HOWDY FAMILIES AND FRIENDS!

What a year it has been! As I reflected on the past year, I am amazed at the resiliency of our children and teachers. We remained open for our families during a pandemic, and we made it a great year even with continuous changes. All of us love and care for our children, which shows in their continued growth and development during this unique year. We know our pre-K children will enter kindergarten with the foundational skills for a lifetime of learning. You may ask, are the children well prepared for kindergarten during a pandemic year? We believe the answer is yes. According to Farran (2011), teachers identify areas such as concentration, persistence, paying attention, following rules, focusing on activities independently, cooperation, getting along with peers and the teacher, appropriate emotional responses, self-initiation of activities, and handling transitions as the top skills children need to be successful learners at school. The teachers, especially with the challenges of this year, have tirelessly worked on executive functioning, self-regulation, and approaches to learning skills in addition to core subjects such as literacy and mathematics.

Our curriculum, HighScope, is backed by 51 years of research and is now the leading Pre-K curriculum for public schools in the state of Texas. It takes the learning process beyond traditional academic subjects and prepares children for later schooling and future success in life. These children know how to be independent, responsible, and confident problem solvers as well as decision makers with strong executive functioning and self-regulation skills that will last throughout adulthood. These children have gained knowledge and skills in important academics, social, emotional, and physical domains. These children have been exposed to diverse cultures and have had an anti-bias education. They can change the world. We have focused our learning on social and emotional development, physical development and health, language, literacy and communication, mathematics, creative arts, science and technology, and social studies. As an added bonus your children have been instilled with the Aggie core values of leadership, selfless service, loyalty, respect, integrity, and excellence. We challenge our young learners to work as a team, to look at the insides of people and not just the outside, how to be accountable, how to build strong relationships, positive social skills, critical thinking, empathy, leading by example, and promoting curiosity and questioning. We’ve witnessed these children being so kind by helping their friends get through difficult times and taking notice if things are unfair and problem solve in how to fix it.

When we look at our benchmark data from the assessments this year, we see that the majority of our Pre-K children are performing above or at age-level norms. Thank you to Kay Myers, Carolina Bratlien, Khali Shaw, and all the wonderful student workers for achieving this wonderful outcome! Thank you to our children for showing us adults how to manage difficult times and for showing us how it is done. We have all learned from you this year!

References:

Farran, D. C. (2011). Rethinking School Readiness. Exceptionality Education International 21(2), 5-15.

HighScope. (2021). HighScope Educational Research Foundation. https://highscope.org

BGCC Updates

EFFECTIVE MAY 3

o Families may begin entering the building to drop off and pick up your child provided:

o Masks are worn by the adult dropping off

o Minimize the number of people dropping off (limit 1 adult per child is preferred)

o Hands must be sanitized prior to entry

o Check-in with the front desk – they will sign-in your child for now

o Limit time spent in classroom and building (no more than 10 minutes)

o Maintain 6-ft. from others when possible

o Wait for your child’s teacher to perform a health check on your child prior to leaving

o If you are not comfortable dropping your child off in their classroom, we will have limited runners to walk your child to and from the classroom (email [email protected] if you wish to use a runner for drop-off and pick-up)

o Art, sensory, and other materials will be available in the classroom – children will wash hands immediately before and after working with sensory materials

EFFECTIVE JUNE 1

o All families will be expected to enter the building for drop-off and pick-up provided:

o Masks are worn by the adult dropping off

o Minimize the number of people dropping off (limit 1 adult per child is preferred)

o Hands must be sanitized prior to entry

o SIGN IN YOUR CHILD AT THE NEW PROCARE TOUCH COMPUTERS

o Hand sanitizing stations will be placed near the computers

o Limit time spent in classroom and building (no more than 10 minutes)

o Maintain 6-ft. from others when possible

o Wait for your child’s teacher to perform a health check on your child prior to leaving

o Family style meals will resume

o Hands will be washed immediately before and after eating

o Limited group gatherings may resume

o Limited special guests may enter building

We will continue to work hard to limit any COVID-19 exposure. Thank you, families, for being so great during all of these changes! We are excited to welcome you back safely into our loving building. Thank you to the Family Advisory Board (FAB) for providing input to the roll-out plan.

Thank You

We want to send a huge THANK YOU to Graeme Wright for volunteering to make our puppet tree we so desperately needed. It is of absolute quality and it will be lovingly used for many years to come! We are excited to purchase a few more puppets to add to our collection that will reflect more of our families at BGCC.