Dear HSA McKinley Park Families,
This holiday season, as principal of our school, I am both extremely thankful and grateful for our hard-working teachers and staff; for our parents and community members; and for our student body. There are great things that are happening here at Horizon Science Academy McKinley Park which we have witnessed in the second quarter.
We recently held our second parent teacher conference and I would like to thank you for your continuous support in connecting with us so we can work together to help your child succeed! This was the largest turnout ever! If you still need to reach out to a specific teacher please send them an email or call the school so we can schedule a meeting for you.
Reading is such a powerful tool for building a child’s mind. During Winter Break, we encourage you to have your child read for 20 minutes or more each day. We want our families and community to help us achieve our highest expectations for each student. Your input and support is always very important to us.
In conclusion, I hope that each one of you have a safe and joyful holiday season. Take time to enjoy your family.
Serving You,
Mr. Vedziovski
2245 W. Pershing Rd. Chicago, IL 60609
(O) 773.247.8400 | (F) 773.247.8401
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Re-Enrollment Period is NOW until January 22, 2021! |
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Reminder: Front Office Closed
During Winter Break
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We wanted to remind our school community that our front office will be closed during winter break. We will re-open again next year on Monday, January 4th with our regular office hours M-F 9am-3pm. Should you have any questions or concerns during break please email us at: [email protected]
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Honor Roll Student Video Tribute |
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Last month, we announced our 1st quarter Honor Roll Students and this month we wanted to showcase them with their awards. Thank you to all of the families that participated and sent us a picture of their child with their certificate and ribbon. Please enjoy this video we put together of our students. We cant not stress enough how much we appreciate all of the support from our families!
Check out the video by clicking the link below:
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FIRST 5125 HOTH
Advent of Code
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This year, FIRST 5125 Hawks On The Horizon HS Robotics team is hosting "Advent of Code" for our high school students. The Advent of Code is a fun advent calendar filled with fun puzzles and programming challenges. This is a month long promotion that is allowing our high school students to keep their brains working on solving problems and creating algorithms over the holidays. Our students also have the opportunity to earn some prize money to expand on their holiday shopping. Also, if our students want to showcase their programing skills then this contest is perfect!
Each challenge is released every day from December 1 - 25 and gets harder the further they progress throughout the month. Each daily challenge has two parts and correct solutions earns each participant 1 star for each part. Our HS students have until January 5, 2021 to submit their work and winners will be awarded as follows:
- 3rd Place: $25 visa gift card
- 2nd Place: $50 visa gift card
- 1st Place: $100 visa gift card
We can't wait until next year to find out who our winners are! Stay tuned for an upcoming update on our winning programmers...until then Happy Programming & Problem Solving!
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Celebrating our Special Education Department |
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On December 2nd we celebrated National Special Education day! We took this opportunity to highlight our amazing SPED team and honor them this whole month. During these times it has allowed us to really understand the importance of how much our teaching staff really effects our students in such a positive way. We are very thankful to our SPED team for all that they do for our students. We posted daily tributes of each one of our SPED team members on our social media, both on Facebook and Twitter. This was a great way for the school community to get to know our Special Education team and find out what inspired them to become educators. We compiled our daily posts into this beautiful video showcasing our staff, please click on the link below to check it out: |
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HSA McKinley Park is proud to report that we were able to pass out over 3,000 books to our students before taking off for Winter Break! On Friday, December 18th our staff passed out holiday bags filled with books for our students in K-6th grade. We wanted to express our esteemed appreciation to Bernie's Book Bank & Open Books for contributing books for our Holiday Book Giveaway! Also a special shout out to Ms. Manzella, our school librarian, for reaching out and collecting these books for our students. This book giveaway initiative is to continue to spread the love of Reading to our students especially during this Winter vacation. Thank you to all of our parents for driving through on Friday to pick up their Holiday bags for their children. It was a collective effort to make this all happen and we are so grateful to all of the staff involved that helped!
Happy Reading this Winter Break!
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We were very excited to launch this year's 12 days of Reading initiative for our k-5 students. Everyday we had a different staff member read a Holiday book virtually to our students and assigned a different challenge to complete in connection to the book they were reading. We wanted to stay connected to our students this Holiday season and we are happy with this fun virtual way to do so! Spreading the love of Literacy is on the top of our list and thank you to our staff for taking part in all of these fun initiatives!
A special shout out to our staff members that read each day! Pictured above are our Holiday Readers:
Ms. Manzella-Day 1
Ms. Folk-Day 2
Ms. Armouti-Day 3
Mr. Vedziovski-Day 4
Ms. Johnson-Day 5
Ms. Skrbec-Day 6
Dr. Hunter-Day 7
Mrs. Vega-Day 8
Ms. Martin-Day 9
Mr. Cann-Day 10
Mr, Hunter-Day 11
Mr. Sravan-Day 12
Thank you again to all of our families that participated and watched each night!
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Congratulations to our Raffle Winners! |
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Thank you to all of our students K-5 who participated in our daily challenges connected to our 12 days of Reading! This was a very exciting activity we launched to promote literacy and the spirit of the Holiday Season. Our daily challenges were connected to the books that were read daily and we were very happy to see our students participate and send us their photos. Some examples of the daily challenges were for our students to helping out at home, showing some act of kindness, taking different pictures with their favorite things and different ways they can use their brain to think! We had 12 opportunities for our students to enter into our raffle, and we were able to put together a great prize. Pictured above are our 3 lucky winners, Kayla Hurtado (5th), Ezequiel Moreno (KG) and Isabella Moreno (2nd). Our baskets were filled with literacy board games, crafts and all 12 books that were read!
Happy Holidays and Happy Reading!
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First BPAC Meeting of the Year |
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HSA McKinley Park's first BPAC (Bilingual Parent Advisory Committee) meeting of the school year was held on Tuesday December 15th. During the meeting Ms. Esparza introduced the two new EL teachers, Mr. Markovic(6-8th grade) and Mr. Wellington (High school). Also discussed in the meeting was an explanation of the EL department and program, and also the upcoming tests our EL department will be administering in the future to our students. Our EL Department hosts these meetings all throughout the year and we will keep everyone posted on our next meeting.
For those parents who missed the meeting you can click on the link below for the meeting's presentation:
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During this Holiday season we are happy to see our CYSP groups doing great things! Ms. Chavez and her CYSP group made Holiday cards for the Seniors of the Grand Regency of South Shore Residents. Not only did they make Holiday cards but they also used their funds from their previous fundraisers to buy some presents for the residents too! Pictured above are some of the girls helping Ms. Chavez drop off the cards and presents to the Grand Regency of South Shore staff so they can pass out to their residents. What a great way to show to our young scholars the importance of giving during this Holiday Season! |
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Winter Activities for the Whole Family |
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This winter break our amazing staff have whipped up some fun family activities you can all enjoy. Thank you teachers!
Our Art department staff, Ms. Curtis and Ms.Kozi put together some fun Holiday crafts you can all enjoy and make together. Click on the link below for instructions.
Mr. Filipiak, our physical education teacher, put together this awesome fun way to stay active during this Winter Break. He made it super easy and fun for the whole family to follow along on a presentation format! Click on the link below and find his presentation on the drive.
We hope you enjoy these activities and this time off with your families!
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The Winter Sessions for K-8th NWEA are vastly approaching and our admin staff have mapped out a plan for the upcoming tests after Winter Break. A plan has been developed for both our K-2nd students and our 3rd-8th students. Emails have already been sent out to all families. We wanted to take this time in advance to express our appreciation to all of our parents for all of your continued cooperation and flexibility. It is with a collective effort that we all are providing the very best to our students. Again if you have any questions or concerns regarding the upcoming testing schedule please email our admin staff:
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Teacher Spotlight: Mystee Brown-Wilson |
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This month's teacher spotlight shines on Mystee Brown-Wilson. We wanted to continue to show our appreciation and support towards our SPED team. What a great opportunity to get to know one of the most supportive SPED teachers we have in the building, Ms. Wilson(as we call her). She joined the HSA McKinley Park family in 2017 and is the 5th & 6th grade Special Education Teacher. She teaches Special Education ELA, Math, Social Studies and Science and nowadays she is live on Zoom everyday and provides both office hours and tutoring daily for her students. She received her B.S. from DeVry University in Technical Management and her M.A. from Grand Canyon University in Special Education K- 12.
As a Special Education Teacher for 19 years, her goal has been the same, to continue showing her students, that no matter what the world continues to tell them that they can’t do, they must highlight and focus on the skills and abilities that they have and know that they can accomplish anything they set their sights on. The sky is the limit because there are no ceilings that could ever contain how high they can hope and dream. This is just a mere glimpse of how supportive and caring Ms. Wilson is for her students. Her motivation is driven from the heart and all of her students love her for that. She has been on both the giving and receiving side of charity and is a true believer of the, “Each One, Reach One” philosophy. She is in charge of some of our most important field trips we host for our students such as the Feed My Starving Children events and is heavily involved in creating many different social gatherings for middle school students. She also has fundraised for many different charities with her Kindness club students and is in charge of one of the board game clubs at HSA.
Outside of her duties at HSA she is very involved in her community, she is the Inclusion Coordinator for the Waukegan Park District where she modifies activities and programs to enable participants who have special needs to participate fully and have a great time. She also teaches Praise Dance (a mixture of ballet, modern and jazz that is performed to Gospel music,) at her church. She also enjoys writing poetry and playing lots of board games with her family as well as play old school video games, "NES for life!" -Ms. Wilson
We are so happy that we have Ms. Wilson on staff, her motivation speaks volumes to our students and we appreciate all that she does to make our school shine!
Closing out with her favorite quote:
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Lao - Tze (Laozi)
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At HSA McKinley Park our top priority is the health and safety of students and staff, and we will continue to follow the guidance of local, state, and federal health officials in this evolving situation. Should you have any questions or concerns please email our school principal,
Mr. Seat Vedziovski at:
Ms. Armouti, Outreach Coordinator:
Mrs. Vega, Outreach Coordinator:
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