Alpharetta Elementary PTA

Important Upcoming Dates

• January 10:          Family Pretzel Day at The Pretzel Company – all day!
• January 13:          Report Cards Go Home
  
• January 16:          AES Family Night – Roasters
• January 16:          MLK Holiday – NO SCHOOL
• January 17:          Fired Up for Reading – First Grade
• January 18:          Katie Reeves Community Meeting, 9:30am – Northwestern MS
• January 19:          Bear Fair Kickoff Assembly – Cafe
• January 23 – 27: Bear Fair
• January 26:          Watch D.O.G.S. Pizza Night
• February 3:          Bingo Night – 5:00pm and 7:15pm
  
• February 7:          Chick-fil-A Family Night
• February 10:       AES LSAC Meeting, 9am
• February 14:        Family Pretzel Day – all day
• February 16:        Progress Skills Checklist sent home
• February 17:        NO SCHOOL
• February 20:       NO SCHOOL
• February 21:        Katie Reeves Community Meeting, 9:30am – Manning Oaks ES
• February 22:        Pizza Vito Family Night, 5pm-10pm
• February 24:        Junior Achievement – K/1st/2nd
• February 29:        Jump Rope for Heart
• March 23:            Spring Carnival

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THE WATCH D.O.G.S. ARE CALLING ALL DADS OF AES STUDENTS!

Dads and Kids Pizza Night Event

Come for FREE pizza, drinks and fun!

• WHEN:  Thursday, January 26th 6:30-7:30 p.m.
• WHERE:  AES Cafeteria
• WHO:  All fathers and father-figures and their kids

WHY:  We’ve had a GREAT first semester of our Watch D.O.G.S. program.  Now it’s time to fill up the rest of the calendar for the year!  Dads are invited to come with their kids for some free pizza and sign up on our Watch D.O.G.S. calendar.  We will also have T-shirts available to order.  If you already have your Watch D.O.G.S. T-shirt, WEAR IT TO THE EVENT!  For those dads who haven’t yet signed up this will be a great opportunity to talk with other dads who have already done it this year.

For more information on the Watch D.O.G.S. program at AES, contact John Foster, Top Dog, jhf725@yahoo.com or Vicky Sanchez, vtuymer@hotmail.com.
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Congratulations to Ms. Haight and “The Kroger Healthy Living Machines”!!

The students’ contest submission was awaraded Honorable Mention and  $1500 prize award!! 

Inspired by Kroger’s Learning Plus Earning Contest, students from Ms. Haight’s class created a project about healthy living.  They called themselves “The Kroger Healthy Living Machines.” This project is innovative, creative, and is entirely student-driven and designed.  Not only did the Kroger Healthy Living Machines from AES make it their mission to fully embrace healthy living themselves, but also educated others about this important topic.

We invite you to view their submission to Kroger’s Learning Plus Earning Contest at http://krogerhealthylivingmachines.weebly.com/ Please click the links at the top of the page to see our work!

The students who created the project were: Malachi Brewer, Chloe Briede, Hayden Davis, Natalie Fedel, Nicholas Gokhman, McKenna Johnston, Stephen Nichelson, Carolyn Perry, Blake Renner, and Florian Siewe.

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Who’s Up For A Little Competition?  AES Staff Health and Fitness Challenge

2012 is here!  We want our entire staff to kick off the New Year with a fresh and fit start and set a healthy example for AES’ students and families.

In conjunction with our school partner, Harry’s Farmer’s Market, AES is proud to announce it’s first-ever Staff Health and Fitness Challenge.  The program will run January – March.  Staff members will receive pedometers and be grouped into teams.  On a daily basis, they will have five healthy goals to achieve:

1. Drink 6-8 (8oz) glasses of water
2. Eat a healthy breakfast
3. Eat a minimum of 3 servings each of fruits and vegetables
4. Walk 5,000 steps a day or complete 60 minutes of daily physical activity (4 days a week)
5. Encourage friends/coworkers to make healthy choices

Points will be assigned per activity and team standings will be posted in the cafeteria on a weekly basis.  (Look for updates in future Eagle Wings and the Alpharetta Elementary PTA website as well!)  Come cheer on your favorite team and encourage them towards success!

To keep things exciting, prizes will be awarded to weekly individual and team winners as well as overall program winners.  In addition, Harry’s Farmer’s Market will be providing the entire staff with lunch twice a month and healthy snacks throughout the program.

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Bingo Night

Come Join the Fun!

It’s one of the most exciting and talked-about family events of the school year.  Where else can you…

• Eat a yummy Chick-Fil-A dinner PLUS get a chance to win fun and fabulous prizes… for only $6?
• Listen to Mr. Witt’s “witty” banter as he draws the numbered balls (perhaps with YOUR lucky number on it!) from the Bingo wheel?
• Enjoy home-baked treats from the 5^th grade class?
• Join family and friends for an action-packed night of non-stop laughs and entertainment?

At AES’ annual Bingo Night, of course!  (Trust us — you don’t want to miss this much-anticipated event!)

Remember, we’ll start selling tickets approximately ONE WEEK before the big day.  And when you get the ticket order form in your child’s backpack, be sure to hurry – seats sell out for the two evening sessions almost immediately!

ATTENTION: VOLUNTEERS NEEDED!

In order for us to plan, coordinate, and run this huge family event, we need help!  Here are some of the volunteer positions we currently need to fill:

• Prize Patrol – We need several volunteers to help secure PLUS go shopping for PRIZES! (What could be more fun?)  We also need volunteers for the night itself to help set up and hand out prizes to the winners.
• Food – We also need volunteers to help run the food and lemonade stations.
• Door and set-up/clean-up duty – Like to get things done?  We need help with handing out consolation prizes, ticket taking, and setting up before and/or cleaning up after the event.
• More! Have other ideas of how we can make Bingo Night 2012 the BEST Bingo Night ever?  Please let us know!

Please contact one of the Bingo Night chairpersons and committee members, below, for more information on volunteering… and thank you!

1. Marian Chesbrough – marekeener@yahoo.com
2. Paula Laderoute – paula.laderoute@att.net
3. Kim MacPherson – kim@inboxinteractive.com

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Alphie’s Healthy Tip of the Week:

Tired of hearing “low this” and “no that”?  Healthy eating doesn’t have to always be about giving up things.  In fact, we’d rather talk about the delicious stuff we should be eating.  It’s a philosophy called “nutrition addition”.   Here’s some simple, surprising ways to make food even better for you (one consistent trend emerges:  with each addition of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants comes exponential leaps in flavor, texture and color:)

Breakfast:

1. Pour instant all-natural oatmeal into a smoothie.  One packet of oatmeal adds 3 grams of fiber and contains half of your daily iron needs.
2. Add Greek yogurt instead of milk to eggs before scrambling them.  Whisk 1/4 cup of it into 8 eggs for a light, fluffy, even-better-for-you breakfast.  Each cup of greek yogurt contains nearly half the satiating protein you need in a day, and 30 percent of the recommended intake of bone-building calcium.
3. Whisk canned pure pumpkin puree into your favorite pancake batter.  The fluffy flapjacks will be enhanced with vision-boosting vitamin A (for each 1/2 cup, you add nearly three times the recommended daily need).

Sides:

1. Fill that pot with unsweetened tea — instead of plain water, a green or white-tea based broth will add flavor and antioxidants when cooking grains or poaching chicken.
2. Substitute quinoa for rice in any dish — it contains all nine essential amino acids (the building blocks of protein) and has 6 grams of dietary fiber per serving.  Rice has none!

Salads:

1. Toss fresh herbs into your greens – salads that included fresh seasonings like marjoram, sage and thyme as much as doubled the disease-fighting antioxidants of other veggies.
2. Trade low-fat and fat-free salad dressings for dressings made with flaxseed oil or extra virgin olive oil.  The added good-for-you fat will help your body fully process vitamins A, D, E and K, which are abundant in vegetables.  You can also get the same result by adding a small handful of nuts to your salad.
3. Replace half of the mayo in creamy dressings with plain nonfat greek yogurt.  You’ll get the same creaminess, add calcium and protein and cut calories.
4. Add half an avocado — when people ate salad containing this fruit, their blood concentrations of the disease-fighting antioxidants lycopene, beta-carotene and alpha-carotene were as much as 15 times higher than when they ate it without.

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Spirit Wear 2011-2012

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