day (No School)

May 28 - 5th Grade Promotion Ceremony

May 29 - Last Day of School (Half Day)

· Please send in headphones for your student(s). The blended learning programs require sound and each child having their own headphones helps cut down on germs and lice!

· Free breakfast is available for every student. Get to the cafeteria by 8:25!

· Don’t forget to support our school and earn prizes through schoolstore.com all year!

· Please be considerate of the campus and don’t drop trash on the ground.

· Please remember to park and walk your student(s) in and from school. You will need to show your number tag every day.

· Please do not drive through the bus loop during arrival and dismissal time (7:50 - 8:30 and 2:45-3:30). This causes a risk for our students and staff who are in that area.

· DCPS visitor policy requires visitors to our campus to present a government-issued ID and wear a visible pass that identifies them and the purpose of their visit to be worn while on campus. Visitors MUST enter and exit through the main entrance of the school.

· Please remember to park and walk your student(s) in and from school. You will need to show your number tag every day.

Testing season is upon us. Students will continue to take the district-based assessment in March and will begin the state testing in April. Below is the state testing calendar. Remember to encourage students to sleep well the night before and eat a healthy breakfast on the day of testing. Though it is an important day to showcase all their hard work we would like to minimize stress and anxiety for our students.

The state has created the Reading Scholarship to help public school students in third, fourth, and fifth grade who scored a Level 1 or 2 on the English Language Arts portion of the Florida Standards Assessment last school year. Students may be eligible to apply for this $500 scholarship. If awarded, the scholarship can be used to reimburse tuition and fees for part-time reading tutoring, summer reading programs, after-school reading programs, and instructional materials related to reading or literacy. Program funds are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. To apply online, or for more information, visit www.StepUpForStudents.org/reading.

Thank you to Ms. Stephenson (and her extended day students) and Ms. Linton for organizing our lost and found in the cafeteria. We have an abundance of jackets, water bottles and lunch boxes. Please have your child check for any missing items when they are at lunch with the permission of their teacher. All items will be donated at the end of the 3rd quarter (March 24) and at the end of every quarter thereafter.

Parents, if you pick up your children from the front of our school, please reinforce to students to keep out of the mulch and flower beds. Also, please reinforce to students that we should not step on the benches, but use them to sit instead. We want to ensure that the beautification from Lowe's lasts a long time and continues to show how beautiful our school is.

Thank you for your support.

During any school evacuation drills (fire drills) where students must go out to the parking lot, all traffic will be suspended. No cars should enter or leave the parking lot during the drill. We will ask any cars to stop and turn off until the drill is finished. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

If you would like to join us to volunteer or chaperone any field trips, please sign up to become an approved volunteer https://dcps.samaritan.com/custom/506/#/volunteer_registration

School Spirit T-Shirts are on sale now for just $10, Hoodies are available for $20 and Water bottles for $5. Bring in your money with a t-shirt order form and your student will be given their spirit shirt. Every Friday is spirit day at GPE!

Follow them on FB—Greenland Pines PTA

March 21- Spring Fling

Follow our Facebook page for updates.

Once again our SAC members have been hard at work recruiting business partners for our school. If you would like to learn more about our School Advisory Committee, please come by for our April meeting 4/8 @ 6PM.

Pre-K is excited about the month of March. Spring is in the air! We will be learning about the season of spring and looking forward to the upcoming spring holidays. During the month of March, each preschool class will be starting the Battelle Developmental Inventory-2 test with all students. Please make sure that your child is getting plenty of rest, that they are feeling well, and are getting to school on time so the testing can be as accurate as possible. As always, please make sure that all clothing items (including jackets) are clearly labeled with your child's name.

VPK is marching into spring! We are so excited to experience two field trips in March! We will be going to the Universoul Circus on March 5th, and JCA to see a Dr. Seuss play on March 26th! After a week of learning about the Arts, we will spend March learning about Animals! Spring break is coming, and before we know it, graduation will be here! Thank you so much for your continued love and support!

Kindergarten is as good as gold! In February, we learned about Earth in Space and Time in science! In Reading, we continued with story structure, characters, plot, and how to retell a story as well as key ideas and details. In Math, we completed our unit Number Pairs and Addition and Subtraction to 10. In March, we will wrap up or Space unit and move into the organization and development of living things in science. In reading, we will begin our author study unit beginning with Dr. Seuss! In Math, we will be dealing with Numbers 10-20 and Counting to 100. Lastly, in Phonics, we are moving through our Saxon Phonics curriculum and working on a letter a week and focusing on blends and digraphs.

Students in first grade have had a very busy 2020. We are learning how to measure length, writing numbers using expanded notation and telling time. Now that we can identify the character, setting, problem, and solution in narrative texts and we are identifying the lesson or moral in the story. We will have shown our expertise in explanatory writing and will be writing to persuade. In science, we have become astronomers and are studying the solar system. We can’t wait to show you our constellations! We know you can tell there is a lot happening in first grade this month!

March brings 2nd grade reading into our poetry unit. This includes rhyme, alliteration, repetition, as well as other types of poetry. Math also brings us repetition as we enter repeated addition. This unit will include not only learning to count by numbers other than one but also will include building arrays and the introduction of multiplication. We will not be going into multiplication but will visit how addition is related to multiplication.

Third grade is excited to spring into March! In reading, we are finishing up our unit on text structure, and beginning to compare both informational and literature-based stories that have the same topic or theme. We are also in full review mode as we approach the FSA at the end of this month! In math, we just finished Module 5. We learned that fractions are equal parts of a whole. In Module 6, we will focus on generating and analyzing different types of data. By the end of the module, students will be working with a mixture of scaled picture graphs, bar graphs, and line plots to problem solve using categorical and measurement data. In science, we will be learning all about living things- specifically plants. We will learn about a plant’s structure, role, and how they respond to their environment. We will also learn about the process of photosynthesis. We are looking forward to a great month of learning!

We are hoping that the luck of the Irish will be upon us this month as we do our Progress Monitoring Assessments! Math will be on March 18th and 19th, Science on the 20th and Reading on the 23rd and 24th. In reading this month we will be learning about the elements of poetry, play and prose. In writing, we are reviewing informative/opinion writing as well as test-taking strategies. Our FSA writes is on April 2nd, so we are working hard to be fully prepared! In Social Studies we will continue learning about the American Revolution and Civil War. In math, we are finishing up our study of fractions. We will move on to the study of decimals and decimal notation. Our work with decimals will be largely in comparing them with fractions. In Science, we will soon begin our study of rocks after we finish up looking at different forms of energy.

In Reading, students will draw on information from multiple print or digital sources, demonstrating the ability to locate an answer to a question quickly or to solve a problem efficiently. In Social Studies, students will use primary and secondary sources to understand history. Explain how and why the United States government was created. Identify the Declaration of Independence’s grievances and Articles of Confederation’s weaknesses. Describe how concerns about individual rights led to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution. Compare Federalist and Anti-Federalist views of government. Explain the relationships or interactions between two or more individuals, events, ideas, or concepts in a historical, scientific, or technical text based on specific information in the text. Define a constitution and discuss its purposes. In Writing, students will write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons and information. Introduce a topic or text clearly, state an opinion, and create an organizational structure in which ideas are logically grouped to support the writer’s purpose. Provide logically ordered reasons that are supported by facts and details. Link opinion and reasons using transitional words, phrases, and clauses (e.g., consequently, specifically). Provide a concluding statement or section related to the opinion presented. In Math, we are completing Module 4 and moving into Module 5, finishing multiplying and dividing fractions, and multiplying and dividing decimals. We will be moving onto finding the volume of rectangular prisms and area and continuing to work on FSA countdown packets. In science, we are finishing up weather and climate. Students have been using the globes to locate places on Earth and familiarizing themselves with latitude and longitude lines. Students will be moving onto plants and the human body in the next couple of weeks.

Happy March! Please note the Spring Book Fair dates are March 20th-26th! Also, we have been working on learning about different African Americans that have changed history to celebrate Black History Month. As we enter into March, we are going to discuss women in history for Women’s History Month! “Never stop learning; for when we stop learning, we stop growing." - Loyal 'Jack' Lewman

Applebee's

Antisyn (IT Consultants)

Adventure Landing

Chick-Fil-A

Skate Station

Sonny's

Images are linked to the business' website.

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