Greetings West Dover Families

The last number of years at our school we have been working hard to improve reading in our students.  One of the foundational reading skills that teachers engage in daily is something called phonological awareness, which refers to children being able to hear sounds (something we call phonemes) in spoken word and be able to add, take away, or substitute sounds at the beginning, middle, or end of words.  This work involves something called orthographic mapping and phonic decoding.  Over the past number of years, we have tracked learning in our school in relation to phonological awareness and phonic decoding in all of our students.  Once they are successful at these skills they can move to other important reading skills such as comprehension, vocabulary, and sight word recognition.  All of these things together create reading fluency.  I'd like to share that our assessment results indicate that our students on average are performing at a higher level in phonological awareness that the average of students across the entire CBE.   This is something we can all be proud of - evidence of learning, evidence of achievement, evidence that West Dover School students are improving as readers! 

Coming up this week all of our grade 4-6 students will be completing an online survey called the Our School Survey.  This survey gathers student voice around things like school culture, elements of well being and academics.  I will be sure to share the results at an upcoming School Council meeting.  I'd like to make everyone aware that for the first time in a number of years, grade 6 students at West Dover will be completing Provincial Achievement Tests.  Ms Byblow and Mr Sawatzky have been working hard alongside students to prepare them for this testing.  In fact this week, the grade 6s all completed a practice Provincial Achievement Test, so that they would know what they look like.

We are pleased to share that 5 classrooms at West Dover School have taken on working on the community garden near the Greater Forest Lawn Senior's Centre.   As well, we want to thank Parent Association for their work in finding a grant to apply for funding to purchase important gardening tools.  We would also like to share that we are the recipients of a grant from the Alberta Teachers Association to support our outdoor learning programs.  Thank you to Ms Waluchow who took the lead in putting forward this grant application.

Looking forward to another fantastic week of learning

Roy Strum, Principal