Altura Prep Family Newsletter- September 2023

Dear Altura Prep Parents and Caregivers,

It is hard to believe that our students have now been in school for 19 days!  We have been impressed with how well our students have adapted to learning expected behaviors at school and are mastering all the necessary back-to-school routines to provide them with a year of increased academic achievement and growth.

Month-At-A-Glance

Monday, September 4, 2023:   Labor Day- No Classes!
Friday, September 29, 2023:  Fall Picture Day

Value of the Month: Learning to Do Hard Things
Our value for the month of September at Altura Prep is about learning to do hard things. As a parent, it can be very easy for us to do things for our children that may be hard for them to do when they are little or complete lengthy tasks ourselves to save us time. It can also be difficult for all of us as adults to step back and let our children struggle when we observe that learning a new task is hard for our children.  However, we must learn to give our students the tools they need to deal with the challenges they may face so that they will learn to persevere through hard things as tweens, teens, and young adults.

Take a moment to think back to your child’s first few days of kindergarten: One of the most challenging tasks for many of our kindergarteners during the first week of school was to be able to identify their classroom lunch/snack bins, put their lunch box inside their designated lunch bin, snack inside the designated snack bin, and then to be able to find their designated snack and lunch bins later on that day. Kindergarten teachers would walk students their students outside to help them find and identify their homeroom’s college mascot and then have them practice inside the classroom how to put their lunchboxes and snacks in the correct bins.

After four weeks of school, even the students who struggled the most with finding their lunch/snack bins (or even their homeroom classes!) have mastered this routine that was once very difficult for all of them. By allowing our kindergarten students to struggle productively and not accepting that our kindergarten students were just  “too young to do difficult things,” our kindergarten students were able to push through through daily modeling and learning to advocate for themselves by asking for help from their peers and the adults at school.  

James Nottingham, the founder of The Challenging Learning Group, has identified three mental states students occupy when they are learning something new: panicked, relatively uncomfortable, and relatively comfortable. Too often, too many parents intervene when learning gets uncomfortable, denying children a chance to stretch enough to deepen their understanding. He likens it to trying to help a child learn how to ride a bike with an adult holding onto the back of the seat to navigate every bump, hole, or obstacle.  

It is crucial for our students to know that when they are learning something new, that learning can be both frustrating and challenging.  Students also need to know that they may experience a lot of frustration when trying to improve a skill they have already learned. For example, students who set a goal to improve their handwriting might feel that they are getting worse in their letter formation before they begin to see improvement. This feeling of taking "one step forward and two steps back" can be very frustrating, particularly for children.  Children may even feel as though they want to give up on learning or refining a new skill altogether. 

As parents, we teach our children that feeling frustrated when learning something new is normal and all part of the learning process.  It can also be a precious lesson in failing forward. You may even find that using a visual, like "The Learning Pit," pictured below, can help your children see that overcoming obstacles is just a part of the process of learning and growing.  

The Learning Pit visual can help students see if they keep trying, utilize different approaches, apply effort and determination, and perhaps organize things differently; they can come out of the other side of The Learning Pit with a better solution to their problem or obstacle. 

When we begin to normalize struggle, we teach children that they can rewire their brains and learn complicated things through effort and perseverance. This Learning Pit analogy can also help your child understand that they have the ability to control their own learning. Our students need lots of practice learning how to take risks, fail forward, and figure out how to pick themselves up again. These golden opportunities will help our Prepsters learn to confidently engage in the many challenges that we know they will face throughout their lives. We aim for every Prepster to leave elementary school knowing and believing they can do anything! 

A Message from Ms. Janine
The week of September 4-8, all of our kindergarten through fifth-grade students will be painting donuts inspired by the work of Wayne Theibaud. Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter and printmaker. He is often associated with Pop Art, but unlike Pop Art, he paints from life, not images. Before Thiebaud started painting independently, he was an apprentice with Walt Disney Studios. By the late 1940s, Wayne Thiebaud had stopped doing commercial work and began working on his paintings. Thiebaud is most known for his paintings of food and cosmetics.

Ms. Goff thought it would be great fun to have the students eat a donut after all their hard work in art class. I would love to have a few parents donate a dozen doughnuts for our art project celebration on Tuesday, September 5, and Thursday, September 7. Thank you in advance for your help! Click HERE to sign up to bring a donut treat.

Volunteering at Altura Prep 
After the first month of school, teachers may begin to coordinate various volunteer opportunities in their classrooms. Our schoolwide volunteer policy includes the following: 
-All volunteers must pass a school-specific background check. 
Register at https://nm.state.identogo.com/
ORI #: NM931195Z 
Take your registration and driver's license to a fingerprinting location. Each background check will cost $59.00 and be sent directly to the school’s portal for review. We will check the portal each Friday for cleared background checks and notify you once your fingerprints have cleared. 
Background checks are valid for two years. A new background check will not be required if you completed a background check during the 2022-23 school year. 

-All volunteers must sign a confidentiality agreement. 
We love having family members in our classrooms and ask that all adults in the building respect student/family privacy. 

-All volunteers must coordinate visit times with the classroom teacher.
If your child's teachers do not need classroom volunteers, you may contact the school's administrative team at [email protected], and we will be happy to find some volunteer tasks for you to help with at school. Read the volunteer guidelines HERE.

23-24 Yearbooks
Every year, families have the opportunity to order a school yearbook. This year’s yearbooks are now on sale! They can be ordered online through the school website under Student Life. Click “Yearbook” to be taken to the Jostens site. 

Note that prices increase throughout the year: 
-Order by October 27th, 2023: $25 
-Order by November 10th, 2023: $30
-Order by January 26th, 2024: $35 
-After January 26th, 2024: $38

Fall Picture Day
Campos Photography will take students' fall school photos on Friday, September 29, 2023. Note: Picture day will be a free dress day, and students will not need to wear their uniforms. However, students can wear their uniform if they (or you) desire. 

We will send picture packets home on Monday, September 25, 2023. You can also find the digital flier HERE. For your convenience, you can also order directly from Campos Photography online HERE. The access code for ordering online is L6E9QCVZ. 

Our Fall Picture Retake Day will take place on Friday, November 3, 2023. Families who are not happy with their original fall photos or students who are absent on 9/29/23 will be able to take pictures at this time.

Lost and Found
Our lost and found accumulates items very quickly. Please help avoid the loss of costly items and LABEL EVERYTHING! Water bottles, coats, sweatshirts, sweaters, umbrellas, lunch boxes, backpacks– anything your child brings to school. Labeled items are returned to students each day. Thank you in advance for your cooperation!  We will donate unlabeled items to a charitable organization at the end of each month.  

Uniform Reminders 
This is a friendly reminder that you can find our uniform list HERE. Please note that the uniform includes khaki bottoms (pants, skirts, shorts). While navy polo dresses are allowed (because they match the navy polo shirts), navy bottoms (pants, skirts, shorts) or jumpers are not a part of the uniform. 

The Lands’ End’s Labor Day Uniform Sale is currently live. Click HERE to view the flyer and retrieve the codes for 20% off school uniform apparel through Lands’ End. 

Attendance Matters
In many cases, absences from school are unavoidable due to health problems or other circumstances. However, chronic absenteeism can drastically impact your child’s education. The New Mexico Public Education Department defines “chronically absent” as missing 10% or more of the available days in school, regardless of the reason. Children chronically absent in kindergarten, first- and second-grade are much less likely to learn to read by the end of third grade. By sixth grade, chronic absenteeism is one of the three signs that a student may drop out of high school. Regular and high attendance is a better predictor of graduation rates by ninth grade than 8th-grade test scores. The bottom line is that missing 10%, or 18 days of the school year, will affect your child’s academic success.

Likewise, an on-time arrival to school allows children time to unpack their backpacks, complete their morning work, and settle in for the day before diving into their classes. Tardy students arriving at 8:01 am miss an hour and fifteen minutes of school-related opportunities a week, compared to peers who come at 7:45 am. Over the course of a school year, that difference adds up to the equivalent of six and a half days of academic time.  

As part of our regular monthly processes, families will be notified if student attendance records illustrate a pattern of concern. 

Please continue to notify the school in case of an absence or appointment by emailing [email protected] or calling 505-539-5369. You may also email doctor’s notes for excused absences to [email protected]. 

Pick Up Carline Reminders
We can't thank all of you enough for your working with our team to ensure a safe and timely dismissal process.  The following reminders will help to ensure that dismissal runs smoothly each afternoon: 

Please place your placard(s) on the windshield (driver's side) so that the faculty logging in your child's/children's number/s can access them quickly.  Please do not waive car tags at the staff, as it makes it more difficult to see the numbers.
For afternoon dismissal and pick-up, please STAY IN YOUR ORIGINAL CAR LINE- DO NOT change car lines, even if one looks like one lane seems to be moving faster. We input your car tag numbers into lines (Lines 1, 2, 3, or 4) in our PikMyKid software, and when cars move lines, it impacts our ability to get your child to you promptly, and it then holds up both lines.  
Keep pulling forward as far as possible.
Please watch for moving teachers with children!
Please keep everyone safe by staying off your phones.
Ensure that your child can enter and exit your vehicle quickly, and practice putting on and taking off their seatbelt. Learning to be an independent buckler will help minimize wait time and allow cars to flow rapidly through the parking lot.
Scott, our awesome custodian, will be directing four rows of traffic, so it is imperative that you pay attention to him when it is time for your lane to exit Hope Plaza onto Alameda.
Altura Prep families should not turn left into the school parking lot - we must not block Signal Ave from two directions. 
When lining up to enter the school parking lot from Signal Ave, our neighbors have asked that we please leave space for their cars to enter Aspen Leaf Court and the other cul-de-sacs that line Signal Ave. We do not want to block their access to homes. Please help us to be good neighbors!
We will open the Signal Avenue gate at noon on minimum days and 2:45 p.m. on regular dismissal days. We kindly ask that parents do not block the entrance on Signal Avenue in the afternoon, so plan your arrival at school for pick-up accordingly. Students must be picked up by 3:30 p.m.  
We ask that parents picking up students on foot wait at a designated point to pick up their children. A staff member will meet you near the crosswalk just east of the school parking lot, across from the fire hydrant. This designated pick-up location will allow us to keep track of all children. We want all of our Prepsters to develop independence at school, and this routine will support that.
All dismissal changes must be made by 11:00 a.m. on early dismissal days. There are many pieces to the dismissal process, and last-minute changes put a strain on the office staff and teachers.  During regular school days, dismissal changes and early pick-up must happen before 2:30 p.m.  We will not dismiss students early after 2:30 p.m.

Have a wonderful Labor Day weekend, and we look forward to seeing your students back at school on Tuesday, September 5, 2023!

Best-

Meaghan and Lissa