| Dear Students, Staff, Friends and Familes of Colonel Walker School, My name is Kathryn (Kate) Jones, and I am thrilled to let you know that I have accepted the job as principal of your wonderful school community. I was born and raised in Australia, but have lived and worked for most of my adult life in Calgary where I reside with my two children (8 and 14) and our giant Bernadoodle. Over my 20 years as an educator, I have served as a classroom teacher, specialist and administrator with and for students in diverse K-12 schools. During this time it has been my honour to care for the learning and well-being of all students so that they understand who they are, see themselves as capable, and dream about (and enact) ways to make our world a better place. As the principal of Colonel Walker School, I can’t wait to get to know each and every one of you and to learn all about your fantastic learning community! I promise that under my leadership, our school will continue to be an inclusive and vibrant place that celebrates diversity, sparks thinking and supports students to grow and see themselves as competent and contributing community members and community builders. My first day at Colonel Walker School will be Tuesday October 11. Between now and then, I will be busy saying farewell to the staff, students and families at my current school (Mount Royal School) and working alongside Ms. Predolin to ensure a smooth and thoughtful transition. Warm regards, Kate Jones
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| Dear Parents & Guardians, For the past three years, it has been my great pleasure to serve the students, staff and parents at CWS. Together, we navigated COVID-19 and all the changes this pandemic brought to learning, families and work. I have learned much at CWS and take many magical memories with me on my journey. I hope that each of you will do the same. It is with a heavy heart, that I have to say farewell. I am the newly appointed principal at Bowcroft School. Bowcroft houses the German bilingual program. My German language skills will support the bilingual program and, hopefully, help it grow further. Thank you for your trust and for supporting my vision of CWS. Starting on Monday, September 12, 2022, retired principal Alessandra Predolin will be acting principal until a new principal is appointed. Please welcome Mrs. Predolin warmly. Your child/ren and the school are in good hands with her. The Calgary Board of Education welcomes input from parents, students and staff regarding the programming and leadership attributes valued in a school principal. You can provide input at this survey link, which will also be posted on our website. Information collected will be used in the Principal selection process. The survey data will also be shared with the new Principal to inform their entry plan into the school. The survey will be available until 4:00 PM, Friday, September 16, 2022. Warm Regards, Meike Thomsen, Principal |
| Dear Parents & Guardians, Thank you to the 25 parents who attend our first IN PERSON school council meeting on Tuesday night. It was a FULL HOUSE. Many parents were excited to meet Mrs. Sherri Sherren, our new grade 1 teacher and learning leader. Thank you so much to Julie A. for planting the 3 planters at the front of the school again. The flowers look so pretty and make the school’s entrance so much more appealing. Here is the news many of your have been waiting for: Staffing Update and Grade Configuration for 2022-23 Enrolment: 131 -
K – 21 Geoff Kearney
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Grade 1 – 27 Sherri Sherren & Tara Grant; full time education assistant
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Grade 2 – 20 Robin Drinkwater
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Grade 3 – 17 Dena Leigh
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Grade 4/5 – 15 +15 Deborah Ling & Brittany Reid + Dave Scott, full time education assistant
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Grade 6 - 16
Brittany Reid
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Music (Grades 1-6) & FSL (Grades 4-6) Deborah Ling
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Physical Education & Wellness
Grades 2-6 Geoff Kearney
Math Celebration Liz from Grade 4 has mastered all her multiplication facts up to 12x12! Congratulations to Liz! A number of students started practicing multiplication facts, but stopped at some point, not finishing the x12. Please, if you have not started or have stopped mid-way, please continue practicing over the summer. Math success starts with knowing your facts (subtraction, addition, multiplication). As we are almost at the end of the year, I would like to look forward to NEXT school year. Joanne Pitman, one of our superintendents, highlighted the following six points that make the CBE such a great place to be and that will ensure ongoing success in the future. - Supporting all needs: Each student and adult at CWS needs different things on different days to thrive. Our goal is to support each person in the way they need to be supported each day.
- Gaps: Each year (COVID or not), students in each class come with a breadth of skills; some high, some low. Early in September, numeracy and literacy skills will be tested and each student will be supported in moving forward.
- Disruption: COVID is always mentioned in the same breath as learning disruptions. At CWS, we were fortunate to have almost no cases the first year. Overall, we were only online when we were mandated to be online. Otherwise, staff and students were in the building.
- Connections: It’s our strength at CWS. We are a small community school with staff who live in Inglewood, too. Everyone knows everyone. This has helped us make it through the last 3 years.
- Resiliency: Our personal connections helped us being resilient. We are one of the few schools who had no staff go on a medical leave due to mental health reasons. While we had people fall ill, 90% of the time we had substitute coverage, which, again, has ensured that our students have had less disruptions in and of their learning than students in other schools. Please thank your teacher for being at school as much as they did!
- Curiosity: As lifelong learners we (students, staff and parents) need to foster curiosity to support our students to thrive and to discover how much fun it is to learn.
I would like to take this moment to express
my gratitude to all of you: our parents, our students, our CWS staff. Together, we made it through three difficult years. Years, when the world changed, a time when we faced HUGE unknows. As a person who likes to plan ahead, I was, at times, reduced to a tunnel vision of: lets make it through one more week of no cases (during the first COVID year). We made it through together. Your unwavering support of CWS, the staff and myself have helped us pull through. I am excited to see everyone leaving into a summer break that promises to be ‘back to normal’. Stampede, family trips and vacations, meeting friends inside and outside. Personally, I will be seeing my sister and her family for the first time in over 3 years when they come to visit for 2 weeks to participate in the my son’s wedding celebration (now more like a 1st anniversary party). Later on in July, I get to hop on a plane and visit my aging parents. I have post-phoned this trip 3 times in the last 3 years. Fingers crossed I make the flight this time. These three years have been hard for them, as both fell ill with COVID in December 2021 and my dad almost passed away. Thanks to my mother’s care, he recuperated. Looking at their photos, they have changed much. Frail is not a word I have associated with my strong, smart, funny father. Now I look at his photo and it is the one thing that pops into my mind. My mother has changed a lot too. The last photo my sister sent me, I looked at her and – saw my grandmother. Very eerie. It is high time that I see and hug them again. I hope you will have a chance to reconnect with some of your loved ones you haven’t seen in a while or with friends from far away. I love our Alberta summer: the heat, the smell of harvested wheat, the sound of combines running. Enjoy, celebrate, have fun. See you on September 1! Warm Regards,
Meike Thomsen, Principal
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| Dear Parents & Guardians, It is hard to believe that our last week of school is approaching! Five more days until winter break. I would like to say Thank You. Thank you to all the parents who have kept their child/ren home when they were unwell and who got them all tested, whether or not they had symptoms or not. Sometimes, it’s been the child without symptoms who has been positive! Thank you to the parents who have sent encouraging messages, thanking me for the wonderful work we do at CWS. They have made me smile and have given me the strength to carry on during these challenging times. Thank you to the parents who volunteered at the casino in the summer. This has raised the astonishing amount of $ 68,000 for the school that will make an incredible difference to our CWS students in the next two years. Thank you to the teachers who have come each and every day – Ms. Masniuk and Ms. Ling. Thank you to all the teachers for teaching students how to be resilient. How to deal with anxiety/frustration: how to take deep breaths, go for a walk, take a sip of water, eat something, step away from a situation etc. Thank you to Ms. Tammy for always calling home, making sure that we know what’s wrong with each child and checking in with families to make sure students are not missing. Thank you to Ms. Ling for making music so engaging that students ask her, with hope in their eyes, each day: “Do we have music today?” The music coming out of the music room is filling my heart with joy. Thank you to Mr. Scott and Ms. Grant for being the wonderful education assistants they are. Thank you to the caretaking staff for keeping CWS spick and span. While I felt it necessary to cancel my visit to my parents in Germany, I am thankful that they are recuperating from COVID-19. Despite being double-immunized, they caught the virus and fell ill. While my mom recovered quickly, my dad is still not well after 5 weeks, but he is improving. I am thankful for that. I am also so very thankful for working at CWS. Being part of this incredibly close-knit and supportive community is a gift. Warm Regards,
Meike Thomsen, Principal
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| At the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th month, World War I ceased. Brothers, sons and husbands had been lost and those who survived and returned home where changed forever. PTSD was not something known back then, but everyone who lived with the men who returned and saw them struggle with sleeping, with the terrors and shaking that overtook them at times … they all knew that their husbands, brothers and sons had seen things and survived things that changed them forever- and it made living with them difficult. By the time World War II ended in 1945, 120,000 Canadians had lost their lifes. Looking at the crosses and reading the dates on them, the young age of the soldiers has always stricken me and has made my heart constrict. So many of the fallen soldiers had been barely 18 years old – boys, really. My son Peter, when he was in his early 20s expressed the desire to visit “the beach were Canada landed on D-Day in WW2”. My dad and Peter drove there. They wandered the beach. They entered a 360 degree theatre. The movie? D-day landing with the sound level of the real landing. My dad, in his mid 70s at the time, had to leave the theatre. It was too overwhelming: the noise, the terror he saw, the loss of life. It also changed Peter. Playing war games on the video console was just not the same ‘fun’ any longer. As we remember those who gave their life, I ask you to reflect on the following quote by G.K. Chesterton: “There never was a good war, or a bad peace. The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst. The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him. The act of war is the last option of a democracy.” Meike Thomsen
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| Dear Parents & Guardians, Hopefully, you have had a wonderful summer filled with downtime, family time, time with friends, fun in the water or in the mountains, close to home or further away. Now, you are probably either home again or on your way home. Personally, my younger son tied the knot on July 3 to a wonderful young lady and both said “I do” at the correct time. I have enjoyed my garden, hosting friends from Ontario and British Columbia. It was SOOOOO good to see them again after such a long time! I am sure you have felt the same when you visited some of your friends and family. Spending time with little Alina on a regular basis was delightful. Seeing her develop and discover things is simply a miracle. She now addresses me as “OMA”, which is grandma in German and she is able to say “I love you!” On June 30, 2021, it was my great pleasure to meet Dr. Dee Keating. She has donated some lovely artwork to the school that will support the Grade 4 social studies, which focus on Alberta’s landscape. 
I’m sad to say that the Grade 5/6 Kamp Kiwanis outdoor school event is cancelled. No overnight trips are allowed at this point in time. Photo day is September 3, so we do hope that everyone is back for September 1! Settling in with your new teacher and your new friends (we have a couple of new students joining us) is important to start the year well. On August 19 and 20, school council ran a casino for two days. This means that school council will, yet again, be able to support the school with $ 40,000 to 70,000 over the next two years. We would like to thank the following parents who all took a shift: Amy T., Jean S., Jonathan W., Elaine W., Ryan T., Rob S., Cheyanne C., Jeremy D., Caterina D., Rita L., Andrew J., Mary S. Sabina B. Sarah L., Kathe L., Giuliana D., Jeff D., Rhonda H., Cameron B., Lonnie S., Scott K., Katrina T., Jonathan T., Josephine B., Erin G., Pamela V., Geoff S. A number of alternates had to sign up in case someone had to cancel short notice. Fortunately, only one needed to be filled last minute in the 2 days in which Jeremy D. and Ryan T. came to the rescue! We would like to thank the other people below were "on-call" in case of more emergencies, too: Maryanne M., Kimberly Z. and James F. Please join us for our first school council meeting, which will continue to be virtual, on September 21, 2021 at 6pm.
Warm Regards, Meike Thomsen, Principal |
| Principal Message Dear Parents & Guardians, A huge shout-out to Ms. Lemke who organized a wonderful Grade 6 celebration, which was recorded and shared with the parents. Congratulations to Amelia, Alina and Luke for being the first recipients of the Colonel Walker School Alumni Award. A big Thank You also goes to Ms. Connell who took time to organize a virtual talent show. Thank you to all the parents who took the time to record their child’s skill. I enjoyed watching the Talent Show and the variety of talents presented! As the year is drawing to an end, I’m reflecting on my past two years at CWS. Each day, week and month, it has been my goal to build relationships with students, staff and parents, while also improving the learning experiences for students. While the past two years have been anything but normal, they did pass in the blink of an eye. I would like to share with you a list of some of the work that I have accomplished during my first two years at CWS: - Introduction of French as a Second Language (4x 40 minutes each week)
- Math club for grade 4-6
- Cribbage club gr. 3 (last year)
- Purchase of math manipulatives to allow for hands-on learning activities (Casino funding)
- Focussed early literacy testing first week of September to determine who needs additional support for the year (or part of the year)
- Purchase of non-fiction levelled readers (Casino funding)
- Removal of all Piitoyias Family school technology off the Colonel Walker’s tech footprint (100+ items)!
- Replacing all the old Mac laptops with new ones (school funds)
- Replacing all old iPads with new ones (CBE Evergreening dollars)
- Protective covers for the iPads (Casino funding)
- New Smartboard for room 13 (Casino funding & school funds)
- Starting collaboration with Piitoyias Family of School – between classes as well as joint professional development
- Learning on the land time for each class this year (Walking Wednesdays etc.)
- Removing 4 truck loads of ‘old things’ from the basement and another one is ordered for this June
- Emptying the ‘tech graveyard’ room and transforming it into a welcoming break-out room that is now used daily by students and support staff
- Multi-lingual Welcome sign at front office; Treaty 7 language decal over the entrance doors to the gym
- Started sending weekly updates to parents on Fridays (Week at a Glance!)
- Purchased large buckets with a variety of recess equipment for each classroom (and we are replenishing them again for next year) (casino funding)
- Purchasing standing desks, wiggle stools, pencil grips, visual timers, head phones etc. to optimize student learning (Casino funding)
- Purchased additional gym equipment (Casino funding)
- Establishing CWS as a Rotary “Stay in School Program” school
- Organizing the ballroom dance residency & the SOGO Orienteering residency & Outdoor school
- Hiring a second, outstanding, education assistant
During my two years at CWS, I have met many of you. Each and every one of you has been welcoming and supportive. I feel very lucky to be part of the CWS family and such an integral part of the Inglewood community. In closing, I would like to say THANK YOU to each and every one of YOU. YOU have helped in your own way to make sure we, as the Colonel Walker School Community, made it through COVID-19. I would like to share the following YouTube video with you that says THANK YOU much better than I ever could. Make sure you have some tissues handy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6G85Hu5KyM Wishing you and your family a most wonderful summer. See you on September 1! Warm Regards,
Meike Thomsen, Principal
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| Principal Message Dear Parents & Guardians, Thank you to the first 21 parents who have completed the Budge & Fees Survey. If you have not done so, please take 5 minutes to fill it out. Again, you find the PowerPoint with detailed information on our CWS website. I will be presenting the information in great detail at School Council night, April 20. https://colonelwalker.cbedialogue.com/en/projects/2021-22-school-budget-and-school-fees-survey/engagements/2021-22-school-budget-and-school-fees
I would like to take this opportunity to answer some of the questions that are coming up from the survey: - Our two education assistants are supervising the classrooms during lunch time. This is part of their assignment and the lunch supervision fee is part of their salary. Lunch will stay in classrooms next year, as it has been very successful.
- Students are NOT staying in the classroom the whole lunch time. After they eat, they go outside to play (same as now).
- We will keep music and French.
- We hope to have clubs again as per usual next year.
- Tentatively booked are:
- Ballroom dance residency
- Alien Inline Skating
- Gr. 5/6 Outdoor School
School Council Meeting on Tuesday at 6:00 PMJoin Skype Meeting
Trouble Joining? Try Skype Web App Spelling Work
I’m excited to share that the first student has finished the Introduction to Spelling Booklet! Way to go! Children learn to spell words correctly by writing them multiple times. Learning to spell in German, English and French, we always had to write a word 3 times. Warm Regards, Meike Thomsen, Principal
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| Principal Message
Dear Parents & Guardians, We made it to Spring Break without any cohorts going into isolation and no staff member having to quarantine at home. Amazing! We are looking forward to seeing all students again on Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Each student brought home a spelling workbook before Christmas break. I hope that your son/daughter has been working in it each and every day or at least most days. Practicing spelling is a foundational block for improving reading and writing. This week, I was doing my rounds through the classes and one grade 3 student asked me how to spell 'over'. This reminded me that I really wanted to check in with all of you in regards to the spelling book and how important it is to work in it. Working on reading and writing daily is an important habit to form. Playing Cribbage with your child in grade 2 and 3 is also the most engaging way of practicing basic facts for math with them (without your child realizing they are doing math work!) I'm very excited to share that CWS will be a PILOT TESTING SCHOOL for K-3 reading assessment tools called LenS (letter name sound test for K-2) and Castles & Coltheart Test (CC3) for grade 1-3. These tests have been used in the Edmonton Public school board for a number of years now. The tests clearly show which SKILL the student should learn NEXT. Dr. Oakley school, the CBE's reading intervention school, has been using this approach very successfully for the past two years. The CBE is allowed to put forward four schools to participate in the pilot project and CWS will be one of them! Even more exciting is the prospect that we will be part of the process to establish Alberta Norms. I will receive the screeners (tests), instructions and a video during spring break. We will look at the material when we return from Spring break. On April 12 and 13th, we will have Bruce Raddatz come into the school to free up teachers to administer the new test one-on-one. I will keep you informed of how this is all rolling out as it happens. Our next school council meeting is on April 20th. Please join us to see what my update on this exciting project will be. The April evening will also involve my presentation on next year's budget and fees. Warm Regards, Meike Thomsen, Principal
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Principal MessageDear Parents & Guardians, Thank you to all the parents who joined the school council meeting on Tuesday. A big thank you to Ms. Connell and Constable Mark Enzie from the Calgary Police who were guests. It is hard to believe that we are heading into the last week of school before spring break. I am looking forward to digging up more lawn and sowing bee-friendly flowers. Going for long walks, reading at least 2 good books (I love a good crime novel!) and spending time with my little grand-daughter. I have reached out to Camp Kiwanis and have given them our preferred choice of weeks, which are all mid September to early October. Of course, all of this is tentative, as none of us know what the world will look like in the fall. If you are a grade 4-6 parent, Alberta Education is asking for your feedback (as they do every year). Please fill out the Alberta Education Assurance Survey (formerly the Accountability Pillar Survey). It has been scheduled for the week of March 22 to April 23, 2021. You should be receiving a letter soon. Your feedback is important to us as we use the data to make decisions and to report back to the whole school community. Seeing as we are such a small school, I encourage all of our grade 4-6 parents to complete the survey. Last year, 13 parents filled out the survey, which was a huge improvement over the only 8 from the 2019. My challenge to you is: Lets try to have 25 parents fill out the survey! The more parents fill it out, the more valid the data is. Thank you in advance for taking time out of your busy days to complete the survey. Warm Regards, Meike Thomsen, Principal
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