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850 Woodvale Street Winnipeg, MB R2K 2G8 Phone 661-2378 Fax 668-9283 Principal C. Qua
February 2018 Newsletter
RIVER EAST TRANSCONA SCHOOL DIVISION BOARD OF TRUSTEES
September 2017 – September 2018
Name Ward Contact Information
Colleen Carswell
Board Chair
P: 204.222.1486 E: [email protected]
Jerry Sodomlak P: 204.999.1409 E: [email protected]
John Toews P: 204.663.0475 E: [email protected]
Rod Giesbrecht P: 204.661.5984 E: [email protected]
Eva Prysizney P: 204.668.3501 E: [email protected]
Brianne Goertzen P: 204.955.6782 E: [email protected]
Peter Kotyk P: 204.668.4181 E: [email protected]
Brian Olynik P:204.661.6440 E: [email protected]
Michael West
Board Vice-Chair
P: 204.990.3228 E: [email protected]
We are all looking forward to warmer days so our students can get outside more often to enjoy more activity and some fresh air. Even though we have often been inside for recess breaks, students have continued to make very good choices by following the school expectations. We are looking forward to meeting with you in March during Term Two Student Led Conferences (March 15th 4:30 – 7:30 and March 16th 9 - 11:30). Our students have worked hard and have grown in many ways this term. They are excited to celebrate their learning with you! Your children are excited to show you what they have done at school and all of their accomplishments. A reminder to parents/guardians that report cards will no longer be printed and sent home. Please remember to sign in to the parent portal to have access. Angus McKay report cards will be posted to the parent portal on March 12th. Your conference slip will be sent home with your child. Thank you to our Community Schools Association for generously giving the school $1000.00 to put towards buying physical education equipment that will be used by all students. Thanks to all of the parents for sup-porting their fundraising endeavours. All of the children will benefit from this generosity. Please say thank you to a CSA member when you see one. Once again I would like to remind you about keeping our pick up/drop off safe for all students. Please remind your children to use the patrols and not just run across the street to your parked car. Please do not stop at the front of the school to pick up/drop of your child. This practise makes it very unsafe for all of the students at Angus McKay. You are also putting your own child at risk as they run up to your vehicle. Please use the stop and go area at the south end of the school on Woodvale. Remember safety over convenience. We all want to be positive role models for our children by following all expectations and laws.
Thank you from all of the Angus McKay staff for the lovely staff appreciation week. The generous gifts of food were enjoyed by all.
Thank you for your continued support, Ms. Christi Qua
Principal’s Message
Kindergarten Registration Registration for new Kindergarten students at Angus McKay School will begin on Monday, March 5th, 2018 at 8:00 a.m. You must bring your child’s birth certificate, passport or baptismal certificate as proof of age. Proof of residence is also required, therefore, you must bring 2 pieces of legal identification with your current ad-dress on it (eg. Driver ’s license, medical card, tenancy agreement and/or proof of purchase). Registration continues for the remainder of that week, from March 5th - 9th from 8:30 - 4:00 p.m. daily .
On a freezing January 16 morning, Angus McKay Nessies were warmed up by the great performance The Good, The Bad and the Munsch. The Prairie Theatre Exchange came to Angus McKay School to perform the play for the whole school. The play included adaptations from the books Mmmm Cookies, David’s Fa-ther, Pigs, Swamp Water and Andrew’s Loose Tooth. There was lots of audience participation and great Robert Munsch words! We all loved the play! We have been continuing with the “Munschies” throughout the month of January and February. Students participated in author study workshops to read a variety of Robert Munsch books, but to also look at his writ-ing style and writing techniques that are unique to him. We capped off I love to read month with some exciting activities. We had a travelling story where every class added on to what had been previously written in the style of Robert Munsch. Students dressed up like a pa-per bag prince/princess, wore awesome socks (thankfully not smell ones like in one of his books), and en-tered to win one of 6 Robert Munsch books – Congratulations to Ren (K), Wyatt (1), Nya (2), Noah (3), Mala-kai (4), and Malaya (5). I love to read was capped off with a whole school Robert Munsch movie!
Nessies have the Munschies!
Just a few adorable paper bag prince/princesses!
Awesome grade 5 socks!
Yoga Club Namaste! The grade 1 and 2 students that have been participating in Yoga Club have been loving it! We have done some amazing yoga routines with themes of Moana, Frozen, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and a varie-ty of animal stories. Yoga club has provided students with the opportunity to stretch, become active, and find their inner calm.
These students are working on their core doing boat pose
These students are in mountain pose
Phys. Ed. Classes
Students in Grade K – 3 have been enjoying Cosmic Kids Yoga in Phys. Ed. Class. We have been doing yo-ga poses with Minecraft, Star Wars and Harry Potter themes. We have also been doing gymnastics circuits focusing on balance, strength and rotations.
Students in Grade 4 and 5 have started the outdoor curling unit when the weather has cooperated. A big thank you to Mr. Caithness, Mr. Crawley, Mrs. Treffner, Hailey, Rocco, Nyka, Kennedy, Sydney, Annika and Ryan for painting the curling rink.
Gymnastics Club There are 22 students from grades 3 -5 participating in our gymnastics club. The gymnasts have been work-ing on their level skills, the warm-up routine and will soon be starting the creative routine. The Tumbling Rally performance will take place at Bernie Wolfe School on Tuesday, March 20th at 6:30.
Folk Dance Festival Students in Grade 1-3 will be dancing at the Divisional Folk Dance Festival in May. More details to follow.
Music Notes
Movement has played an important role in our music classes this winter! The students and I have been finding ways to incorporate movement into our various activities.
In Kindergarten, one of our favourite movement activities is called Drum Cues. Students listen to a specific rhythm being played on the drum and react to that pattern with a specific movement. Once the drum stops, everyone freezes in a cool pose. This fun game helps us learn to move to a steady beat and develops our aural skills.
In Grade 1, students have shown their creativity by moving to music with scarves. We have also enjoyed singing and dancing to songs that have partner clapping parts. Grade 2 students have been experimenting in mirroring and echoing movements from a leader and partners. The students create a series of movements that represent a piece of music and the class copies the movements of the leader. In Grades 3 and 4, students have been learning about types of musical form. In groups, the students created dances to represent each section of the music and then performed their dance for their classes. Grade 5 students have been learning about different time signatures. We played a fun passing game with beanbags to help us get the feel of one of these new time signatures into our bodies.
KINDERGARTEN I thought for this newsletter I would describe to you what a typical Kindergarten morning might look like for your child. Each day begins with your child entering the classroom, greeting his/her friends, taking off all those winter clothes (please spring, hurry up), and, hopefully handing in their home folder. Each day we have a survey question. Your child finds his/her nametag and answers the survey. Ask your child what some of the survey questions are like. Following this, your child chooses a good morning book and reads it by himself/herself or with a friend(s). O Canada, announcements and attendance also take place during this early part of the morning. Each day two students are helpers. They have some special privileges. You can ask your child what these are. Following this, we have our Morning Meeting. I usually write a morning message. We read the message to-gether, look for known words and letters and do some phonics, phonological awareness and letter work with-in the context of the message. We also read poems together, and perhaps I will read a story to the students. The message, poems and stories are usually associated with a science or social studies topic. When we look at the survey results we do some counting and other number work. Learning Centre time follows morning meeting. Typically on Monday mornings, your child chooses a centre that he/she would like to works at, while on the other four days of the week I rotate the students through cen-tres. These usually include a reading/writing/letter work centre, art centre, and two others centres related in some way to a curriculum topic. All of the students know that the sound of the rain stick means it is clean-up time. You have done a fabulous job helping your child learn to clean up. Each and every student helps and shows responsibility for cleaning not only his/her centre materials, but also willingly helps others. Following clean-up it’s hand-washing and snack time. After snack the students go to gym, music or library. When they return we do some type of work related to science, social studies, response to a book, among other options. Then it’s time to get ready for home.
One last comment… how lucky were we with the weather for our field trip! Thanks to the parents who were able to join us and help with skates, giving push-es on the toboggan slide, transporting sleds, and en-joying the morning with us! It was a wonderful morning!
Grade 1
Here’s what the Grade One’s have been up to this month! We have been studying all about Manitoba ani-mals. Together as a class we wrote a few chapters about the Snowy Owl. The students have been exploring many non-fiction books about an animal of their choice and learning how to take jot notes from their research. They are now working towards writing their own research projects of an animal of their choice. We will create habitats for their animals as well as part of our design process. In math we have been practicing our doubles and doubles plus one strategies. The students have been practicing addition and were introduced to addition word problems. We are exploring maps, globes and our communities in Social Studies. They were intro-duced to google maps on the computer and were able to look at their home address and community. We al-so celebrated 100 days of school and Valentines with many fun filled activities. We look forward to sharing more learning at our next Student Led conferences!
Grade 2
The terrific twos have been very busy adding to their repertoire of reading comprehension strategies and skills. Ask us about Picturing Penguin; Fix up Bear; Wondering Walrus; Text –to –Tiger; Retelling Raccoon; and Predicting Panda. These strategies remind us to monitor our reading in order to ensure that everything is making sense and we are connecting to what we are reading!
We have been having a blast conducting forces and motion experiments. We have been observing the effects of friction and slopes on motion. We will be busy following criteria to build our cars for our design process.
In social studies, we have been using the internet and books to become experts about a few topics related to our study of Nunavut. The children are just finishing their final products of their projects and will be presenting them to the class soon. They also created pastel art drawings of the northern lights and then wrote descriptive poems about them.
In math we have been learning multiple ways to add 2 digit numbers by breaking numbers into smaller, more manageable parts when we work with them. Notes were sent home to parents to show them some of the ways we have been talking about and children were encouraged to practice addition at home. We have been working on skip counting by 2’s, 3’s, and 4’s and then making large patterns to predict future elements. Keep an eye out for math practice games that will be coming home soon!
A humongous thank you to Mr. Caithness who came in to assist with our design process! Your helping hands and excellent skills helped to ensure the success of vehicle designs by ensuring our wheels had holes! You Rock! and Roll! Mr. Caithness!
Grade 3 The grade threes are in full research mode! We are researching all about the land, culture, resources, and daily life in Japan. The students are learning how to use features of a nonfiction book to help with their re-search. We will be creating travel magazines as our final product! The students just finished writing poems about reading. We learned how to use quotes to support our writing.
Below are lines from some of our poems:
A book is colours and laughter. A book is not words it is everything. Books are imaginations. The reason I read is because that is what I need. While magic swirls through my head, I read to clear my mind and leave my thoughts behind! I follow the path to the unknown.
We are making a book of all of our poems for the kindergartens as they embark on their reading journey! In January, the students wrote stories about their very first last time. Students were learning how to find a seed within a story and know when to slow down different moments. We look forward to sharing them at stu-dent led conferences. In math, students are working on fractions, multiplication, division, adding and subtracting larger numbers, problem solving in relation to time, and graphing. Students are working through problem solving in relation to multiplication and division. We are learning there are many strategies we can use when adding and subtract-ing larger numbers. The students are getting excited, as we will be making a toy for a younger student to enjoy as part of our sci-ence unit on forces that attract and repel. In art, the students have started exploring printmaking! We are so very lucky to have Ms. Schroeder teach us this cool technique during art enrichment! For Valentine’s Day, the students and their kinder buddies walked to Fraser’s Grove Park for a morning of skating and sledding. It was awesome!
Exploring static electricity as a force Valentine’s Day at Fraser’s Grove
Print Making
Grade 4 News
We have been having so much fun at school, even though this cold weather has been keeping us cooped up quite a bit! We LOVED taking part in the many Robert Muncsh activities during I Love to Read, curling in gym class, gymnastic club, and the watching Canada participate in the Olympics. Here are a few other highlights over the last couple of months:
We learned about Vincent van Gogh in art class. We looked at a bunch of his artwork including Starry Night, Café Terrance at Night, Sunflowers, and many of his self-portraits. We also learned a little bit about Vincent van Gogh and realized he was a pretty fascinating, self-taught painter! One interesting fact we learned was that van Gogh only sold one piece of artwork while he was alive, and it was to his uncle! The art work he sold is titled “Red Vineyard”.
The art work we created was a combination of Vincent’s “Sunflower” painting and “Starry Night” painting. We used his ideas of showing each brushstroke by layering different shades of the same colour on top of each other. We also made a petal template to create our sunflower and glued most of it to our background to cre-ate depth.
Students have been really engaged and excited with our science unit on sound. We have created many inter-esting projects including a sound wave. We have also taken part in many sound related experiments to see how sound travels through the air, how pitch and vibrations works, and how the ear and all it’s parts hear sound. We also created our own instruments that made 3 different pitches!
We have also been having tons of fun learning multiplication! Students have been taking part in many differ-ent hands on activities that help reinforce multiplication and arrays by using real life situations and problems. We have been using our i-Pads to solve problems and practice our skills, and even created multiplication “Array” books by finding multiplication examples in our classroom and school. Please continue to work on multiplication and related division facts to 9x9 at home with your child.
Book Club from the Grade Fives Do you belong to a Book Club? We do! At the start of January, we formed a class book club. We started with introductory book talks where Mrs. Cooper gave us a short synopsis telling us what the book was about. We started with thirteen different novels and have since added another three. For the next few days, we tried books on for size. We started reading and if we liked it, we kept going. If it didn’t suit us, we were able to switch because who wants to read a book that doesn’t interest them? We try to have Book Club every day. During Book Club time, there are four possible things we can do. The most important one is to read. As we read, we jot down thoughts, ideas, and page numbers on our chat list and when we are ready, we can find someone else who has either read the book before or someone who is reading it now and we can have a book chat. Our chats can last from five to ten minutes. It’s fun to have a chance to hear someone else’s ideas about the book you are reading. During the read, we need to stop to make responses as a writer. This helps to show that we are connecting with and understanding the book. We share a quick written retell of the part we have chosen and then we can share our thoughts, opinions, feelings and connections that we have for this part of the story. We can make these responses when we are ready, but we need to make sure that we have done two before we complete the book. We also need to have one writing piece a week ready to share with Mrs. Cooper. We are all as-signed to different days of the week and during this time we have a book conference with her. We talk about the book, how the reading is going, and we get to share our written piece. We read the writing and talk about ways to improve as writers. Once she has seen both responses and we have finished reading the book, we are able to do a Book Report Card. This is how we share our book thoughts with others. We get to give it marks based on how we felt it did with the beginning, ending, characters and whether we connected with the story or not. We then write Report Card comments on our favourite parts, our recommendations for others, things we would change and what we feel others need to know about the book. We have been covering our bulletin boards with these so that our friends can get ideas about good books to read. Here are some thoughts we have about Book Club. Malaya I really like Book Club because you have the time to read and to really get into the story. Sarah I think Book Club calming and a good time to unwind. You get to read what you like. You can
move around and sit with friends, but you can’t talk unless it’s about the book. It’s lots of fun. William I like it. It’s fun. It’s a good way to learn and get into different books. When you hear what other
kids have said about books, it makes you want to read them. Sadie I like the choices of books that we have. I like that we get an hour to read and write. Rocco It’s calm. It’s a time to relax and read. I like reading the best.
Our suggestion to all of you is to join a book club. It’s worth your time.
IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES 2018
Friday, March 2 P.D. Day - NO CLASSES Wednesday, March 7 CSA Meeting (tentative) - 6:00 p.m. Monday, March 12 Report Card Distribution Thursday, March 15 Student Led Conferences - 4:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 16 Student Led Conferences - 9:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. - NO CLASSES Friday, March 16 P.D. Day - p.m. only - NO CLASSES Mon., March 26 - Fri., March 30 Spring Break - SCHOOL CLOSED Monday, April 2 First Day of Classes After Spring Break Wednesday, April 4 Early Dismissal - 2:45 p.m. - Staff Meeting Wednesday, April 4 CSA Meeting - 6:00 p.m. Wednesday, April 11 Pink Day Friday, April 20 Co-ordinated Day - NO CLASSES Thursday, April 26 Whole school walk to Lord Wolseley - MTYP Play - 9:05 - 11:00 Friday, April 27 Hot Lunch Day Wednesday, May 2 CSA Meeting - 6:00 p.m. Wednesday, May 9 Early Dismissal - 2:45 p.m. - Staff Meeting Thursday, May 17 Volunteer Tea - 2:30 p.m. - Library Monday, May 21 Victoria Day - SCHOOL CLOSED Wednesday, May 23 Folkdance Festival - Gr. 1,2,3 - Centennial Park - 9:30 - 1:00 Friday, May 25 Rooftop Photo - 9:15 a.m. Friday, May 25 Hot Lunch Day Friday, June 1 2018-2019 Kindergarten Orientation - 1:00 p.m. Wednesday, June 6 CSA Annual General Meeting - 6:00 p.m. Thursday, June 7 Field Day Thursday, June 7 Free Hot Lunch Day Thursday, June 14 CSA Family Fun Night Tuesday, June 19 Field Day Alternate Date Friday, June 22 Hot Lunch Day Tuesday, June 26 Kindergarten Celebration - 10:00 a.m. Wednesday, June 27 Grade 5 Farewell - 9:30 a.m. Friday, June 29 Last Day of School - Report cards sent home no earlier than noon 2:30 p.m. Dismissal Please be aware that as the year progresses, additional events will arise. Parents will be notified via notes and/or email and the event will be added to the calendar on our school website.
