Together in Education
January/February 2019
Lancaster Drive Public School and Parent Council
Email: lancd@limestone.on.ca
Website: http://lancaster.limestone.on.ca
Location: 1020 Lancaster Drive, Kingston, ON, Canada
Phone: (613)634-0470
Twitter: @LancasterPSLDSB
Upcoming Events
Jan 8 ~ Coffee Time 8:00 am, PAC meeting 6:00
Jan 11 ~ "Get Real" presentation for Intermediate Students
Jan 15 ~ Hot Lunch - Pizza
Jan 18 ~ Basketball Tournament - Girl's and Boy's teams
Jan 22 ~ Hot Lunch - Chicken Fingers
Jan 23 ~ Grade 2 and 2/3 Jarbeau/Bruder to BSS for coding partnership
Jan 22 - 24 ~ Literacy Week - school-wide and classroom activities
Jan 24 ~ Scholastic Book Fair Open
Jan 25 ~ Scholastic Book Fair Open
Jan 29 ~ Hot Lunch - Pasta
Jan 29 ~ Constable Hurding visits junior and intermediate classes for Safety Presentations
Jan 31 ~ Sharing Assembly 11:00
Feb 1 ~ PA Day - No classes for students
Feb 4 ~ Jump Rope for Heart Kick off Assembly
Feb 5~ Hot Lunch - Panzarotti
Feb 5 ~ Coffee Time 8:00, Parent Council Meeting 6:00
Feb 7 ~ Gr. 4-6 to Queen's and Leon's Centre
Feb 12 ~ Hot Lunch - Subs
Feb 13 ~ Yard Pal Training - Session #2
Feb 18 ~ Family Day - No School
Feb 19 ~ Hot Lunch - Pizza
Feb 20 ~ Term 1 Reports Cards go home
Feb 26 ~ Hot Lunch - Chicken Fingers
Feb 28 ~ MOVIE NIGHT!! 5:30-7:30
** see our extra-curricular calendar below for opportunities available throughout the week at morning and lunch recesses. Thank you to our incredible staff for making these possible for students.
Message from your Administrative Team
Welcome back to 2019. We have been happy to see students come back to school ready to learn and with a positive mindset and holiday memories to share.
We begin with our new Safe Arrival program this month, going live with the School Messenger app and toll-free phone line starting on January 14th. See the section carried over from last month's newsletter that shares details and instructions on the new ways to report your child's absence. Lancaster will continue to move forward with other functions that are available through the Limestone App and School Messenger in the coming months. At this point we will continue to use Remind, Twitter and our school Website to communicate information about school life and key updates for parents. Please also note that links to previous newsletters as well as Parent Council meeting minutes can now also be found on our school Website.
In this newsletter, you will find sections that reflect Lancaster's School Learning Plan for 2018-19. We continue to focus on building student's flexibility and understanding of number relationships in the area of math. In the area of building a healthy school climate, we focus on many components of school life; safety, student voice and leadership, and mental health and wellness. We know these build the foundation for learning and this year staff and students are working together to grow skills in self-regulation and resiliency. With the ability to approach learning and life challenges with a growth mindset, strategies that increase student independence and ability to access supports to reduce these potential barriers to learning.
Late arrivals at Lancaster have been increasing. Arriving at school on time allows your child to build good habits and ensures they do not miss key information that helps them start their day with a better sense of calm and less anxiety. Please allow enough time for your child to walk to the playground at the beginning of the school day where they can meet up with classmates and be welcomed by staff. If your child does arrive late please ensure that they sign in at the office. This is particularly important as we move to our automated calling system. The system will call out a notification to parents if students have not signed in and appear to be absent in the system.
Your leaders in learning,
Lani Fox and Sara Wellwood
Sharing our learning - Welcome Ms. Salvary
Construction projects....#teamwork #negotiation
"Get Real" visits our intermediate classes
Literacy Week: Scholastic BOOK FAIR on site Jan 24/25!!!
FOCUS ON MATH
In classrooms, educators are working with students to build skills with understanding and connections, to help develop their sense of number as well as learning and remembering facts. This helps them when problem-solving. When working with your child(ren) at home, consider the following strategies:
- Think about knowing 4 + 7 = 11 simply as a memorized fact. As a sound bite of knowledge it is useful but not transferrable unless we work with it in our sense of numbers and their relationships.
- Now think about knowing that 4 + 7 = 11 because it is a 3 + 7 and 1 more (linked to knowing that 10 is an important number). The understanding of this relationship can help a student to think flexibly about 64+27. In the same way, it can be thought about as 60 + 20 + the 10 (that was made by the understanding of 4+7) and 1 more = 91
As a parent, you can support your child in thinking flexibly about how numbers are related rather than simply knowing the answer in one way. We work on this in classrooms daily through number talks and minds-on activities that are mostly oral in nature. Why Number Talks? See one of the nation's leaders in math thinking explain it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKegyzRj8-k
With your child at home think about using these thinking prompts:
- What other numbers or facts is this connected to? Example: 6 + 7=? This is like the double I know of 6 + 6 and then 1 more.
- What do you know that might help you get there? Example: 7 x 4 =? I remember that 5 x 4 = 20, so then I have to add on two more 4’s, which is 8, to get 28.
- What is another way that you can know that? Example: 4 x 25 =? I can think about money and know that 4 quarters is $1.00, so 4 x 25 = 100
Today, critical thinking, problem solving, reasoning ability and ability to communicate mathematically are essential skills. These processes are the foundation of mathematics instruction in Ontario schools. “Doing Mathematics with Your Child” is a guide available for parents of students in Kindergarten to Grade 6. This guide offers ways to engage their child in thinking and talking about mathematics around the four strands: number sense and numeration, measurement, patterning and algebra, and data management and probability. Please use the link below to access the guide in English and 13 other languages:
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/parentGuideNum.html
BUILDING RESILIENCE
Make connections
Teach your child how to make friends, including the skill of empathy, or feeling another's pain. Encourage your child to be a friend in order to make friends. Build a strong family network to support your child through his or her inevitable disappointments and hurts. At school, watch to make sure that one child is not being isolated. Connecting with people provides social support and strengthens resilience.
Help your child by having him or her help others
Children who may feel helpless can be empowered by helping others. Engage your child in age-appropriate volunteer work, or ask for assistance yourself with some task that he or she can master. At school, brainstorm with children about ways they can help others.
Maintain a daily routine
Sticking to a routine can be comforting to children, especially younger children who crave structure in their lives. Encourage your child to develop his or her own routines.
Take a break
While it is important to stick to routines, endlessly worrying can be counter-productive. Teach your child how to focus on something besides what's worrying him. Be aware of what your child is exposed to that can be troubling, whether it be news, the Internet or overheard conversations, and make sure your child takes a break from those things if they trouble him/her. At school staff can build in unstructured time during the school day to allow children to be creative.
Teach your child self-care
Make yourself a good example, and teach your child the importance of making time to eat properly, exercise and rest. Make sure your child has time to have fun, and make sure that your child hasn't scheduled every moment of his or her life with no "down time" to relax. Caring for oneself and even having fun will help your child stay balanced and better deal with stressful times.
Move toward your goals
Teach your child to set reasonable goals and then to move toward them one step at a time. Moving toward that goal — even if it's a tiny step — and receiving praise for doing so will focus your child on what he or she has accomplished rather than on what hasn't been accomplished, and can help build the resilience to move forward in the face of challenges. At school, break down large assignments into small, achievable goals for younger children, and for older children, acknowledge accomplishments on the way to larger goals.
Nurture a positive self-view
Help your child remember ways that he or she has successfully handled hardships in the past and then help him/her understand that these past challenges help him/her build the strength to handle future challenges. Help your child learn to trust themselves to solve problems and make appropriate decisions. Teach your child to see the humor in life, and the ability to laugh at one's self. At school, help children see how their individual accomplishments contribute to the wellbeing of the class as a whole.
Keep things in perspective and maintain a hopeful outlook
Even when your child is facing very painful events, help him look at the situation in a broader context and keep a long-term perspective. Although your child may be too young to consider a long-term look on his own, help him or her see that there is a future beyond the current situation and that the future can be good. An optimistic and positive outlook enables your child to see the good things in life and keep going even in the hardest times. In school, use history to show that life moves on after bad events.
Look for opportunities for self-discovery
Tough times are often the times when children learn the most about themselves.
Help your child take a look at how whatever they are facing can teach them "what they are made of." At school, consider leading discussions of what each student has learned after facing down a tough situation.
Accept that change is part of living
Change often can be scary for children and teens. Help your child see that change is part of life and new goals can replace goals that have become unattainable. In school, point out how students have changed as they moved up in grade levels and discuss how that change has had an impact on the students.
These tips have been taken from the American Psychological Association’s Resilience Guide for Parents and Teachers available at http://www.apa.org/print-this.aspx .
Lancaster and all LDSB schools introduce new two-way absence reporting system January 14
One of our greatest priorities is ensuring that all our students arrive safely to school. To enhance our existing absence process, we are introducing a new, more efficient absence-reporting system called Safe Arrival.
This new system will make it easier for you to report your student’s absence, reduce the time it takes for our school staff to verify student attendance, and respond to unexpected or unplanned student absences. This time savings makes it faster and more efficient to account for all students and their safety.
The new student absence reporting system will let you use a mobile app, a website, or an interactive toll-free phone number to report an absence in advance. These options are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Future absences can be reported at any time.
If your student is marked absent and the absence hasn’t been reported in advance, our new SafeArrival system will attempt to reach the student’s priority contact by telephone to confirm the absence. If our system is unable to reach the designated contacts, school office staff will follow up.
How to report an absence using SafeArrival
There are three ways you can report your student’s absence in advance:
1. Using your mobile device, download and install the SchoolMessenger blue app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store or from School Messenger website or you can select it from within the LDSB mobile app. The first time you use the app, select Sign Up to create your account. Make sure you use the same email address your child’s school has on file. If you do not use that same email address, you will not be able to create an account. You You may have already created an account when we introduced the Communicate broadcast system. Select Attendance, then Report an Absence.
2. Use the School Messenger website. The first time you use the website, select Sign Up to create your account. Please ensure you use the same email address your student’s school has on file. If you do not use that same email address, you will not be able to create an account. You may have already created an account when we introduced the Communicate broadcast system. Select Attendance then Report an Absence.
3. Call 1-855-257-9349 toll-free to report an absence using the automated phone system.
Please do not call the school directly to report your student's absence.
This new system will begin on January 14, 2019.
· Frequently asked questions [insert hyperlink to Board site]
· Using the School Messenger App for Safe Arrival [insert hyperlink to Board site]
Thank you for your patience and cooperation as we implement this new system.
Families invited to offer input into 2019-20 School Year Calendar
Families in our district are invited to take a few minutes to respond to several questions via an online survey.
If you would prefer a paper version of the survey, please contact your school and a copy will be send home with your child, or you could come into the school to fill it out.
The survey is open for responses until Friday, February 9.
Your input is important to us and we appreciate your time in submitting your feedback and comments.
For more information, please visit the school year calendar page on the LDSB website which also provides a link to the Ministry of Education website.
Lancaster Parent Council Fundraising
In addition to our ongoing fundraising including Mabel’s Labels, Cobs, and FligGive – We will be hosting a silent auction during our upcoming Family Movie Night at the end of February! We are looking for donations from the Lancaster community to use as auctionable items or to be used to put together with other donations to form an auctionable item…so no donation is too big or too small!
We already have volunteers for the following auction items:
- Family movie basket
- Spa and dining package
- Spa and food basket
- Family game night basket
- Bakery basket
Any donated items for the auction should be delivered directly to the school office where they will be sorted at a later date by VOLUNTEERS…oh yes, so if you are unable to donate an item but would like to donate some of your time…I will require a team to put together the auction items. E-mail me at me.huffman76@gmail.com if you can help out in any way! Want to contribute but have no time to spare for shopping or volunteering? No problem, monetary donations welcome!
Our goal is to raise $4000.00 to support the incredible experiential learning work being done by grade 6/7 teacher Deb Cancian – check out her presentation in the Great Hall, on our school website, or through this link:
Looking forward to this fun Family event!
Little Caesars Pizza Kits Are Back!
Mabels Labels
Cobb's Bread
Love tasty baked goods from Cobbs Bread?? Every time you visit Cobbs Bread Bakery at 770 Gardiners rd. in Kingston simply let them know you are supporting Lancaster School’s Fundraiser and they will donate 10% of your sale to us!
Let’s “Raise some Dough”!
FlipGive
You can now shop online at your favourite stores and fund raise for Lancaster! As part of our 2018/2019 Fundraising efforts, Parent Council is putting a 3 year plan in place to raise funds for schoolyard improvements for all divisions - primary, junior and intermediates. This is a significant project and will require a lot of hard work and dedication from our Parent Council, Staff and Community.
FlipGive allows us to earn cash back for our school for shopping online! There are dozens of retailers to shop with including Indigo, Amazon, Walmart, Starbucks, Old Navy, Sport Chek just to name a few. You can even earn cash back for the school when you purchase gift cards - great teachers gifts or stocking stuffers! Going out for dinner? Order your gift card online through FlipGive ahead of time and use it to pay for dinner....So easy & something you were going to do anyway!
How it works
- Join our Lancaster Team at Flipgive.com or download the FlipGive App from the app store
- Go to https://www.flipgive.com/teams/164409 and click on "Join This Team"
- Enter code CFKGRP
- Happy Shopping!
Feel free to also share the link and code with family & friends - anyone can join our team! Every little bit helps. We appreciate your support.
- Indigo - Gift Cards gives 15%, Shop Online gives up to 3%
- Amazon - Shop Online gives up to 10%
- Walmart - Shop Online gives up to 1%
- Starbucks - Buy Gift Cards gives 2%
- Old Navy - Buy Gift Cards gives 2%, Shop Online gives 5%
- Sport Chek - Shop Online gives 10%
- Ultimate Dining Gift Card - gives 7%
- Jack Astor's - Buy Gift Cards gives 10%
Student Safety – Safe Arrival, traffic and parking reminders
Having each of our students arrive and depart safely to and from school is of utmost priority and a shared commitment between home and school. In June we updated our families about the timeline for the parking and traffic project that has been developed as a joint effort of the Limestone District School Board and Algonquin Catholic District School Board to address the traffic patterns on Lancaster Drive around school drop off and pick up times.
With this project slated to occur in the summer of 2019, we would like to make sure the Lancaster community is aware of and following the intermediary measures that are in place for student safety.
- Our school footprint within the community plan was designed to meet the needs of a primarily walking community. If your child, or you and your child, are able to walk to school please do so. This greatly reduces the congestion that occurs with the number of vehicles. Look into options of having an older student in your community walk your child to school as a “walking school bus”.
- Please pay attention to parking signs and do not park in places that are not designated as such. This reduces vision lines for other vehicles, for students who are trying to navigate their way to school and can also prevent our busses from entering their drop-off zone. It is essential that we are looking out for the collective not individual safety of our children. One person’s convenience can create very unsafe conditions for our students – please consider this at all times.
- When dropping your child off consider using some of the access points to Dunham park and schoolyard that are not out in front of the school. Arrange for the same meeting spot when picking your child up from school. These areas are quieter and offer more ease with finding parking and greeting your child at the end of day. Some of these access points can be found off of Limestone Dr., Irving Ct., Woodside Dr. (near Marsh Cres. and Crestwood Ave.) and Dunham St.
- On inclement weather days when it is rainy or too cold for students to be outside staff will invite students inside at 8:15 when supervision begins and students will wait in the hallways until the bell rings under staff supervision. To ensure the hallways are not crowded parents should not be walking their child to the classroom door (especially on days like these) as it creates even greater congestion in the hallways and can have the impact of creating a more stressful environment for students starting their day.
- The front doors of the school are not student entry doors. If you have dropped your child off they are to walk around to the back of the school and enter at bell time with their class. Students are best set up for a successful day when they arrive on time and are able to begin their day with their peers, receive valuable instruction and join in morning routines. If your child does arrive late they may enter the front doors and report to the main office to receive a late slip and have their arrival recorded on our attendance records. When signing your child in please do not walk them down to their classroom as this is disruptive to the classroom and does not reinforce in your child the skills and independence they exhibit throughout the day
Thank you to our families for supporting safe arrivals and departures for all of our students. We are a community of caring adults and share this responsibility with you.
Stay connected with board's new mobile app
The Limestone District School Board is excited to launch our new mobile app designed to enable students, families, staff and the broader community to stay informed about district and school news and events.
The free app (Limestone Dist School Board) can be downloaded for Apple in the App Store or for Android in the Google Play Store. Users can also select “push notifications” when they download the app to receive the latest news from the district and your school(s).
The new app will allow users to subscribe to their schools of choice and will provide families with instant access to school calendars and news items as well as links to sports schedules, busing information and social media accounts. New information will continue to be added to the app.
“Our new, official mobile app empowers everyone in our school communities to stay connected and up-to-date on the information that they want and need using the convenience of their mobile device,” says Director of Education Debra Rantz. “The app will allow the school board and our schools to manage and share content in a more timely manner with our families, students and staff.”
The mobile app is the latest tool in a new suite of electronic communication tools being deployed by the school board to improve communication with families and our school communities.
- New and improved district and school websites were launched in late spring.
- All schools will begin using a broadcasting tool called Communicate that allows the Board and schools to push important messages to students, families, and staff via voice mail, email or text message. The tool is linked to the Board’s student information system and families will choose how they wish to receive these important messages. Some schools are beginning the new school year with Communicate. All schools will introduce the tool by the beginning of October.
- The Board is piloting Safe Arrival, an enhanced two-way absence reporting tool with Southview Public School this September. This new system will make it easier for you to report your student’s absence, reduce the time it takes for our school staff to verify student attendance, and respond to unexpected or unplanned student absences. Safe Arrival will be rolled out to all schools during the upcoming school year.
- Some schools in the Greater Napanee area will begin piloting a cashless payment system that will allow families to pay for field trips, hot lunches and other items online. The system will also schools to include any necessary permission forms to increase efficiency and privacy.
We are excited to unveil these new tools to our school communities. We will share more information as each new tool is introduced. We thank you in advance for your patience and understanding as we improve to serve you better.
Coffee Time is Back!
This fun community building event has been sponsored locally this year by Starbucks.
Parent Council Account Balance
The Parent Council account balance
as of December 31, 2018 is
$7,104.39
Submitted by Lyndey Caves, Treasurer
ANGST
Music Lessons
Piano
Tanya Bezanson
613.539.8342
Guitar
John Porter
613.328.6070
Useful Links
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