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The OSCAR - OUR 40 th YEAR Page 34 MAY 2012 Kathy Ablett, R.N. Trustee Zone 9 Capital/River Wards Telephone: 526-9512 Catholic Education Foundation EduGala Come join us for the seventh annual CEFO benefit dinner, auction & cabaret May 3rd, 2012. Remember this unique event sold out last year and there was a waiting list, so book early!!!! If you have questions regarding ticket orders, please contact CEFO Board Member Karen Delaney at 613-831-4567, or by e-mail at karenldelaney@hotmail.com. All proceeds from this and all previous highly successful Galas have and will continue to go to CEFO’s “Helping to Alleviate Poverty in Our Schools” program. Hope to see you there!!! Catholic Education Week Catholic Education Week is an OCCSB TRUSTEE REPORT “PUTTING STUDENTS FIRST” opportunity to celebrate our schools’ excellence, faith and community. This is the time to highlight all the wonderful educational experiences and activities that our schools are already doing! Catholic Education Week begins on Sunday, May 7 and ends on Friday, May 11, 2012. The theme for Education week this year is Catholic Education: ‘Walking in the Light of Christ’. Please check with your school for a list of activities planned for this special week. Immaculata High School Immaculata High School Principal Danielle Novak will receive the Director of Education Commendation Award at the Education Week Mass at Notre Dame Basilica on Tuesday, May 8 at 7 pm. Congratulations Danielle! Also during Education Week Immaculata with celebrate with an Arts Night (May 9) and a spaghetti supper followed by a Silent Auction. Please contact Immaculata for dates and times. Corpus Christi At Corpus Christi School, spring also means lots of great music. In April, the school hosted TJ Wheeler, an internationally known musician as part of the Council-sponsored ‘Music to My Ears’ program. TJ provided music workshops and programming to all the students in the school and performed a concert for students and parents as part of his ‘week in residence’ at Corpus. Nurses Corner: May is Physical Activity Month. Help Kids Get Active! Celebrate physical activity month by getting kids moving every day in May! Kids need to do physical activities that make them sweat and breathe hard, like bike riding and ice skating, every day. Kids also need to do activities that help build muscles and bones, like playing on monkey bars and skipping. Physical activity can help kids: • Improve their health • Do better in school • Improve their mood • Learn new skills. Did you know families can By Kimberly Connolly borrow pedometers from Ottawa Public Libraries? To find out more information about borrowing pedometers as a way to stay active, go to ottawalibrary.ca For more information about physical activity call Ottawa Public Health at 613 580-6744 or go to www. ottawa.ca/health Board Spiritual Theme 2012 – 2013 The Board’s new spiritual theme is “By our works, we show our faith.” This new theme calls us to live our faith fully and to recognize that all we do is born out of our life as children of God and is based on James 2: 16- 18. This theme will provide a sound basis for actions, service and prayer at schools. The past two years the Board’s theme has been ‘Though Many We Are One Body in Christ.” If, at any time, I can be of assistance to you please do not hesitate to call me at 526-9512. Sincerely, Kathy Ablett “Your Trustee” Learning About How Ottawa Kids Think Are you fascinated by how much children change from the time they’re three-years-old to the time they’re six? You’re not alone! The members of the Children’s Representational Development Lab (CRDL) at Carleton University are too. They are a group of enthusiastic researchers who are interested in learning more about how children’s thinking changes throughout the preschool and childhood years. “We are called the Children’s Representational Development Lab because we study how young children understand different kinds of representations. We’re interested in what children know about symbolic representations like words, numbers, and pictures and how they can stand for ideas and concepts, or for actual objects in the world - the way the pictures on a map stand for the location of buildings and streets. We’re also interested in what children know about other people’s knowledge and intentions, which are considered mental representations.” says Dr. Deepthi Kamawar, head of the Children’s Representational Development Lab (CRDL) at Carleton University. “The researchers in my group, undergraduate and graduate students, use stories and games like those many kids are familiar with – such as Memory and Simon Says – to help them figure out more about how kids learn to use different symbols and representational systems. Representational understanding can be anything from using symbols on a map to find stickers hidden in a room, to keeping track of what different story characters know or do not know about story events.” said the Ottawa Professor. For instance, Andrea Astle, a PhD student in Kamawar’s lab, is looking into how children design and produce symbols and legends to help them find items in a memory game. She has children create a legend with crayons to keep track of where different toys belong, and then later has them use their legends to put the toys away. “The different symbol elements they use in their legends, like the colours and shapes of the toys, tells us a lot about how children’s symbolic understanding develops” says Andrea, “We are really interested in the kinds of things that kids think are important to include in their legends, and the kinds of things that they may leave out!” To look at kids’ ability to consider more than one property of an object, Gal Podjarny (another PhD student in the lab) is using picture cards. Cont’d on page 37
MAY 2012 Southside By Paige Raymond Kovach Southside Board Member Southside Preschool currently offers programming for children aged two to nine and serves about 100 Old Ottawa South families. It has been a part of our community for over 30 years. The current provincial government plans to make full-day kindergarten available for all schools and at Hopewell Avenue Public School full-day kindergarten will begin in September 2014. This political reality required that the Southside Preschool Board review its current programs, its business model, and plan for the future without its Kinders programs. This was obviously a serious challenge to the organization, and the goal was to keep Southside in existence and vibrant for Old Ottawa South families. In other communities, such as Barrhaven, where full-day kindergarten already exists, all programming for children aged four and five has been drastically reduced or has simply ceased. In February, the Southside Board unanimously adopted a three-year plan to help ease the transition for Southside into this new educational and economic reality. The focus of Southside’s programming will shift towards revitalizing and developing the nursery school, focusing on curriculum development for the community’s youngest children, as well as continuing to offer an engaging and improved After School Program for Hopewell students. Starting this past fall, Southside educators began the process of implementing a new curriculum that is childcentred and interest-driven. It builds on the relationship that already exists with the Early Childhood Educator and the children, and moves away from a focus on toys, equipment and pre-planned or repetitive structures and activities. Early Childhood Educators are interactive with children during ‘play’ in order to develop activities that increase skills geared to the interests of the child. The child is at the centre of learning. Programming is more spontaneous, far less linear, and focuses on implementing a particular interest through a range of pedagogical activities geared to different learning objectives. “For example, the educator would notice children asking a lot of questions about the changes in the weather, so she would lead activities about spring,” said Joanne Iob, Southside Director. “As she talks about spring, she realizes everyone is fascinated by bees. So she would take this interest and focus on it using the different areas of skill development. The first activity may be building a beehive with the big blocks. They would talk about building the beehive, and it would be used as a tool for expressive and receptive language development, and the children would develop their large muscle group and co-operative play in the building process. The children may need to use their problem solving skills with the large group social interaction surrounding the building.” “The class may decide to include preparing a special snack with honey to enhance further language skills while utilizing their sense of taste, sight, touch.” “The children decide that they need bees to live in the beehive so they would proceed to the free art shelf to make bees (depending on the skill level, the educator may have tracers for the children and an example of a bee), this process would enhance the fine motor skills by using the pincer grasp to hold a pencil, using the scissors and gluing the pieces together. The activity would also increase the children’s expressive imaginative development.” “Moving to the book area the educator would read a book about bees sparking more language development and pre-reading skills in distinguishing the letter that bee begins with. This may open a dialogue about other things that begin with ‘B’ or the letter that begins their name. Counting the bees (pre-math) and making a chart on what the children know about bees would lead to songs and perhaps ending our time with the children using their imagination by pretending to be bees, “ said Joanne. “Our now 6-year-old son Finley has been at The OSCAR - OUR 40 th YEAR Page 35 Southside Preschool Plans for its Future Southside for two years, beginning with his junior kindergarten year at Hopewell,” said Julie Greene, mother of two. “Since he spends the majority of his day at Southside, most of the news we get about his days springs from his activities at Southside. Like many children of this age, our son does not provide us with a fulsome report on his days, so I have to reply on snippets of conversation to understand what he is focused on at “school” (which includes Southside).” “Over the last two years I have definitely noted new topics areas entering Fin’s conversation – he tells us little facts about the weather, the planets or insects, as what he has learned gets applied to our home, something we see in the car, or on our neighborhood walks,” said Julie. “I distinctly recall the time he dropped the word ‘chrysalis’ into our conversation, and that’s when I knew that they were studying the lifecycle of a butterfly at school – although Fin certainly didn’t describe is that way!” “Lately I have ascertained that they are focused on hockey at Southside right now – a topic of great interest to all the kids there, relevant given the 67s and Sens playoff runs and almost certainly organically derived from the children’s own interest in the sport and its heroes. I understand from Fin that they have experienced and learned about hockey both through stories, magazines and discussions – as well as trying out their skills in a paper-based/sock-feet game, as well as learning to set up a hockey rink and follow the rules of the game. Their discussions also covered violence in hockey and I got to probe around how Fin feels about seeing fighting in this game.” “I will say that while we don’t get a daily report on what Fin has learned in school that day, I have learned to listen between the lines of conversational snippets that are sometimes -- but not always – connected to our current context or conversation so that we can understand what he is working on, how we can enhance learning at home or apply what he has learned to our context. For this is truly how learning happens!” “Fin is always thrilled to run into Southside each morning, no doubt in large part due to the caring and committed staff there, who understand that every child gets excited about different things and learn in different ways. I never feel that Fin is missing out on learning opportunities that full-day kindergarten can provide, as I know Southside is very focused on learning through play – a nice transition between pre-school and Grade 1.” Southside’s Early Childhood Educators will also note a child’s attainment of a milestone on the Tree of Success. It is a visual tool for the children, educators and parents to monitor the skills achieved by each child throughout the school year. “The markers on our tree are Social, Self-Help, Manners, Problem Solving, Task Completion, Pre-Reading, Pre-Math, Language, Fine and Gross Motor and Respect. When the child masters a skill, his or her name is added onto the branch of the tree,” said Joanne. “We also inform parents of our daily interactions with their children using picture boards, newsletters (updated on our web site www. southsidepreschool.ca), our programming chart, Tree of Success, and educators’ conversations directly with parents and caregivers at drop-off or pick-up.” Staff are currently being trained in the new curriculum and it is being implemented in stages over the next two years. In addition, there are also plans to explore and develop further nursery school age programming options involving expanded age groups and/or hours of care, workshops and speakers for parents and caregivers, and adding the Family Zone, a drop-in for parents and their children once a week with an Early Childhood Educator on-site to facilitate learning and answer any questions that the parent may want to ask. For the After School Program, in addition to adapting the new curriculum for the older age group, a variety of “rejuvenation” strategies are being explored including homework supervision, community involvement, longer term projects, and specialty days centred on science, weather or math. All of these adaptations (and more) are being tested and refined during the next two years to enable the renewed and improved programs to “hit the ground running” in fall 2014. It will be a busy two years of development and exploration, but one that the teachers and board are excited about. Southside families save the date The famous end-of-year barbecue at Brewer Park will be held on Tuesday, June 26, 2012 at 5:30 p.m. Families are encouraged to bring their own drinks. Please look for sign-up sheets for pot-luck foods on the notice boards outside the classrooms soon. As always, Joanne assures that the weather will be fabulous! See you there!
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Page 13 and 14: MAY 2012 BOOK REVIEW Publisher: Anc
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Page 17 and 18: MAY 2012 NOTES FROM THE GARDEN CLUB
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