Recent Achievements
Friendship Fridays
This year, four Fridays were chosen for our leaders to reach out to our community and fill some buckets. We began in November with the grade 4 students who led a school-wide effort of collecting more than 900 reusable bags for the Airdrie Food Bank. On each bag was attached a handmade note with a positive message for the recipients. In January, our grade 3 team chose to reach out to the other two schools on our tri-school site. Each homeroom at the middle and high school received a poster-size bucket filled with positive messages that was hand-delivered by the grade 3s. In March and with spring just around the corner the grade 2 team organized door-to-door delivery of a flowerpot to each home in the community of Jensen. Finally, in April and as a culminating activity for Earth week, the grade 1 team organized a community clean up in which each grade team was asked to help our neighbors by picking up garbage that had accumulated through the winter. We are very proud of all of our leaders and know that through our Friendship Fridays they are learning what it means to be global citizens, to care about their environment and about each other.
Literacy Blocks
In keeping with our focus on effective literacy instruction within a Universal Learning Environment, we strategically aligned school resources to support our vision. During the timetabling process all grades were provided with a one hour uninterrupted literacy
block. This has allowed the grade teams to organize flexible groups among all of the students within respective grade level cohorts. In addition to flexible groupings, we have adopted an “all hands on-deck” approach whereby additional adults (i.e., learning coaches, administrators, assistants) are available to support students within the various grade levels. In order to monitor student progress and determine next steps, a committee consisting of teachers and administrators created a school-wide reading continuum. This continuum has been instrumental in ensuring that assessment data is gathered in a consistent way.
Leadership
This year our continued focus on empowering all to be leaders through the principles of the 7 habits of highly effective people, has strengthened due to some additions and changes to how we view leadership. Our leadership assemblies are still run by different grade levels however have taken on a new focus. Rather than highlighting a habit, we highlight the incredible leadership that goes on in our school and the 7 habits language is woven into the assembly. This gives our student leaders who lead the assemblies every month, an opportunity to reflect on the tremendous leadership that goes on in our school on a regular basis and it allows the assembly goers a chance to sit back and celebrate the great work we all do.
