Greetings West Dover Families

This coming week we have a couple of notable events taking place. Wednesday, May 8 is Hats on for Mental Health Day. On this day, children and adults are invited to wear a favourite hat to raise awareness about the importance of mental health at school. One of big focuses this school year has been building resiliency in our students so that they can better handle if a little set back occurs during the day, or in challenging social situations, or responding to challenging work.  Also on Wednesday, May 8, you are invited to join the School Council meeting at 5:30 in the Learning Commons at school.  School Council is meant to be a formal opportunity for parents to contribute to the life of the school.

May is a big month for work related to our School Development Plan. The School Development Plan is developed each year to address gaps in learning shown by many of our students.  This year our school development plan identified phonic decoding and phonological awareness as two very important reading skills. Phonic decoding is the skill of being able to decode combinations of letters - for example knowing that when certain letters are placed side by side they create a new sound  such as when a C and an H are placed they make a 'ch' sound like in the word chimney.  Phonological awareness is learning about things such as substitution of letters in words such as in rhyming families such as hat, cat, bat, sat etc.  When students can hear sounds and substitute them for another sound it helps to put together words with letters - for example, we might do a phonological awareness activity that sounds like 'say cat', 'now say cat but instead of 'c' say 'b'' - then the student would say bat. In May we undertaking some standardized assessment work that will show how much each student has improved in their reading over the school year up to now. These assessments are something you could ask your child's teacher about. In May some students are working phonological awareness and phonic decoding assessments while others who are ready are working on reading comprehension, spelling, and word recognition assessments.

A big thank you to all of the parents for helping with our big field trip day last Thursday. All of our regular program students got on big coach buses and engaged in a day of incredible learning at Tyrell Museum of Palentology in Drumheller. All of our EES students participated on the same day on a trip to Calgary Zoo. Both of these experiences were made possible by our West Dover Parent Association - thank you Parent Association for ensuring that these rich learning experiences were provided free of charge to all of our students.

Kindergarten registration is open.  Please let your friends and neighbours know that we have one of the only full day public school kindergarten programs in Calgary.

Looking forward to another fantastic week of learning

Roy Strum, Principal