Monthly Archives: August 2014

Principal’s message for a new year!

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September 2, 2014

 

Dear Parent:

 

It’s my pleasure to Welcome You to St. Anthony Catholic School.  With memories filled of summer fun and sunshine it’s time to turn our attention to school.  Specifically, the expectations and routines needed to promote your child’s success.  I invite you along on the journey as home, school and church work together in this exciting and challenging year.  Your participation is important and I thank you in advance.

 

“Restore One Another in a Spirit of Gentleness” is the new spiritual theme for 2014-2015.

This year’s spiritual theme is based on Galatians 6 where St. Paul reminds the community to overcome differences, restore one another with gentleness and bear each other’s burdens. I believe this is a wonderful theme for our school community and one that we will be able to practice every day of the year!

 

Arriving home today are a number of items.  1) Your child’s agenda.  This is a useful book to help students organize, and more importantly, to assist parent communication with the school.  2)  A calendar highlighting the school year, professional learning days and holidays.  3) Student Verification Sheet.   Kindly ensure all information is up to date. The correct information is very important for our school records.   4) Insurance Form.  This is strictly optional for families to consider.

 

This year we will be instituting a student activity fee.  The fee will be $20.00 per student with a $40.00 maximum per family.  The fee will cover the cost of the student agenda ($7.00).  The remaining money will be used for special classroom supplies or in-class activities such as field trip costs and guest presentations. By collecting this fee now we will endeavor not to be charging students for class activities through the remainder of the year.

 

The $20.00 student activity fee (cash only) and Student Verification sheets are due into the school by Friday, September 5th, 2014.  Thank you.

 

Lastly, we are very excited to introduce our new St. Anthony Catholic Community Blog! (https://stanthonyconnects.edublogs.org/) More information about our blog will be provided at our Open House which will be held on Tuesday, September 16, 2014 from 6:00 to 7:30 pm.  Please join us to meet your child’s teachers and celebrate the beginning of a wonderful school year.

 

Yours in Catholic Education,

Paul McGuire

Making creative spaces at St. Anthony

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We want to develop a center for innovation at St. Anthony school.

Every day more is written about makerspaces and the benefits these centers offer students.  We have experimented with Makey Makey kits and littleBits in the past, but now we want to take a more comprehensive approach.

Our idea is to create a center for innovation in our school for the use of our students and the wider community.  The components of this center are certainly up for discussion, but the important idea is to create a space for creativity and innovation in our school and a concept that can be shared with other schools in the years to come.

The most important part of this process is to have great partners.  Right now we are working with a small brainstorming group that includes Luc Lalande, the director of the Entrepreneurship Hub at the University of Ottawa, Tracy Crowe, assistant director of teacher education at the University of Ottawa, Marlaina Loveys of Blockheads and Allison Burnett from Algonquin College.

We also have a great partner in St. Peter High School TEJ3M Engineering class.
I met  Rick Alexanderson the TEJ teacher at the Makerfaire a few weeks ago and we are going to partner this year.
As a partner with the St Peter High School  –www.petertherobot.com – initiative, we will be able to get real classroom projects for our students and teachers.
 We will also be able to receive some robots from this innovative program!

This is a terrific group to work with!

So…where do we start?

First, we need student teachers who are interested in developing this project.  We are hoping that some of this year’s student teachers will be willing to volunteer at our school this year.  Hopefully, they will also get placements at our school.

Then, we need an event!  We are thinking of planning a ‘maker week’ at St. Anthony.  Each day, our students would be exposed to another component of a makerspace – a 3-D printer – lent to us by Luc Lalande, a lego day with Blockheads, possibly a Caine’s Arcade contest (building with cardboard) and other activities and demonstrations.

The idea is to introduce something new every day in order to spark interest and new ideas amongst the students, staff and the University of Ottawa students.

From there,  the students and staff will work together to build  our own makerspace or innovation center.  At this point, we would certainly need financial support to purchase the component parts.

The rest of the year would be devoted to learning how our students can benefit from this creative space.  This will be new learning for all of us.  It will call on the creativity and innovation  of our students, partners and staff .

The result will be an innovation center for the St. Anthony community.  Even better, we hope to come up with a model that can be transferred to other schools in the years to come.

Here is the link to the University of Ottawa Makerspace

Let the making begin!creativity-396268_1280

 

Related articles

More community partners!

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Every day I am meeting more people!  The area surrounding St. Anthony is incredibly well served when it comes to community services.  I still have lots of people to meet, but here are a few of the people who will be working with us this year.

Social Rec Connect is a group that helps kids get connected to social recreational opportunities in the community.  They are affiliated with Christie Lake Kids and they offer an incredible service to the kids in our area.  It makes such a huge difference if kids are connected to their community recreational programs.

I think this group has lots to offer our community and I am hoping that they will be able to use some of our vacant space here in the school this year.  Any program that makes a real effort to connect kids to their community really has to be supported.

The YMCA offers an after-school program to around 30 of our students.  This includes homework help to families who are interested.  The spots in the program can be subsidized if needed.  The program will be coordinated this year by Allison Cunningham.  They will use the gym daily and have a permanent room for all of their activities on the third floor.  The YMCA will also be offering the Y Kids Academy again at St. Anthony.  This is a terrific program that encourages junior students to become more active and adopt a more healthy lifestyle.  I am so excited to have this program at our school!

Young Rembrandts is a great program that will be offered after school here at St. Anthony.  The program has worked with the YMCA before and we are looking forward to them setting up shop here at our school.  Subsidized spots will also be available for young artists who would like to take part.  These folks run a very organized program and their instructors are excellent.  They too will be located on the third floor, right next to the YMCA!

I met Cori Thompson-Smith, the coordinator of Children and Youth Services today.  The Centre runs a wide variety of programs for all ages.  They run Headstart Nursery Schools, playgroups, a clothing cupboard and parent support to name just a few.  You can see the incredible range of programming here.  I am sure that we will be doing lots of creative work together this year to better serve our community.

So – these are just a few of the groups that will be working with us this year.  There are more, but this is enough for one post.  I really see that St. Anthony is a hub for the community.  We offer facilities for Dalhousie Day Care, the YMCA, soon hopefully Young Rembrandts and Social Rec Connect and we want to do more.

If you have ideas, please let me know!

The Gardens of St. Anthony

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The grounds around St. Anthony are quite beautiful. It was the first school yard greening project in the City of Ottawa back when John Dorner was the principal.

Ann Coffey, one of the original designers of the beautiful greened area in the yard writes,  “the quiet natural “island” was also to be used as an outdoor classroom. Two years after we removed the asphalt from that area and planted the trees, we did a plant ID. There were 210 species of plants, and many of them were “volunteer” wildflowers. We had all four species of goldenrods found in natural areas in Eastern Ontario, and we hadn’t planted any of them. It was really lovely there – full of the sounds of crickets and birds…”

The area is still beautiful, but it is really time for a renewal of the original project. Working with our school board, Ann Coffey, Andrew Harvey of the Evergreen Foundation and especially the students, staff and parents of the St. Anthony community, we plan on revitalizing the gardens of St. Anthony.

 

 

Some areas really need some weeding, but even in these areas we were able to find native plants like milkweed which are very good for attracting butterflies.  Other plants like the hostas in the back gardens are thriving with the shade from the central island of trees.

I think the most exciting part of this new project will not be the new trees and plants we bring into our yard, it will be the collaborative spirit that will bring all of us together to come up with a new plan that involves our students, staff and parents.  In my experience, that will build the spirit we will need to maintain our new gardens in the years to come.

I hope our wider community becomes involved in this project. The trees and gardens of St. Anthony can offer a great deal to the greening of the entire community.

Let’s make this an island of natural health and beauty in our neighbourhood.

 

New Programs for September

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Summer is the best time to start setting up programs for the year.  It is wonderful to actually have the time to do some work that I hope will benefit the whole school during the upcoming year.

We are starting with a new program called Fun 2 Run!

 

 Fun2Run Program

Michael Stashin and the Healthy Active Living and Obesity (HALO) research group at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario are developing the Fun2Run non-competitive running program for elementary school children grades four through six.

We met with the two people who will be running the program.  They are both wonderful and the program looks fantastic!  Michael Stashin is a running instructor who is doing amazing things including running to the North Pole.  Here is a video showing some of the work he is doing.

 

What is impossible2Possible (i2P)? from GOi2P on Vimeo.

We also met Sophia Rosa who is a health communication consultant working with CHEO.

As you can see there is a connection to a program called impossible2possible which looks amazing and perfect for our school.

Next week we are starting with a runner’s workshop with Mike.  It will be great to see how this program works with our kids in the fall.  The plan is to train all the juniors throughout the fall in running techniques then to hold a running adventure for the students to finish off the program.

Any program that motivates people to move from the impossible to the possible has wonderful potential for our school!

More information to come!  Maybe see you next week?

Welcome to our new blog!

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This is where we plan to publish all information about the St Anthony Community.  You can subscribe and you can follow us all the time!

Due to Federal Legislation, we are no longer to send messages to you through e-mail.  This is not a major problem, but it means we need to look for new ways to communicate with you.

I will be using this blog to write to you on a regular basis.  I will supplement this with a number of other communication tools including Twitter – @StAnthonyOCSB and Facebook.

We now also have an instagram account (stanthonyocsb)which is a great way to keep up on what is happening every day at St. Anthony.

Over the next two weeks I  will be writing about our preparations for the new school year.  I will also introduce you to new staff and new community partners we plan to work with this year.

Remember to subscribe to our blog – this way you will get updates in your mailbox every time we post!