June 2010

Play Day

June 23

Trustee : Gary Atamanyk

550 Allanburg Rd, Thorold ON L2V 1A8 Phone: 905-227-2851 Fax: 905-227-8804 ont@dsbn.edu.on.ca

3 pitch Dates:

Jr—June 17

Int.—June 21

Dates to Remember

Establishing procedures helps students succeed.

If you have walked down the halls of Ontario School or been inside a class-room, you have surely noticed a collection of Procedures posted on the walls. As a school , we have been establishing these to help students know what is ex-pected of them.

Students readily accept a uniform set of classroom procedures because it simplifies their task in succeeding in school. Efficient and workable procedures allow many activities to take place with a minimum amount of confusion and wasted time. Pro-cedures help a teacher to structure and organize a classroom for maximum en-gaged learning time.

Students know how to walk respectfully down the hallway and that when they enter the class, they know what activity is expected of them. If you enter during a Nutri-tion Break, you would see the students following the procedure for breaks as deter-mined collaborative by students and teacher.

If there is a substitute teacher? Just look on the wall for the behaviour for this pro-cedure. Almost all of our visiting teachers have remarked on the wonderful group of children we have here! I am proud of the hard work staff and students have done to create such a positive and respectful learning environment.

P. Holmes, Principal

June 28th Report Cards Go Home Please return Page 3’s

Graduation—6:00pm

June 29th Last Day of Classes 9:00am Assembly

June 30—P.D. Day

Year End Trips:

JK/SK Puddicombe Farms June 22 - 9 am

Gr 1-3 Safari Niagara - June 17

Gr 4-6 Canada’s Wonder-land—June 24

Gr 7&8 Toronto Trip—June 9-10

Fun Fair

June 3rd

4 to 7 pm

IT’s CRUNCH TIME for the FUN FAIR We’re counting on everyone to pitch in and make this night a success

G I will bring Baked Goods on Thursday (all day) to the Gym.

G I will bring Loot Bags/Goodie Bags to the Office this week (you can send these to school with your child too)

Your name: . Please send this notice back to school with your child this week.

DSBN Launches Community Flyer Website Being environmentally conscious has never been more important. By conserving power, increasing recy-cling and implementing other waste reduction strategies, students and schools across the DSBN have made the environment an important priority. In the past, we have offered a free flyer distribution service to community organizations. While we value our many community partnerships, we also understand the importance of reflecting the leadership of our students who promote a culture of conservation at school and at home. The DSBN is pleased to launch our eFlyer website. We are encouraging our community partners to post their community information on our eFlyer website rather than send paper flyers through our schools. We are pleased to support the community with this site, and save thousands of trees in the process. While paper flyers are still permitted, we hope that community partners will take advantage of our free and environmentally friendly website instead. To visit the site, simply go to www.dsbn.org and click on the DSBN eFlyer button. On the site, you can look for events, camps and activities that may be of interest to your child or family.

Ontario School's Literacy Focus Our focus this year at Ontario School is “Reading for Meaning”. We are working to-gether to teach specific strategies to use during the reading process that enable stu-dents to engage in a more interactive, thoughtful reading experience and to improve comprehension. Students that do this are proficient readers.

June’s Literacy Strategy: Reading as thinking

to all of our

Dear Old Dad’s

“Critically” constructing meaning of text Reading is more than pronouncing words. Of course, we must teach students different ways of cracking the textual code and enunciating the words they encounter. This is an important aspect of reading but it is not “reading” in the full sense. There are students who can fluently pronounce the words in a passage but have little sense of the textual meaning. This student has not truly “read” the passage. Meaning is not simply to be found in a text but is actively constructed by thinking criti-cally about the possible interpretations and implications of a text (explicit and implicit) and judging which seems most sensible. It is not sufficient that students understand more of the words they read, but students need to be detectives engaged in an inquiry that builds meaning by thinking and making judgments before, during and after reading. Research tells us that successful readers approach and interact with text in particular ways in order to make meaning. In other words, good readers do certain things that struggling readers are unable or disinclined to do. We refer to these as literacy compe-tencies—abilities that strong readers possess that enable them to thoughtfully con-struct meaning from text.

Independent, critically thoughtful readers approach text with an inquisitive mindset as they interact with text, construct meaning and transform their thinking. To help students become thinkers, we must consciously nurture self-regulated use of tools in the pursuit of what we see to be five overarching literacy competencies:

Activate relevant personal and public knowledge

Anticipate text development, purpose and structure

Extract explicit and implied details and overall meaning

Challenge your own interpretations and to assess merits of the text

Deliberation about the implications beyond the text

Mary Abbott The Critical Thinking Consortium

Track and Field Athletes soar in May !! Congratulations to all students who participated in Track and Field last month. The Juniors and Intermediates com-peted on May 13th and 14th and the Primary classes on May 21st. Although we didn’t get the weather we hoped for on the 13th, we managed to finish half of the events then and were able to finish up on Friday. Regardless of the weather the students enjoyed competing and all students and staff had a lot of fun. Our Junior and Intermediates vied for the oppor-tunity to represent the school at the Regional Meet on May 21st. Congratulations to the following students who earned the privilege to compete at West Park:

Zachery Bleich Tyler Broderick Jessi Jensen Tyler Reid Samantha Seburn Durieal Bell Makayla Benvenuti Joey Laws Matthew Covington Devin Maraldo Robin Payne Alyssa Pressley Cinthia Rougoor Niklas Gallen Connor Higham Layne Kares Kyla McGowan Hanna Nixon Morgan Snow Joseph Bleich Cameron Crites Cohen MacPherson Jillian Mathieson Bonnie McGowan Jamea Scholtens Jenna Watchorn Justin Broderick Henry Freeman Logan Gauld Patrick Holditch Karly Large Talia Spencer Gillian Stanford Tiffany Votour Issac Whitty Kiley Barron Joseph Gosselin Joey Horton Brooke Kares Josh McCart Drew Noonan Elias Regier James Robidas Bailey Roy Hunter Terryberry

From these athletes that participated in the Regional Meet, we have a few students who earned a spot at the DSBN meet, being held in June. Congratulations to Jillian Mathieson, Karly Large, Logan Gauld, Justin Broderick, Brooke Kares, Joseph Gosselin, and Elias Regier. Good Luck to each of you in June!! In addition to these competi-tors, we had several more Ontario students win ribbons at the meet. Congrats to Alyssa Pressley, Robin Payne, Jamea Scholtens, Patrick Holditch, Rowan Bryan, Isaac Whitty, Kiley Barron, Joey Horton, James Robidas, Henry Freeman and Josh McCart as well as the 4 x 100 metre relay teams in the Peewee Boys and Midget Boys Divisions.

Intermediate Co-ed Soccer teams had a ball this year!!

Congratulations to the Intermediate Co-ed Soccer team for their hard work at their tournament on the 26th of May. You played very well considering the extreme weather conditions. Great job!! Austin Lemieux Drew Noonan Justin Broderick Issac Whitty Patrick Holditch Rowan Bryan Joey Horton Josh McCart Joseph Gosselin Kiley Barron Talia Spencer Brooke Kares Teresa Badgley Gillian Stanford Tiffany Votour Brooke Hagar Bailey Roy

SPORTS SHORTS

Thank you to everyone who has supported our athletes this year—

as coaches, spectators, cheerleaders, and drivers. Our students would not get the opportunity to compete in the school’s sports teams if it weren’t for you. Your words of encouragement, direc-

tion and time are invaluable to our students success.

Summer Skills One of the most exciting things about summer is all the time children have to pursue their interests, such as sports, summer camps and time with friends. Even though they’re on break, the summer offers many oppor-tunities for students to practice their reading skills and work on math concepts. For instance, have the whole family read together each day. Take turns reading out loud, and talk about what you read. Ask children ques-tions about the characters, why might they be acting in a certain manner, or how might they solve a problem or a dilemma they are facing. Questions like “why” and “how” encourage children to think about what they are reading and help them to answer questions about the text, and provide their rationale and evidence for those answers.

You could also find ways to make hobbies educational. A child who loves to collect baseball cards, for instance, could practice penmanship and literacy skills by writing fan letters to players. He/she could also work on math skills by tracking players' statistics or by visit-ing educational websites such as cool-math.com.

Thorold Secondary School Reunion 2010

Saturday June 26, 2010

@ Battle of Beaverdams Park

11am to 5pm

Everyone is welcome to attend—admission is free (please bring non-perishable food or clothing items for community care)

There will be food, refreshments, pony rides, dunk tank, inflatables, clowns, face painting, Teddy Mac (bring teddy bears for check-up),

race cars, trucks, firefighters, police agencies, EMS, magi-cian/hypnotist and door prizes.

Please bring your lawn chair or blankets to sit on.

All proceeds from this event will go to McMillan park

Community Outreach As a school, we are teaching our students to give back and contribute to their community—near and far.

Thank you to everyone who supported our Jumpers and Young Hoopsters in our Jump Rope and Hoops for Heart Day. Thanks to the generousity of our community,

the students were able to raise $3,600 for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

A Huge Thank You to Mrs. Irwin for organizing this event.

WAY TO GO!

Are You Moving this Summer? It is important that we have accurate enrolment information for September. Therefore, if you are moving and your child will NOT be returning to

Ontario in the fall, please call Mrs. Sentence as soon as possible.

Also, if you know of families who will be moving into our school area, please ask them to contact

us.

Milk Days Are Coming To An End As the school year begins to wind down we are starting to wrap up our Milk Days as well. For those students who have milk still, you may continue to buy milk throughout the month of June until we run out. We are not able to determine, at this point, how long it will be available. Once all the milk that we have or-dered has been consumed, we will not be ordering any more. Therefore, please pack additional beverages for your child, in addition to the milk tickets you send in with them daily. If you have milk tickets remaining after June, they can be redeemed again in September.