October 31-Nov 4 Happy Halloween. We expect the hallways and classrooms to be filled with students and staff in their costumes or comfy pajamas continuing with their learning and enjoying the first Special Lunch of the school year. Should be an exciting day. Our calendar for November was emailed to you on Friday and is available on our school home page. You can see that it is a busy month and we are getting started on some lunchtime clubs and activities. It might look like a lot of fun – and it will be – and I’d also like you to know that there is a lot of learning going on too. Our Knitting Club will be working on scarves to donate to The Mustard Seed or Drop-In Center and our Dance Club is preparing to be a part of our Remembrance Day Ceremony. Whether it is the current New Birghton club offerings or the daily learning in a classroom we know that experiences that are relevant and connected to the real world lead to more engagement by students and better, more powerful learning. Dr. Martha Cohen School (DMCS) Delayed You should have received an emailed letter on Friday informing you of the delay of DMCS. New Brighton School families know how awesome it is to have a new school in your community. We are disappointed for the DMCS community but we are happy to continue working with the grade 5 students, teachers and administrative staff. Although the term “School within a School” may describe part of our relationship with DMCS it is closer than that in several ways. DMCS students are hosting our Remembrance Day Ceremony, have some plans around some December “giving” and some cross grade clubs including the Grade 5 teachers are also in the works. Now that we know the stay will be longer – it assists in our planning to the benefit of all our students. Veterans Food Drive Our Grade 3 students took the lead and the whole school has taken up the work of helping fill the shelves for the Veterans Food Bank. Thank you for your contributions leading up to our finish on November 10. Save the Date It may seem like a long time away but mark Wednesday, December 7th on your calendar. With the support of School Council we will be hosting a Sock Stuffing Family evening from 6:00-7:30PM. It will be Drop-in/Open House style. More information will be coming home in the next few weeks but we hope lots of advance notice helps with your planning in what is a very busy month for everyone. Have a great week.
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'Thank you to our community and parents who contributed to the Clothing Drive this weekend. We look forward to hearing about the total raised. Thank you to the New Brighton School Fundraising Society for organizing the event and for spending part of the day in the school parking lot accepting donations. We would also like to thank the community for participating in our school’s Indigo Bookstore Fundraiser. Your purchases helped the school raise $1079 to purchase additional books for our Learning Commons. We know our students have enjoyed our Learning Commons collection so far and look forward to continuing to enhance the collection with your support. Veterans Food Drive Beginning next week and continuing until November 10 our Grade 3 students will be coordinating the Veterans Food Drive at New Brighton School. Grade 3 students will be sharing their project with the school and encouraging each student to help if they can. You’ll definitely be hearing/seeing more about our Food Drive in the coming weeks – but I did promise to include an early edition poster created by Grade 3 in this weeks update. We hope you have a great week. Jeff Oct 17-21 Our jersey day was a great success for students and a partial success for the many teams we were supporting. Halloween Details: We’ll be celebrating Halloween in a way that lets students and staff have a bit of fun and do something for the community all at the same time. October 31 will be Costume and Pajama Day at New Brighton. Costumes need to be appropriate for an elementary school setting and replica weapons will need to stay at home. Regular school activities will continue and so costumes also need to allow for regular school participation including physical education (Halloween Style) and going outside for recess and over the lunch break. Masks that interfere with safe movement around the school may need to be removed. We feel learning can continue on what is an exciting day of Trick or Treat anticipation for many students. Post Halloween we would ask that parents are conservative in the number of treats students bring to school. Students can also know that the principal’s favorite Halloween treat is Rockets. We will be well into our Veteran’s Food Drive by October 31 and look forward to celebrating our school-wide effort to date on the 31st. October 31 is also a Special Lunch Day for those who have completed orders at HealthyHunger. Details are available on our school home page. School Council We had a great turnout of parents last week. The school shared some brief updates and our shared work towards to the mission of the CBE and New Brighton School. A PDF of the slides shared are located below. We appreciated the conversation around parking and drop-off and the offer for a group of parents to continue looking at ways to improve. We would like to remind parents that supervision is available on the compound/soccer fields from 7:55AM and that access to the compound is available from many access points surrounding the school. We would also like to remind parents that choosing convenience over safety results in many of the daily issues faced by most elementary schools including New Brighton School. If each parent and child followed existing rules and signage there would be far fewer issues. Indigo/Chapters Fundraiser Oct 17 and 18 We hope to see you on October 17 or 18 as we raise a bit of money for our Learning Commons collection. Details are on the school website and invitations were sent home last week. Picture Day Students are reminded to bring their best smiles to school on Oct 19 for Picture Day. Have a great week and feel free to contact us at the school if you have any questions. Jeff October 10-14 We hope you and your family enjoyed the long weekend. We would like to thank parents who were able to attend Conferences last week. We know that communication between home and schools makes for better learning and appreciate you working in partnership with us. We also hope that the Term Plan provided to you helps with understanding the learning path your child is on for the next couple of months and the way in which knowledge, skill, attitude and big idea thinking and development go together. We look forward to celebrating your child’s accomplishments at our next set of Conferences in late November. It looks like winter has arrived along with all the fun activities that come along with an Alberta winter. A few tips from the school to make the trips to school safe and enjoyable:
We are looking forward to our School Council Meeting on October 12 @6:00PM. The invitation is below. Refundable Drop-Off New Brighton School now accepts donations of refundable containers. The blue bin in the parking lot was provided courtesy of Recycle For Life (recycle4life.ca) . The school receives the full refund amount to support school activities while several local charities also benefit from an arrangement with ABCRC. Check out the website for additional information. Upcoming Events Clothing Drive - Bring your clothing donations to the school parking lot on October 22 between 10:00AM and 2:00PM. Clothing donations support New Brighton School and the Kidney Foundation of Canada Halloween will be celebrated “Costume and Pajama” style. Students are welcome to wear their costumes or pajamas on October 31. We’ll also be enjoying our first Special Lunch of the year with a pizza lunch for those who order. Our Remembrance Day Ceremony will be on November 10 in the morning. More details will follow and this is a public event open to the community. October 3-7 We always expect the best but prepare for the unexpected when doing something for the first time – and this is especially true in a new school. We are happy to report – that even with several Guest Teachers and fences where we wish there weren’t fences – our first evacuation (fire drill) went very well. Evacuating close to 600 students – almost ½ of which are 6 years old or younger may sound easy and perhaps it is with the right preparation. In just a couple of minutes we were all on the field and every student and adult was accounted for. We’ll be practicing our evacuation 5 more times throughout the year for an event we never hope to have to actually do – but we prepare for just in case. We also prepared in classrooms, the gym and as a school for our first Terry Fox Run. We were thrilled with the turnout of parents and family members and look forward to sharing with you the total distance we ran and the amount collected for the Terry Fox Foundation. It was a great first school wide event. We are looking forward to the next one. If you were fortunate enough to be in the gym for the kick off you know our school has lots of energy and enthusiasm all ready. Our next big event involves you. On October 6 and 7 we look forward to meeting you at our first set of Parent Conferences. This conference provides an opportunity for teachers to share their current knowledge about your child and the instructional plans going forward. 15 minutes is not a lot of time but it is quality time and we feel it is an important opportunity for some 1 on 1 time, face to face with teachers, focused solely on your child. Please book an appointment if you haven’t done so already. Have you heard about Tommi? Some of you have and some – maybe not yet. In partnership with ACAD, Education Matters and the CBE, New Brighton School has welcomed Tommi Watts as our resident Studio Artist. We provide studio space for Tommi to do her work as an artist and Tommi provides students an opportunity to see a professional artist in action. Over the course of the year our work with Tommi will continue to grow. Save the Date and watch for the invitation but our first School Council Meeting is on Wednesday October 12 @6:00PM. All parents are invited and we look forward to sharing our first School Report with you. We’ll share our report on the school website afterwards so all parents have access to the information shared. Finally – the fences are gone and our fields and compound just became a whole lot more fun. We look forward to students being able to enjoy more places to play and easier, greater access coming to and going from school. And the grass and the grounds look great. Have a great week, Jeff What are we reading right now: There are lots of things students need to learn about in school and the volume can sometimes seems daunting. As a staff we have been talking about the purposefulness and "staying power" of the most important parts of schooling - from some basic skills, to helping solve some serious and significant local and global problems to being a contributing member of a group and valuing the contribution of each group member. It is incomplete - but the Continuity of Purpose below provides some context for the staying power of what we expect students to learn while at school. |
Jeff HuttonNew Brighton School Principal, CBE graduate, native Calgarian, husband and father of two CBE students. Archives
June 2018
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