Colts Connection - Parents Edition

The Colts Connection is a monthly message sent out to our school families to keep in touch with all the great things happening at our school. Although we keep our website up to date and are fairly active on our Social Media Pages, this is another way we can keep in touch with you.

A huge thank you to all of our parents and guardians for your kindness and understanding as we navigate through the ongoing changes on restrictions, staying home, isolating, etc. We recognize it is not easy to have to keep your child home for extended periods of time and we really do want them at school. That being said, we are required to follow the guidelines provided to help keep our students and staff safe and healthy. We appreciate our families in their ability and willingness to come and pick their children up if they get sick while at school, as well as, keeping them home when ill.

Registration for Bright Futures Play Academy and Kindergarten opened in early January for the 2022/2023 school year. If you are wanting to register your child for either of these programs you can click here or head to our website and click on Registrations under the Menu button.

Our Kindergarten Program runs full days on either Mon/Wed or Tues/Thurs. We place students in classes on a first-come, first-serve basis. The earlier you register your child the more likely they are to be placed in your preferred day.

We received and distributed our rapid test kits to all students and masks to our PreK-Gr. 3 students. We are expecting the second half of the shipment in the coming week, in which we will be receiving large masks for older students. Since the purpose of these masks are for school use and our Gr. 4-6 students are already required to wear masks, we will be keeping these masks at school to supply our Gr. 4-6 students as needed.

A huge "Thank You" to our School Council for their sponsorship in purchasing a new projector and screen in our gym. They were installed this past week and look amazing. We can't wait to get everyone back in the gym together and the new screen and projector will make that experience just that much better!

We will be live with PowerTeacherPro starting tomorrow. Information was shared with parents last week as to how they can access their child’s marks. Due to the timing of the transition, parents will only see marks for their child from February 1st moving forward. We will be continuing with our current progress reports in March and report cards at the end of the year. If you are not sure how to log into your parent portal, please contact the office and our amazing admin assistants can help you get logged in. There are also details on how to access your child's marks on our school website (here)

It was announced in the fall by the Minister of Education that a grant was created for schools/school divisions to apply to in order to support students in Grade 1-3 impacted by the pandemic. Earlier in the fall, we received money to hire a teacher to support Grade 2 and 3 students in Numeracy and Literacy. Mrs. Shauna Wessner has been working with students in small group interventions to bridge the pandemic learning disruption gap.

We recently completed our Grade 1 Numeracy and Literacy assessments and submitted our results to the government. We are now waiting to hear what/if support will be provided for our Grade 1 students whose learning has been impacted by the pandemic.

These grants are intended to support the ongoing in-class interventions our teachers and educational assistants already support in the classroom on a daily basis.

Andrea Ramage is a new Wolf Creek Social Emotional Learning coach whose role has been developed in response to the increasing needs of our students being able to navigate and manage their social and emotional well-being.. Andrea was able to come and spend time in our Gr. 1-3 classes and some targeted classes in our older grades as well. She also gave a presentation to our staff at our last PD Day to help provide teachers with some knowledge and language to support social and emotional well-being in the classroom.

Basketball has started up with Mrs. Chapman (PSC Teacher), Mrs. Johansen-Hornett (Grade 1 Teacher) and Mr. Kaegi (Grade 6 Teacher) all helping out. We currently have about 70 students participating in basketball from grades 4-6, with the majority of them being in grade 4. It has been great to see such a high turnout. A huge thank you to the teachers who volunteer their time to coach and to our parents for being there to pick up their children so they can participate.

Our leadership team has planned quite a few more school spirit days for the remainder of the school year. We typically have a school spirit day on our assembly day and that is it, however, our leadership students wanted some more. All School Spirit days are on our school calendar. February's School Spirit Days are:

February 4th - Olympics Kick Off - show your support for team Canada by wearing your Canadian gear, or as much red as you possibly can! Go Canada Go!

February 17th - Pink Shirt Day - Pink Shirt Day is officially on February 23, however, our students are not in school that day, so we will recognize this day on February 17th. For more information on what Pink Shirt Day check out the website. https://www.pinkshirtday.ca/

Get connected and join our monthly School Council meetings, look for any updates here. In February we will be meeting virtually at 6:30 pm on Monday, February 28th. Watch for links to be posted. We hope to see you there!

February 11th - No School for students - Professional Development Day for staff.

February 14th - Valentine's Day - keep an eye out for information from classroom teachers as to what classes are doing for this day.

February 21-25th - No School for students - this week there is Family Day holiday, an in-lieu day for staff, professional development day for staff, 2 days of Teachers' Convention.

February 28th - Awesome Awards Assembly

Click here to access the PES Google Calendar

Email: nathan.mcentee@wolfcreek.ab.ca
Website: pes.wolfcreek.ab.ca
Phone: (403)783-3583
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PonokaElementarySchool
Twitter: @PonokaElem