Elizabeth School

· develop a good understanding of their community, including its needs, resources, supports and aspirations for student learning and well-being;

· communicate annually with families and community members about their activities and accomplishments;

· participate in orientation, training, development and networking opportunities in relation to SCC responsibilities;

· boards of education (regarding policies, programs and educational service delivery, including fund-raising, school fees, pupil code of conduct, grade discontinuance, school closure, religious instruction, and language of instruction, but not educational service delivery by a specific teacher);

· other organizations, agencies and governments regarding the learning needs and well-being of students (but not individual students).

SCCs do not discuss or have access to confidential personal information or complaints about students or their family members, teachers, administrators or other board employees.

All parents are invited to attend any of the SCC meetings throughout the school year. All meetings are in the library and start at 7:00 pm. If there are any changes to the meeting date in a particular month, it will be posted in the current newsletter. If a meeting date has to be changed at short notice, an announcement will be posted on the front entrance door. Following are the dates for the year.

October 11^th November 8^th

December 13^th January 10^th

February 14^th March 13^th

April 10^th May 15^th

June 12th

The Poinsettia fundraiser was such a huge success last year that Elizabeth School SCC will be doing it again. Later in the month, more information along with order forms will be sent home with your child/children. Please support this fundraiser as this will be a “helping hand” to the school budget to free up some funding for our children to participate in all the activities that have been offered in the past.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the budget discussions, please contact Chris Oscar, Geralyn Allen or one of the SCC members and we will try to address your concerns.

Over the last couple of weeks a number of rubber bracelets have been present on our students’ wrists supporting the funding of breast cancer research. Unfortunately though, the sayings on these bracelets do not agree with our school dress code/conduct policy. These bracelets have slogans on them with questionable breast-related jargon comments/sayings on them. I am asking that the bracelets that are sponsored by the American Boobiesrule.org or the Keep-a-breast.org foundations, are not worn in school. As a school we will continue to support the Pink Ribbon foundation by not only wearing our pink bracelets, but will continue to sponsor a hamburger luncheon as we have done in the past with the good folks representing Kindersley’s Pink Ribbon chapter. If your son/daughter is wearing the bracelets from the Boobiesrule or Keep-a-breast we will ask him or her to remove it, and give it to the teacher who will return it to the student at the end of the day. If the same students continue to bring them to school, a phone call will be made to the parents explaining further the problems associated with the particular slogans. Thank you very much for your support in this matter.

Due to the never-ending and fast pace of technology, Elizabeth School and the School Community Council (SCC) would like to update their electronic device policy. Many students now have personal cell phones, Blackberries, IPhones, and handheld gaming devices which can all have internet capabilities. There is absolutely no possible way that supervisors can properly monitor the content of messages, personal internet sites or music/lyrical content during recess breaks and at lunch time. Moreover, cyber bullying continues to be a major problem for today’s student. As for phone access, we at Elizabeth School will continue to allow students phone access for reasonable requests just as we have done in the past, and parents can still get in touch with their son/daughter at any time in emergency situations by phoning the school. We prefer that parents, in non-emergency situations, make contact with their children outside of classroom instructional time.

With this in mind, we are asking you, the Elizabeth parents, to answer a few simple survey questions. The responses that you give will help the School and the SCC generate an electronic device policy that reflects the current times. The survey is located at www.surveymonkey.com/s/G7WMGGW The deadline for the survey is Friday, October 14^th. Thank you for your assistance.

Last June the staff at Elizabeth School requested that students and parents not give them gifts, but instead donate money towards building a playground in our partner school in Morogoro, Tanzania. There was an overwhelming response to this project, and we were able to send $2,259.00 to the school. With this money the school was able to turn a barren playground into a child’s dream.

The school now has a set of swings, a merry-go-round and two teeter-totters. They were also able to purchase several soccer balls and a few playground balls. The work was done by the men of the community, and they received payment in sugar, to help feed their families.

The director of the school has sent several pictures of the building process, and of the students playing on the equipment. If you wish to see them stop into the school and check out our bulletin board called Elizabeth School Citizens of the World or our TV monitor.

We would like to thank all the families that supported this project and to the staff for their donations as well. The Elizabeth School family really are Caring World Citizens.

Elizabeth School will be having their Fall Bottle Drive from October 11^th until October 20^th. Once again we are raising money to feed the 100 children at Dada Maisha Chekechea School, Morogoro Tanzia. We will be accepting all containers that SARCAN takes. This includes bottles, cans and juice containers. We are asking all students to participate in this project.

· For many of the children the meals they receive at school are their only meals.

· Elizabeth School raised enough money last year to feed the students for just over nine months.

· Many Elizabeth School students have raised money over the summer to donate to our partner school.

The students have each been inspired by the new fall season and created their own fall sound story. Families are able to view them on our class blog.

September was super! Kindergarten students have settled into our routine nicely! We worked on so many ways to make us happy; music, friends and playing games together! We have already had our 10^th day of school and we met Lizzero the Hero. Each 10^th day we will look forward to her zero-shaped treats! We added to our seasons’ centre with a nature study with our big buddy classes. Red Ks are with Mrs. Georget’s grade four class and Blue Ks are with Miss Ritchie’s grade four class. We look forward to many more fun times with our big buddies!

Thanks to all who participated in our Terry Fox fundraisers this month! We learned he was a hero who fought to find a cure for cancer, and that we can continue his fight! Great job, Elizabeth!

October is fire safety month and we will share more tips and encourage discussion about fire safety at home too! It will be great to have some local fire fighters come to our school. This is a great month to talk about scary feelings and how to feel better! October 11^th and 12^th will not be regular Kindergarten days. Students will be participating in a screening to check school readiness, speech and motor skills.

Have a great Thanksgiving, enjoying a fun Education Week, practice our home and school fire safety plans, and have a happy Halloween!

What a super-duper September we have had! We now know SO many sight words, and many of us are already taking home Blue Card books! Mrs. Harris is especially proud of our top-notch, top-down printing!!!

In ELA we are reading a book called Up The Hill, and we can hardly wait to impress our parents with how we can read the words and patterns!

We are being thankful and counting our blessings as Thanksgiving comes around! Check our colorful creative writing in the hallways!

Thank you to the parents who helped us with our Safety Walk! We are looking forward to another parent guest coming in to teach us Yoga and Nia!

We have been very busy in Room 105! We are working hard on learning about patterns in math, practicing printing our letters, knowing their names, and recognizing their sounds. We work on our sight words daily, at home and at school. Soon we will be getting Blue Card Books to take home each day! In Social Studies we are learning more about ourselves and our classmates. Safety, especially traffic safety, has been our topic during Health class. Mr. Doll is making our Phys. Ed. classes fun and active! We like going to the Library to get books and to the Computer Lab to work on the computers. We can all log on with our own names! In Music we have been using the rhythm sticks and are getting quite good at this.

We enjoyed our walk to Westberry School to listen to Boris Sichon present music on a variety of instruments. We also enjoyed the story Don’t Laugh at Me that Ms. Walter read to us. The message was “Don’t get pleasure from my pain.” Another story that we read was Have You Filled a Bucket Today?, which has a message about doing things to make others feel good and in doing so you also make yourself feel better.

October will bring lots more work, more progress, and more good weather, we hope! Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Wow! It is hard to believe that a month of school is over. We have been very busy in Room 106. In Language Arts we have been reading stories all about our families and our friends. We will be spending October on this unit as well, and will be concluding it with our famous Grandparents’ Tea Party. The Tea Party will be on Friday, October 28^th in the afternoon. The students will bring home an official invitation in a week or two.

We have just started a unit on dance, and hope to perform one of our dances for our Grandparents. As well we will soon be learning a poem and a song to present at the party.

In Math we are just finishing our unit on repeating and growing patterns. We are learning to use patterns to help us solve problems. The students will be making a pattern placement to bring home and show off their patterning skills.

Welcome October! It’s hard to believe that we’ve been in school for over one month already! We’ve been busy learning about friends and family in our worlds, communities, getting along, patterns and lots of other important grade two stuff.

To start the month of October we will be looking at all the things we are grateful for: our families, food, clothing, homes and friends. It always warms our hearts to look around and see how fortunate we really are!

At times like this we remember our adopted school in Tanzania and think of how thankful they must be for Elizabeth School! They have a wonderful new playground because of our generosity! We look forward to our upcoming bottle drive from October 11^th – 20^th where the money will go toward helping our friends in Tanzania once again. Please get ready to bring in those bags of recycling so we can see how much money we can raise this time!

We look forward to another big event happening in grade two in the near future. We will be busy preparing songs, poems and treats for our guests as we prepare for the Annual Grade Two Grandparent Tea Party. It will be such a busy and exciting month!

Our class would like to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving and a Haunted Halloween.

Wow, where did September go? We have certainly enjoyed the beautiful weather that we have been so lucky to have this month. Each morning we check the weather forecast for the upcoming day as well as the next day or so, so that we know how to dress appropriately.

The Grade threes have settled into a routine and have been excited to be learning some big people stuff, like cursive handwriting and we have already been doing some multiplying and dividing in our daily Math.

It was fun to meet our Big Buddies and join them for the Terry Fox walk. The Terry Fox Talent show was a huge success as well.

Watch for important dates on the October classroom calendar as we will be having some tests and we will also be completing the CAT 4 which is the Canadian Achievement tests that all Grade 3, 5, 7 and 9 students are required to take.

This month in Room 401 we started studying rocks and minerals, Saskatchewan, and the earth and how it changes. We also have been doing lots of spelling and math. We have done recycling five times this month. We went on the Terry Fox walk with our little buddies. We have a class pet named Tyke. Tyke is a guinea pig. Tyke squeaks when we sing O’Canada because he knows he gets fed right after O’Canada. We all had a great first month of school!

Wow, the first month of school really flew by. In Mr. Doll’s Grade Six class we have been working on a number of projects and assignments. In Language Arts we have been doing a spelling unit and a paragraph a week assignment every week. We are wrapping up our Holes novel study and we watched the movie Holes last Friday. It was excellent to see the characters brought to life. In Math we have been working on Place Value and learning about operations using an input and output machine. In Social Studies we have been learning about location, geography and time zones. In Science we are learning about Diversity and doing a Powerpoint report on an endangered species. In Art we have been learning about symmetry and perspective. In Phys. Ed. we have learned some football and soccer skills and now are working on volleyball skills in class. We made hamburger cookies with our buddy class, Mrs. Friesen’s grade twos, and are looking forward to helping them with the Tanzania Bottle Drive coming soon. So far, the first month has been a whirlwind of activity. We are looking forward to October!

In Science Mr. Burkell’s awesome grade seven class is doing observation and in Health we are doing “All About Me” and in Art we are doing colour wheels and colour mixing. In Guidance we are talking about what we are going to be in the future. In French we are doing numbers. In Math we have learned systematic traits, patterning and how to draw a diagram. In ELA writing and spelling we are doing group work. Well that sums it up. Have a good rest of the year grade seven!

Santa’s Hut will be held on December 17, 2011 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Elizabeth School Gym. Donations can be made at the Crisis Centre or call Wendy at 463-6655, 463-2379 or 463-7685 for more information.