Kobza's Komments

I have been checking out my flower bed every day for the past couple of week to see if the tulips that I planted in the fall, have sprouted.  Today I finally saw some green peeking out of the ground.  I’m pretty excited because these tulips were specially created to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of Confederation and are white with a red maple leaf design.  To celebrate at FLVT some of our classes are participating in the Canada Games Activity Challenge where students complete a variety of activities.  Speaking of activities, our elementary marathon club kicked off last week and will continue to train and put in the required 40 kilometers so that students can complete the Little Souls Kids Marathon on May 31.

There are lots of other events to celebrate this month at FLVT.  Our grade 9 students will culminate their three years of studying French by heading off to Quebec for five days.  This is a great experience for our students to see another part of Canada and to put their French skills into practice.

Badminton is winding down and students in grades 6-9 will head off the City Championships in early April.  Good luck to all our teams. After the Easter break, our grade two students will take part in a First Communion retreat at the Church. Our students receiving the Holy Eucharist for the first time is a definite milestone to celebrate. We are blessed to have such a wonderful partnership with St. Martha’s Parish.

I’d like to highlight the work and achievements of our Health and Wellness Advisory Team.  After attending the Healthy Active Schools Symposia in the fall, the students identified four priorities with a focus on mental health. Students decided to create calm down kits to help reduce student stress and anxiety.  They spent time researching items to go in each kit, and they have created kits for the rooms in the office and are in the process of creating a kit for each classroom.  One item for the kits are fidgets which help to improve concentration and attention to classroom tasks.  Students spent time repainting the canteen and the canteen now plays calming music at lunch time. Their “Red Light, Green Light, Eat Right” program is currently in place.  Students can earn entries for weekly prizes by showing they are eating a healthy food item of a specific color. March was red and now green is the focus for April. The students still have a goal of creating a quiet room in the school before the school year ends.  Congratulations on a job well done Team!

Finally, I’d like to celebrate the work that our teachers have been doing in their weekly Learning Team meetings.  One of our goals in our Continuous Improvement Plan this year, is to improve basic fact fluency.  Basic facts are addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts from 0 – 9 and students should be able to give a quick response in about three seconds. Teachers have been working with the resource Elementary and Middle School Mathematics Teaching Developmentally by Van de Walle, Karp, Bay-William, McGarvey, and Folk (2015). Teachers have been working on specific strategies that can improve number sense and basic fact fluency. One important skill for students is to anchor numbers to 5 and 10 where students can easily recall which numbers make a 5 and once they have that they should move on to making 10. Teachers have also been working on finding engaging games that allow students to practice their skills.  We shared what we learned with one another at our PD Day in March.  Teachers each brought a game they used in their classroom and played it with their group and then the group discussed ways the game could be adapted for their grade level. It was an amazing day of learning from one another and we had some fantastic dialogue on teaching strategies.  We are blessed to have a staff who are not only committed to, but are also role models for lifelong learning.