Reminder:
There is no school
February 16th and 27th |
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7:40 - 7:55: Students should not arrive prior to 7:40. All students enter through the main doors. Breakfast is served. Students may not enter the building until the bell rings at 7:40. 8:00 am: School begins 2:35 pm: Dismissal for all walkers and parent pickup 2:40 pm: Dismissal for bussers
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February
2 - PTA Meeting @ 7:15 in the Pinecrest Media Center
2 - 6 I Love To Read Week - see schedule below
16 - No School - President's Day
25 - 26 - Evening Conferences / Book Fair
27 - No School - Conferences / Book Fair March
2 - PTA Meeting @ 7:15 in the Pinecrest Media Center
4 - STEAM Night 5:30 - 7:30
6 - 20 - No School: Spring Break
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Semester 1 Report Cards are available on Infinite Campus Parent Portal under Documents. If you have not set up your parent portal, please email pzais@isd200.org for your Activation Key. |
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Order your copies of Stephen Shaskan's books by Wednesday, February 4th! |
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Elementary Conferences will be held in the evenings of February 25th and 26th and during the day on February 27th. The link to sign up will be available February 6. Please register for a conference as soon as possible after receiving the link to ensure your preferred time is available.
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COUNTDOWN TO KINDERGARTEN
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2026-27 kindergarten registration is now open. Please register here. |
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January PRIDE Winners
Congratulations to our January PRIDE Winners! |
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2026-2027 Class Placement
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Class placement forms are now available in the office for families who wish to share specific input regarding their child’s 2026–27 classroom assignment. Please note that requests for specific teachers should not be requested on this form. Completed forms must be returned, to the office, by Friday, April 10. Kindly do not submit this information by phone or email. |
End of Day Transportation Changes
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When there is a change to your child’s normal dismissal plan, please contact the main office at 651-480-7280 by 1:35 pm if possible so we are able to get a message to your child and their teacher before the end of the day. |
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| Join the Pinecrest PTA! Meetings are held the first Monday of each month at 7:15 pm in the Pinecrest media center. New members are always welcome!
Visit our Pinecrest Elementary Community Facebook Page for more information! |
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There will be hands-on Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math activites and demonstrations. |
| In order for this to be a successful event, we need your help! |
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The Pinecrest PTA is hosting our Scholastic spring book fair during conferences February 25-27th in the Pinecrest Library. You won't want to miss this opportunity to shop for your student's favorite new books! Plus up to 50% of all book fair sales come back to the PTA for the purchase of books for our Pinecrest library and classrooms!
View our digital Book Flyer and check out some of the featured titles coming to Pinecrest!
Flyer in English
Flyer in Spanish
Can you help? Volunteering for a shift at the book fair is a great way to meet and connect other families and kids from your child's classroom! We need 2-3 adult volunteers per shift to make it a successful book fair! Sign up below: |
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The Music Room has been a busy place as we finally completed our first round of formal assessments. We are excited to welcome Miss Hearther Wallace to our school as she will begin her student teaching with us on Wednesday, February 11.
Grade 4 has been practicing their new rhythms ti-tika and tika-ti. Ask your student to try and write these new rhythms for you. In addition, we are practicing our melodic houses, Low La and Low Sol. It is so exciting to hear the children share what instruments they tried to play at the instrument fair!
In third grade, we are learning about the composer, Ludwig von Beethoven. We have listened to his Symphony # 9 and Fur Elise. It is amazing to think he created so much of this music while he was deaf!
Grade 2 is busy practicing reading, writing, performing and creating with their melodic houses “Do, Mi, Sol and La”. In addition, we have been practicing our new rhythms, the half note and half rest. We are looking forward to a new house moving in on music street.
Grade 1 students are working on the difference between beat and rhythm and recognizing the time signature, bar lines and double bar lines. We are practicing the reading of tah, ti-ti, and rest, (that is quarter note, eighth notes and quarter rest).
Kindergarten students are recognizing the difference in instrumental timbres. From the sounds of drums, to triangles, to shakers, each instrument has a different type of sound. We have had a lot of fun discovering how music can be loud and soft as well as fast and slow. New this month will be determining if music is high or low. In addition, we have been working on our rhyming words.
Our Pinecrest Panther Choir will continue our Tuesday morning rehearsals. We will be combining with the Kennedy and McAullife choirs for an evening concert on Monday, May 4 at 6:30pm in the Hastings Middle School Auditorium.
Please mark your calendars now for the annual Children’s Orchestra Concert. It is scheduled for Monday, March 9 at 6:00pm in the Hastings High School Auditorium. Admission is free. Local celebrities read and act out some of our favorite children’s books while the orchestra accompanies the re-telling of these books. Hope to see you all there! |
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Students have begun learning all about the different elements of art! They learned about how these seven elements are like ingredients to making awesome artwork! There are 7 elements of art: Line, shape, color, value, form, space, and texture! We have spent some time looking at different artworks and pointing out areas we see these elements, but most of our time was spent creating art based on the first element of art, LINE!
4th grade artists used different types of lines to create drawings of vases inspired by ancient Greek pottery. We took a look at images of these vases and pointed out all of the different types of lines we saw. We also talked about what it means when an artwork is functional vs decorative. Fourth graders then filled these vases with all sorts of cacti, plants, and flowers and brought it to life with many colors! We are still working on finishing these projects up, but you can check out an in-progress picture of this project below!!
3rd graders “travelled” to India to learn about a popular type of art there, rangoli! Rangoli art is a traditional Indian art form using colored sand or powder to decorate a floor or courtyard during a special occasion such as a wedding! We looked at quite a few images of all the different amazing rangoli designs! Something the students talked a lot about was how this wasn’t a permanent artwork. The sand design could easily be blown away in the wind! We mixed the idea of rangoli art with India’s national bird, a peacock, to create this awesome art project!
2nd grade artists learned all about different types of lines in their Line Llama project! They focused directly on drawing different types of lines for their background before using lines to draw a llama. And these artists truly blew me away when I saw how awesome their llama drawings turned out! They also got to experiment with an oil resist before they painted the backgrounds. They used oil pastels to decorate the background with lines before they painted with colorful watercolor paint on top, and because oil and water doesn’t mix you can still see all of the awesome lines beneath the paint!
1st graders were inspired by the artist Heather Galler for their LINE art projects! She is an artist who fills her artwork with all sorts of lines, shapes, colors, patterns, and details! We took all of that as inspiration as we drew and designed our Cup of Hot Chocolate art project! During this project the students got a refresh on collage art! They decorated the background, “counter”, and coffee cup all separately before cutting and gluing it all together! Kindergarteners have been hard at work learning about lines too!! We did a lot of brainstorming and practicing some of the different types of lines. Through their Emoji Line project kindergarten artists got to showcase all of the awesome lines they learned about! They also got to use shapes and lines to draw a super cute emoji in the middle of their paper!
Take a look at some examples of these projects all these awesome artists have been working on! |
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January has been a busy and exciting month in the STEM classroom! We kicked off the new year with some design challenges that encouraged students to think creatively, problem-solve, and collaborate with their classmates. Design challenges are always a favorite, and students rose to the occasion with thoughtful ideas and unique solutions.
After completing our challenges, each grade level began a new STEM unit. As January comes to a close, we are about halfway through the new content, building new skills and deepening their understanding through hands-on activities, discussions, and experimentation. We will continue working through these units into February and then shift into some Winter Olympic–themed design challenges!
Thank you for your continued support of our STEM program. We’re looking forward to an exciting finish to winter filled with creativity, curiosity, and problem-solving!
Kindergarten Kindergarten students got a chance to answer the question, what else could this cardboard tube be? Students approached this challenge with creativity and imagination. Among the inventions were purses, trees, unicorns, fireworks and jellyfish. It was an impressive array of ingenuity!
We have now started our newest project, Programming Robots to Recycle. This picks up at the same park where the students designed a trash collector to clean up Danny the duck’s pond. Now students are tackling the trash around the rest of the park and they will be programming a robot (blue bot) to help them! The robot will be helping them sort their trash and deliver it to the recycle bin or the trash can. Students will finish programming the robot in February and will then be moving on to the Winter Olympic challenges.
First Grade
First graders started the new year designing a sled. Students were given a selection of materials and challenged to create a sled that could carry 4 people (small teddy bears) to the bottom of the hill safely. The bonus challenge for the students was making the sled go the furthest. The students had a lot of fun with this and it was great to see how much they got into measuring the distances their sleds traveled!
First grade then moved onto their next STEM unit, Engineering Nightlights. They were introduced to another first-grader, Yazmin, who is afraid of the dark and needs a nightlight. The problem is her cousin is visiting her and he likes to sleep in the dark, with only a little light. Students have been testing different materials to determine what is transparent, translucent or opaque. This project culminates in selecting the materials and building a nightlight that lights up only half of the room for Yazmin, and leaves the other half dark for her cousin. We will then test our nightlights and improve them before moving on to the Winter Olympic challenges.
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Second Grade
Second graders got to start the year with two design challenges: build a sled and build your dream playground. In both challenges, students first developed a plan. Once they presented their plan, they were given the materials that their plan indicated they would need. Students practiced persistence and problem solving in bringing their ideas to fruition.
We are finishing up January having started our new STEM unit, creating slime. Students are currently working on the second of three recipes we will be using to make slime. Once a recipe is made, students then test their slime for elasticity, stiffness and shape retention. Students will finish this project by reviewing their testing results and recreating their best slime recipe. This work is intended to introduce students to the field of chemical engineering. Through creating and testing slime, students step into the role of chemical engineers, experimenting with materials to see how they change and interact. We will be making our last two recipes in February before moving on to our Winter Olympic adventures!
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Third Grade
Third grade began the new year with a sled challenge, followed by a tower challenge. In the sled challenge, students were tasked with creating a sled that could safely carry 4 people (small teddy bears) down the hill and continue to the furthest distance. In the tower challenge, third graders were asked to build the tallest tower they could using only index cards. The sled challenge encouraged students to be resourceful with materials while the tower challenge encouraged students to innovate and find new ways to fold and stabilize their index cards for height.
We spent the last half of January on our new project: Animal Traits. This unit began with students dissecting owl pellets and collecting the bones they found. Students then used a bone identification chart to determine what bones they found and what the owl had eaten. This dissection has been so engaging for students and it has been rewarding to hear the students become so excited over their discoveries. From wearing gloves, to using the tweezers, feeling like a real scientist was a common theme among all the third grade classes. We will spend time in February focusing on beak adaptations and learning to use a dichotomous key before moving on to our Winter Olympics challenges in curling, ski jump and slalom skiing.
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Fourth Grade
Like the lower grades, fourth grade started this year with a sled design challenge: building a sled to safely carry four people down the hill, traveling as far as possible. Students tested various weights on their sled, as well as different building materials in order to minimize friction while increasing momentum. This grade was particularly strong in collaborating and using feedback to improve their design. Overall, the students were helpful with each other and quick to offer support and ideas when a student’s sled did not perform as well as they had hoped. It was impressive to watch students take suggestions and find success in working together.
Fourth graders are currently in the middle of their newest subject: Color and Light Properties. Students have been experimenting with light and how it interacts with prisms, red/blue filters, and water. Students also had an opportunity to play with shadow shapes and sizes using a flashlight and legos. In February, we will continue this work with a light up challenge where students will be given materials to create a circuit and tasked with lighting up an LED bulb. We will then finish this unit with an introduction to Edison robots. Students will be learning how to program the robots and use these programs to experiment with Edison's light sensors. The light sensors are mounted on the bottom of the robot and students will be trying to determine what colors the robot can detect best and why. Once we have finished this testing, we will move on to our Winter Olympic challenges where students will be introduced to another robot, Dash.
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Order your Spirit Wear! Can be customized to our school! |
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