Happy Holidays!

Glenbrook staff and students would like to wish all of you a happy and healthy holiday season. No matter the celebration, may you enjoy time with your family and friends!

                 

Holiday Fun

It was obvious that the holidays are upon us! This week at Glenbrook there was lots of planning for the upcoming holidays and just a little bit of celebrating.  

Thanks to our PTA, we held our annual Holiday Shop all week long in our cafeteria.  Mrs. Warkel organized the event with many of Santa's helpers (parents and grandparents).  The children enjoyed shopping for their families and their friends and even managed to buy a gift or two for themselves.  

The students had to manage their money well to be sure that they had enough money to purchase something for everyone on their gift list.  This was not an easy task with so many great items to choose from.

Thank goodness for our volunteers who worked tirelessly helping the students wrap their packages and label them too. They left with very sore fingers!  Santa would be very proud of them for their help!

To add to the fun, Mrs. DeRoo held her first "Dessert with the Principal."  Students were able to place their "Gotchas" into a raffle to win the dessert.  70 students were chosen and they enjoyed red and green snowball cookies.  It was delicious and fun!

We are so very proud of our Glenbrook students, their families and our staff for participating in our annual Canned Food Drive.  This year they collected 465 non perishable items to donate to Hanover Township Food Pantry.  (21 Boxes)  This is nearly 200 more than we donated last year.  What a great way to help our community and an awesome way to show HAWK PRIDE!!!

These are just 7 of the 21 boxes that  are being donated to the Hanover Township Food Pantry.
We are thankful that our families and staff are so incredibly generous to those in need!  

Everyday is an adventure at Glenbrook!

Each day something new and interesting happens at Glenbrook. This week the students have been working hard on their mid year MAP testing, which can be a bit stressful and requires a bit of hard work! We want to celebrate their successes and effort.  This week we made sure that we enjoyed the week with some fun and interesting things, starting with every class participating in the "Hour of Code."  

The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. Anyone, anywhere can organize an Hour of Code event. One-hour tutorials are available in over 45 languages. https://hourofcode.com/us

Every class spent at least one hour this week learning how to code using hourofcode.org.  Our youngest students partnered with our more experienced students to learn just the basics of computer science. Now that all students are registered, they can continue coding as often as they wish.  

Mrs. Smith, 4th grade IGNITE teacher lead the school in the efforts to start coding at Glenbrook. This has become an annual event here and the students love it.  She helped our school to become a part of the 320,931,751 students who are benefiting from the work of the Hour of Code organization.

Some of our classrooms wanted to learn more, so they began exploring other uses for coding when they read about how coding is used in robotics.  Mrs. Dauksavages class practiced Binary Coding after reading about The Evolution of Robots. 

After all of the MAP testing and coding it was time to do some other interesting things.  Mrs. Smith's class Skyped with a Mystery Classroom on Friday. When Skyping with another classroom across the United States, or even around the world, they play a sort of "20 questions."  Each classroom has the opportunity, via Skype, to ask the other classroom "yes" or "no" questions about where they are located.  Both classrooms were able to find each other on the map. This time the Mystery Skype classroom friends were from Newfolden, MN a small town of 380 people way up in the northwestern part of the state.

We also had to take time out this week to honor our very own Ms. Monica Rivera. Ms. Rivera is our school social worker. She recently received an award for her work with crisis prevention. Ms. Rivera works with students everyday who may be stressed or having trouble coping with some sort of crisis.  She is always calm and does an excellent job helping students as situations arise.  We are very proud to call Mrs. Rivera one of our very own Glenbrook Hawks!

U-46's Annual Principal for a Day Event

This year, at Glenbrook, we were very lucky to host 2 Principals for U-46's annual Principal for a Day (PFAD) which was held on Friday, December 2.  Mrs. DeRoo kept her 2 extra principals very busy all morning meeting with students and in classrooms.  

Firefighter Brandon Moneyhun from the Streamwood Police Department began by helping 3rd graders from Mrs. Chavez's class recite the Pledge of Allegiance and the Hawk Pride Pledge. Here Joanna Ayala poses for a picture while Firefighter Brandon finishes a few announcements before passing the intercom to Principal #2 Kris Kenney from Poplar Creek Public Library. 

Glenbrook's Youth Advisory Council enjoyed a delicious breakfast with our PFAD's. Each of our members shared their talents and favorite things about Glenbrook. They told all about what their role as a Youth Advisory Council member is and what Hawk Pride is all about.  Members of the council included: Alexander Nickels, Jack Jeschke, Diavyance Richardson, Kyra White, Latavun Norwood, Joseph Lunz, Vincent Lunz, Giana Wrzek, ALejandro Mancera, Stefanie Mendez, Edwin Guillen, and Sara Castellanos. Their staff "coaches" are Sandy Pierson, and Ann McGovern. 

Both of our PFAD's enjoyed spending time with our 6th grade leaders.  Firefighter Brandon talked to Mrs. Jagielski's class about his training and experiences as a firefighter and paramedic.  Mrs. Kenney shared her education and training with Mrs. Diaz-Blanco's class. She expressed the importance of having passion for what you do for a living.  All of the students kept our PFAD's busy for quite some time with questions and interesting conversation.

 Kindergarten students love to be read to, especially when they have guest readers.  They were so excited when both of our PFAD's joined them to share some favorite stories.  They were naturals! Mrs. Lentino's class enjoyed hearing another story with one of their favorite characters, Pete the Cat, while Mrs. Scarpino's class was introduced to a new character, Rosie Revere in Rosie Revere, Engineer,

Just like the kindergarten classrooms our second and 3rd grade classrooms enjoyed hearing some stories from our guest principals.  Each PFAD shared a little bit about themselves and what they do in their "real jobs."  Then, they read to the children.  It was difficult to pull the PFAD's away as the children were so excited to talk to the new visitors.  Luckily for us, Firefighter Brandon will be back!  He will be joining our very own Firefighter Tim to help us learn about fire saftey later this school year.  We also know we can visit Mrs. Kenney any time at Poplar Creek Library! 

Thank you to our Principal's for a Day and to School District U-46 for making this day possible!