| Having survived the deep chill of January and with the winter holidays a distant memory, we are busy planning and looking forward to the rest of the school year. The month of February marks the half-way point in the school year. We are excited about the possibilities of what is yet to come as we reflect on all that has been accomplished. We hope that you feel that same excitement and see and feel the energy as you talk with your children about school.
The month of February is busy with many school activities. Information on these events is contained in in our weekly messages from the office as well as from your child’s teacher. This week we have Elev8 Lacrosse in our school providing a residency for grades 2-4. Our kindergarten and grade 1 students will be participating in the swim program later in the Spring. Supporting students to build self-awareness and understanding about who they are through these experiences enables them to become confident, self-motivated, independent and engaged learners. We invite you to join us at the school as you continue to volunteer in classrooms, field trips, and our DDS Loves Literacy program. We truly appreciate how all of you support the school in a variety of ways.
It was wonderful to have so many of you join us for our parent evening with Dr. Allan "Understanding and Responding to Anxiety: Getting Closer to the Life We All Want”. Please see our website for a copy of his PowerPoint.
With our School Development Plan, we continue to focus on designing rich learning tasks to develop student’s written expression across the disciplines and their procedural fluency in math. Our well-being for learning goal “to increase a sense of belonging within the school community” continues to underpin everything we do at Douglasdale School. Teachers meet on a weekly basis to purposefully share student work and ensure assessment practices are aligned. This practice is known as calibrating with colleagues, and is grounded in Schimmer’s (2016) work “Grading from the Inside Out: Bringing Accuracy to Student Assessment Through a Standards-Based Mindset”. At our last professional learning day, we reviewed the strategies and actions in our School Development Plan to ensure we are making progress and on track to meeting our goals.
Warm regards,
Edie Reichardt and Shawna Rabey-Weir |
