Sunday, April 15, 2012

APRIL 16, 2012

April 16, 2012




Dear Parents,


This week is National Volunteer Week. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the parents who volunteer their time in the school. You are a valuable part of our community and you send a positive message that you consider school a worthwhile cause. This week in the Core English program we will be taking some time to discuss volunteerism and the power of volunteers to make a positive change.




Next week April 22-27 is Earth Week. Students will have the opportunity to participate in a number of activities to help the environment. Activities are posted on the General Lake blog at http://www.generallakenews.blogspot.com/, but two activities your child may be interested in include:






1)Taking a pledge for the planet. Students make a pledge to do something to help the planet for the week. At the school level sudents can post their pledge up in the main hallway on April 23. If your child wishes to take it a step farther, they can register their pledge at http://www.ecokids.ca/.


2) Recycled creation contest. Students can build a creation out of recycled items. Creation is due April 24. Creations will be judged for prizes and then display in our mini gallery on the gym stage April 25-26.


In the next couple of weeks I will be using the Ontario Education Resource Bank to present some of the online lessons on the smartboard. You can access this website at https://resources.elearningontario.ca/. It has a password which I will send home in the newsletter. This is an Ontario Ministry of Education resource and it is password protected.



JK/SK Students are almost finished all their Jolly Phonics sound program. We will continue working with sight words. I will also begin using an instructional program outlined by Mary Lou McKinley that focusses on word families. I am sending home our latest shared reading called 'Animals At Night'. Please practise reading this book with your child. I have introduced a new book called 'At the Farm'.



Grade 2 Students in Group 1 continue to work on word families and sight word identification. We have been working on parts of speech including nouns, verbs, and adjectives. We have also begun exploring the features of the non-fiction text such as an index, glossary, table of contents, bold fonts, subtitles, graphs, maps, labelled diagrams, headings, and facts. Please take some time to explore this genre with your child and draw their attention to these text features. We will continue this work.



Grade 7/8 Students are organizing 'Five Days of Freedom' for this week. Five Days of Freedom is an action plan to promote awareness to the four obstacles to freedom—exploitation, poverty, thirst and disease. Students are also completing their book report of 'Free The Children' which is due April 30th. A rubric has been given to the students to show them how I will assess their work. Our next reading will be a fiction novel by Caroline Pignat called 'Egghead'. Students will also have an opportunity to pick their own fiction novel to read. More information to follow about the culminating task.


Thank you and have a wonderful week.



Debbie Legault