Dear Families,
I am thrilled to welcome you to Heartland Elementary School! What an AMAZING place to be an elementary school principal! This is my 28th year in education and my ninth year in District 304. My previous 19 years in education were served as a teacher, assistant principal and principal in the Crystal Lake School District.
You are part of a fantastic community of educators at Heartland that recently marked its 20th Anniversary during the 22-23 school year. We look forward to another 20 years and will focus the 23-24 school year on leadership: Heartland-We are ALL Leaders!
Heartland fully supports the district's vision and prepares students in a 21st century learning environment. Our school improvement plan is currently focusing on reading instruction and social emotional well-being in order to ensure growth for all learners. Our goals are:
1. to improve the ability to make an assertion in a written response to reading and support the claim with relevant text evidence and reasoning.
2. empower students to attend to/focus on instruction and to independently solve problems when faced with an unexpected situation.
We engage students in extracurricular learning through our Young Explorers program; our students love to work collaboratively as they engage in the unknown, and we can't thank our PTO enough for the support they provide to the success of this program! We are committed to working as a professional learning community in order to focus on learning, create a collaborative culture and get the results for which we strive.
We are excited to begin implementing components to our new reading curriculum- Really Great Reading (grades K-2) and Word Wisdom (grades 3-5)! We understand and value the importance of phonics, phonemic awareness and word study. Our students will truly benefit from these foundational skills as they navigate reading during the early years in their education. Be sure to ask your child about these units of study which they'll be learning throughout the year.
We hold students' social and emotional well-being in high regard; we will continue our second year with the new online Second Step curriculum to help students succeed in the classroom and in life. This new format offers opportunities for our students to work on executive functioning, skills for learning, empathy, emotion management and problem-solving...all which connect to our school improvement goals.
I am looking forward to getting to know all of you and to working with our community on behalf of the Heartland students. Should you ever have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me. I can be reached at 630-463-320
0 or by email at [email protected].
With gratitude,
Kimberly Hornberg
Principal