January 2014 Principal REport

Principal's report January 2014 General Lake Public School Happy New Year to all of our General Lake community and welcome back. Our school is extremely excited to be back as we plan exciting school wide events and move forward with our academic, character and healthy school goals for 2014. Among some of the up and coming events planned we have our Literacy Day book swap and pyjama day next week on Monday, January 27th. We are also raffling off a Brainy Smurf stuffed toy and some books. Tickets will go on sale for $1.00 each or 5 tickets for $3.00. All funds raised will go toward our ‘Breakfast for Learning’ program. On Thursday, January 30 we will be having our Chinese New Year Parade where students will parade through the school with noisemakers. In February we are looking forward to our Public Speaking events and in March we anticipate our extremely popular Science Fair. We have also identified February 27 as the official General Lake Day as it coincides with our namesake’s birthday. We hope to have a fun filled activity on this day. Valour plans are coming along and Mr Baird has reported we are still anticipating a September 2014 opening. Next Friday, Lake staff has been invited over to General Panet for lunch and to preview plans for classrooms. The PA day has been designated for assessment purposes, with our TERM 1 report cards going home on February 19. New Junior Kindergarten Registration begins on January 27 and a survey went home looking for parental input regarding an extended day program. Surveys are due to the office by February 10 and are available online on the Board website www.rcdsb.on.ca under programs. Mr. Baird has sent over Valour hats for us to distribute randomly at our character assembly, as well as at various special events. Another survey also will be going home asking for feedback into the French Immersion programs and is also available under programs on the Board website. We have experienced several more staff changes since the beginning of the school year. Mme Bessette joins us in our JK/SK immersion kindergarten until Mme Yakabuskie returns and Mr. Blimkie joins us in the English junior senior kindergarten. Mme Butler has accepted a position in Renfrew and we are hoping to have her position filled shortly. We have added two new positions including .5 library and .4 special education resource which has been filled by Ms Conway and we have two more Educational Assistants working with our kindergartens Ms Moreau and Ms Charboneau. General Lake continues to make student safety its number one priority. We are happy to report people have got used to the locked doors and the front bell to ring in. Parents are signing in and wearing their passes when visiting the classes. We have had a couple of lockdown drills (November 8, 2013 , January 17, 2014) with the help of Constable Darcy Nicol from the OPP and MP Karen Renaud. Everything went smoothly. The police were impressed with how quickly the staff and students responded and how well protocol was followed. Our EQAO for our grade 3 and grade 6 students occurs this year from May 26 until June 6. The Education Quality and Accountability Office annually tests reading, writing and mathematics skills throughout the province and allows student achievement to be assessed in relation to a province-wide standard. Our new SERT teacher, Mrs Conway has begun working with our level 2 students at the grade 3 and grade 6 level to give them extra remediation to ensure their success. More information about the testing is available on the EQAO website at www.eqao.com. As part of our Champlain Healthy Schools initiative action plan, students were trained in December for the PALS playground leader program. Valour Principal Baird participated in the learning day with the students. Students have been scheduled for their duties and we are extremely pleased at the progress of the program. We look forward to expanding this training to Pinecrest and bringing this initiative to Valour. Fitness continues throughout the school to be a number one priority with Grade 3 students participating in swimming programs; junior students participating in skating; dancefit continues for students in grade 5-8 and a school wide 30 day fitness challenge for k-8. Intermediates are now involved in basketball practices. Mrs Green, Mrs Robillard and Ms Hansen have been providing intramurals to our grade 2-8 students. We are currently expanding this program to every day as we have seen a marked decrease in office referrals from playground issues on days the intramurals are taking place. Staff have also taken up the challenge and they are organizing staff walks, runs and dance fit after school hours. We are pleased to announce that the number of Kindergarten office referrals have decreased significantly, as we have adopted a number of strategies from the Calm, Alert and Learning book by Stuart Shanker. The school has purchased four more walkie talkies to ensure our Educational Assistants can be contacted and can respond immediately to an issue. We are using strategies including quiet areas in the classrooms as well as a large box to be carried to the office to give students a body break. As part of the Board wide plan to increase technology in our schools we are happy to announce we have 67 new IPADs in the school. Teachers can sign-out a class set of IPADS or they can sign out on an individual basis . We continue to train our staff in its use and find creative ways to use within the classroom. We have been doing a lot of work on triangulation of evidence when assessing our students. That is using conversations, observations and product to assess our students. The IPAD is proving to be beneficial when documenting the work of our students, particularly the conversations. Our Anti-bullying plan has been updated for the 2013-2014 school year and is available from the office or online. Our focus is on promoting positive behaviours, rather than focusing on the negative. We continue to be part of the Stop-A Bully online reporting system and we look forward to rewarding five of our students in February for their positive contributions as part of the True Colours initiative. We continue to have our monthly character assemblies and daily quotes promoting the character virtues of the month. Our overall theme for the year is RESPECT and we promote respect daily in our interactions with all. A focus for our up and coming anti-bullying week will be on respect and using online respectfully. During our work with the Stuart Shanker book we focused on the Indicators to Distinguish Play fighting from Bullying which we now have included in our anti-bullying plan, as well as in our conversations with students to determine if bullying is taking place: Play Fighting: Positive facial expressions (smiling); Voluntary participation; Alternated roles (being chased, then being the chaser); Tempered force; Children stay together after playing Bullying: Negative facial expressions (angry looks); Involuntary participation; Fixed roles (being either the aggressor or the victim); Aggressive force; Children separate after an encounter Finally we had tremendous support for our holiday concert as it was standing room only as parents delighted in the performances of our students. Plans are underway for another couple of school-wide performance based events including a Mini ‘WE’ day to occur during Education week in May and our Talent show in June, which we will be inviting our parents to attend. As always we welcome our parents into our school and we look forward to keeping everyone up to date with our blog, weekly synervoice and now our new Twitter Feed @debbielegault. Thank you Deb Legault