Welcome Back!

Mrs. Faloon

Primary Language Class

Hello and welcome to a new school year! I hope that everyone had a wonderful and relaxing summer! I know I enjoyed my time with my family!

I was so thrilled to see my returning students and I am very excited

to get to know my new students.

We certainly have had an exciting start to our new school year.  

It has been a very busy few days. We have started some getting-to-

know-you activities, talked about our summer holidays, discussed

school and classroom rules and procedures, and began to establish

routines within the classroom. We even practiced a fire drill so we

know what to do when the first one happens. We are off to a great

start and I know it is going to be a wonderful school year!!

In the next few weeks we will dive right into our learning. I will

be teaching the students about reading and writing strategies and

we will be working on our oral language skills daily. We have

already begun talking about letters and sounds and how they work

together to make words. We have practiced rhyming and syllables

each day.

We read a book called, You're Finally Here! The students drew a

picture and told me all about their summer.

We will begin weekly word wall words shortly. The students will

complete activities within the classroom to practice and learn their

words. The words will be sent home each week for you to practice

with your children. I will write the students words in a book each

week and you can review them with your children. There is no

specific activity that will be required of them, the words are sent

home for reinforcement and to keep you in the loop about what

your children are learning. Feel free to read the words with your

children, write the words with them or simply bring them up in

conversation and talk about their spelling.

We will also begin our Snuggle Up and Read Program soon. I will be sending home their reading folders with a book for your child to read.

For the new families, the concept of the Snuggle Book is that I send home a book for you to snuggle up and read with your child.  While I am sure you have tons of books at home, this is a book that I have chosen to be at your child's reading level. The idea is that you read the book with your child a few times until they can read it to you independently.  This may be right away or it may take a few days.

However long it takes.....no problem! Please keep the book until your child feels comfortable reading it on their own, then you can return it for a new book. In the folder there is a place for you to write whether the book was too easy, too hard or just right.  Please let me know so I can continue to choose appropriate books for each child!

We will begin learning about our Daily Five workstations.

This is valuable learning time that we use to focus on each

child’s individual goals. The stations are set out with each

child’s individual learning needs in mind. It gives them time

to work on skills at their level!

Also in the next few weeks we will be learning some new

games to help with our learning. We love to make learning

feel like playing!

The students are working hard and I am really proud of them.

 It is a lot of work coming to two different schools! I would

like to thank you for your dedication to your child's learning.

Our little class can be best described as a family. We take

care of each other and learn from one another. Our situation

is unique and beautiful. I feel so fortunate to be in a class

where I can focus on each child, assisting each one to meet

their goals. I am looking forward to learning with them

throughout this school year. I know it will be amazing!

Here are just a few little reminders:

Have you checked us out on Twitter yet?

@MrsFaloonPLC

There are tons of pictures and snippets of what we do everyday.

Also, remember that our blog is mrsfaloonplc.blogspot.ca.

We will also be using the SEESAW app again as a way for you to see what is happening in the class. You will be able to sign up and get notifications when your child adds work to their folder. There will be more information sent home about that shortly. Stay tuned!

Transportation: If your child is absent from our Primary Language Class, it is very important that you call the transportation office to cancel the STS drivers (arrival and departure).

The phone number is 613-723- 9677.

Does your child have indoor shoes at St. John the Apostle Catholic

School?   We are requesting that each student brings an extra pair

of shoes that could be left in our classroom. The shoes should be

shoes he/she can put on easily on their own (i.e. without laces if

you child is unable to tie his/her shoes yet).  This will help keep

the class floors neat and tidy. Please be sure to write your child’s

name in the shoes clearly. Please let me know if you have any

concerns about this.

Please label your child’s belongings. It is very helpful to have your

child’s name in their coats, sweaters, lunch bags, backpacks,

shoes and boots!

IEP’s

Your child’s Individual Education Plan is developed in collaboration between the homeschool team, you the parents, and me. The homeschool will send home a draft copy of the IEP in October.  Please take the time to read it carefully. Please remember your input is very important. Please note that a different teacher from St. John the Apostle will be reporting on the Social Studies curriculum for our students.

I hope everyone had a nice week. The first week back is always busy

and hectic and wonderful! Please remember that I am happy to help if

you have any questions or concerns.

Sarah Faloon

Can you believe the end of the school year is only a few days away? We have enjoyed a wonderful year of learning and created many memories, and now it’s time to celebrate our hard work! The children are very excited with the end of the year coming and the new challenges they will be facing in September. Some children will be moving back to their homeschool or moving to another system class while others will be returning to the Primary Language Class. For the children moving out of the program, I wish you more success and happiness, and, I look forward to helping those students returning to St. John the Apostle Catholic School meet new language goals.

We are all ready to enjoy the class party today! I am really looking forward to enjoying the day with the students!

The students will continue to bring home their school work. Please take some time to go through what they have done. 👍

The students will also be bringing home their plants today. Some of them are pretty impressive, but as nature would have it, some did not grow. If your child's plant did not grow, I will be sending home a little package for them to try again!

A big thank-you to all of you for your support and assistance this school year. As parents, you playan important part in helping children meet success. It has been my sincere pleasure working alongside with you to teach your children this year. I have mentioned this in previous posts, but this is the most amazing job in the world. Your children are an incredible joy and they teach me something new everyday. I feel blessed to be in this unique teaching position and I look forward to seeing what the children can accomplish in the future!

Over the summer vacation, I strongly encourage you to help your child continue learning. Read to your child every day and practise writing by using the word wall words that we have been working on all year. Doing one or two activities each day over the summer vacation will help to keep your child’s skills sharp.

A reminder that the St. John the Apostle School BBQ is tomorrow afternoon. Please feel free to join us for some fun starting at 4:00 pm here at the school!!

I hope you enjoy time with each other this summer. Have a happy and safe summer holiday.

God bless you and your family in this summer season!

Sarah Faloon

Wow!  What a beautiful morning! 
I am thrilled to see the sun, to feel the warmth of its glow and to finally get outside without getting wet! It really feels as though we have turned a corner in the weather, and SPRING is here!!

I hope that everyone had a nice weekend enjoying the sun. Now.....time to work! 

As always, we have been quite busy here in the PLC.

In our writing, we are learning about describing. The students have been using their 5 senses to describe many different objects. Some of the students are working towards the goal of writing a descriptive text that includes a topic sentence, 3 details to describe the item, descriptive adjectives, and a concluding sentence. It is a lot of fun looking for ways to describe different things!

During our daily meetings and sharing circles, we incorporate many different Language Development skills. Identifying sounds, deleting sounds, blending sounds and rhyming words are part of our daily discussions. Feel free to try and incorporate these into your conversations at home!! 

We will continue to practice this writing form in large and small groups, and soon enough, the students will begin composing a descriptive text all on their own.

In our reading, we have been working hard and practicing our reading strategies every day! Since the students are at varying places in their reading journeys, students are working on different ways to solve unknown words. Here are the reading strategies that we have been learning about all year. Ask your child which one they use when they are reading and come to a word they do not know! 

  

Good readers use many different strategies to solve words. They also use different strategies to gain a better understanding of what they have read. We have been practicing predicting and inferring as comprehension strategies. Our goal and some success criteria for inferring as a tool to help us remember what we have to do! 

Another thing good readers do is ask questions! We have been working on our goal of using the 5 W's as a way to further understand stories we have read or listened to! 

We have used this chart to remind us of what each of the questions is about. We also talk about lesson was learned in the story. This has been a good way to practice retelling stories! Please feel free to ask your children about the 5 W's in a story when you are reading at home! 

Some other areas that we will begin working on shortly are: 

• comparing and contrasting objects. How are two things similar? How are they different? 
• synonyms, antonyms and multiple meaning words
• Media Literacy: identifying different massages within media 

A few reminders:

*Friday April 27th is a P.D. Day. Enjoy the long weekend!

* If your child is going to be absent, please remember to let transportation know. If you do not have your child's driver's phone number, just call STS at 613-723-9677 and they will let the drivers know. Thank you for support with this! 

*While the sun is out today, Spring days can still be wet! Please consider sending in extra clothing with your child just in case! We do have some extra clothes, but it always better to be safe than sorry.

I hope you have enjoyed reading about our hard work these past few weeks! We will continue to work on these skills.  A reminder that I will continue to post student videos, pictures and work through SeeSaw for you to see. Let me know if you need help accessing the app. 

Happy March everyone!!!

With just one week left before the March Break, we are all very excited here at

St. John the Apostle! There are many fun and interesting days and activities
comingour way! 

The second term is underway and the students have been hard at work.  We are
working on new vocabulary words from different stories, listening comprehension
skills, writing, different parts of speech, phonological awareness, decoding strategies,
and punctuation.

We will begin our study of narratives very soon. We will be looking at the different
parts of a story with specific focus on the 5 W’s (who, what where, when and why).
You can reinforce this skill at home by reading with your children and asking them any
one of these questions while reading. (Who is in this story? Why do you think they
decided to do that? What is happening now? What do you think will happen next?)

The students have continued to work really hard on their writing. We have been
working on sentence structure and how to write proper sentences. Sentences
need to start with a capital letter, have all lower case letters in the middle,
there needs to be finger spaces between the words and there should be punctuation
at the end.
We have been using our Writer's Eye to check and make sure our sentences are correct!

We have started reading our written work out loud to see if we can hear the errors. It is a
strategy that is really helpful for some kids. As we write, we want to get our ideas out on
paper as quickly as we can so we don’t forget anything! This strategy provides a good
opportunity to check to make sure it is in a logical order, has the proper punctuation and
includes everything they had hoped!  I am really proud of how each student has

made gains in their writing! 

This term, we will expand our writing and we will be starting to look at descriptive writing. 
Our goal for this style of writing is for the reader to be able to make a picture in their mind
of the text. The students will learn to use their five senses and descriptive adjectives to write
about people, places, things and events. This will be a fun and long writing unit!

You may have noticed your child talking about a program we have been exploring called
Google Read and Write. We have been learning about this amazing tool that will help us
with our reading and writing tasks. The Grade 3 students have been working on using the
"read" function on the program which will highlight and read a text out loud!
This is a fantastic way to eliminate frustration when text becomes too difficult.
The idea is that the students are familiar and comfortable with this program in
rade 3 so that they can be better self-advocates in their learning in the junior grades.

The students in Grade 1 and 2 have been exposed to the program in whole group activities.
The focus for these students is more on logging into the computer and locating the programs.
They will continue to use these programs in the coming years so that they feel
comfortable and confident in using them throughout their learning. 

This week, as a class, we will be creating a book entitled “Our Lenten Promises”. 
Each student will write down something they would like to work toward during this sacred
time. Ask your child what their Lenten Promise is. 

Throughout the year, the students have been learning about different strategies that
will assist in their reading decoding and comprehension. Last term, we practiced
making predictions and visualization. This term, we will focus on inferring.
The basic idea of inferring is to figure outthe things that the author does not
outright say in a text. 

Next week is the last week before March Break…..can you believe it???

We will continue our focus on Lent and how our actions and words can bring us closer to

Jesus during this solemn season. We will also talk a bit about St. Patrick’s Day. We may even
discuss how we can catch a leprechaun!  Remember to check Twitter to see what fun
activities we are doing!

A few reminders:

Please dress students appropriately for the weather for the day. It can be a challenging time

of year as the weather fluctuates so much! The students should be dressed warmly and ready to be outside. With all of the ice melting and puddles around, sending in an extra pair of clothes, socks and mittens is a great idea!

Please inform STS if your child will not be requiring transportation. If your child is sick, staying at their home school or bring picked up early, please call STS so that they can inform the drivers. The phone number is 613-723-9677. Thank you for your cooperation. 

Our Lenten Projects continue. We continue to collect cans for the Knights of Columbus
and coins for the OK Clean Water Project. Please feel free to send in contributions any time.

Happy Love Day!

Can you believe it is the middle if February already?!

 
January flew by and I have a sneaky suspicion that this is an indication of how quickly the rest of the year will go! Every year I am amazed at how quickly times goes!

As early in the year as it seems, we have already begun discussions about the student's progress and where their learning journeys will take them next year. For some students, they will be returning to their home school full time while other students will be returning here to the PLC at St. John the Apostle for another year in this program. It is necessary for these conversations to happen this early as there are many protocol to follow and some paperwork that needs to be done! I have been lucky enough to have already spoken with many of you about this. Please know that I will be touching base with everyone about the next steps for your child. If I have sent home any documentation for what is upcoming for your child, please fill it in and return it to the school as soon as you can. Feel free to call me if you have any questions about the forms.

Just a reminder that your child's Term 1 report card and IEP will be coming home soon. These reports are completed as a collaboration between myself and the homeschool. They are sent home from your child's homeschool. 

If you would like to discuss your child's progress at all, either on the phone or in person, I am happy to talk with you. I will send home an interview request form at the end of the week. Some schools will be including the Term 2 IEP's in with the reports from Term 1. This means you will be receiving the grades and evaluations of their progress on their expectations from Term 1 as well as the new IEP goals that your child will be working toward in Term 2. Some schools will be sending the Term 2 expectations home at a later date. Regardless of when you will be receiving the Term 2 document, I am happy to go over it with you as well. There is a lot of information in those documents and your voice as the parents is important. Your input on the IEP is encouraged! 

We have been really busy here in the Primary Language Class! So much learning and many exciting events have happened in the past few weeks!  

The students have been doing a great job with their word wall words. Just as a reminder, I send the words home each week in their notebooks. You are welcome to work through the words as you would like. As I have mentioned before, I completely understand that your lives are busy and there are so many other things you would like to be doing with your children that are not homework! That being said, exposure to these words is extremely beneficial. Repetition and daily use of these words will improve their recognition of the words, alleviating some stress while learning to read. There are many different apps and programs that focus on sight words as well. Please let me know if you would like some information regarding these useful sites. 

Lately, we have been exploring different technological tools to help us in our learning. The students have been working in an app called SeeSaw. We used this program last year and, and the students who were familiar with it were able to teach the new students about it! With this program, they can record their learning in picture, photograph and video format. They are many options including taking a video, recording their voice or show their learning by drawing. They are all able to independently record their learning and store it in their own file. I am pretty impressed with the ease of which they have picked it up!  

I have also introduced an app called Google Read and Write to the Grade 3 students. This is a tool that they will be using to help them gain independence as a learner. This program helps students with reading, comprehension, vocabulary and writing. I am very excited to teach the students this tool as I hope they will be able to use it independently in the junior grades. I will also be introducing this tool to the Grade 1 and 2 students later in the year. 

Today is Valentine's Day! The students will be working on different literacy stations to showcase their learning.

Check out Twitter to see some of the fun! @MrsFaloonPLC

Today is also Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent. This afternoon, students will gather in the gymnasium to hear Father Lindsay from St. John the Apostle Parish talk about this important liturgical season. The students will receive ashes on their foreheads.

The students will also be thinking about the importance of a Lenten Promise. They will be writing one Lenten promise (for example: I will help mom with dishes, I will be kind to my friends at school, etc.).  We will revisit these promises often throughout this liturgical season.  It is our hope that parents will continue to encourage their children to make positive choices at home as well (for example: completing chores at home for a small amount of money) in support of our school-wide initiative with the OK Clean Water.
Please see this information for what is coming up in the next few weeks to support our Lenten Projects.

OK CLEAN WATER     

40 cans for lent!

St. John the Apostle’s

LENTEN PROJECTS

BACKGROUND: Ottawa-Kumbo (OK) Partnership

The OK Clean Water Project takes its name from the link that has been developed between Ottawa, Canada and Kumbo, Cameroon, Africa. The volunteers in Ottawa raise funds to support the water delivery systems being built in Kumbo and surrounding villages. The villagers in and around Kumbo volunteer their labour to build the water delivery structures and then receive training to manage and maintain the water supply. In doing so they establish ownership of their efforts.

40 Cans for Lent  We will be working with other schools in our area, St. John the Apostle Church, and the Knights of Columbus to raise 2000 lbs of food which will be shared with Morrison Gardens and Pinecrest Terrace Food Bank. Bring in a can or two every Tuesday during Lent and we’ll arrange a pick up from your classroom.  We will begin collecting every Tuesday beginning on Shrove Tuesday, February 14th.

Events- Mark your Calendars

Wednesday, Feb 14th       Launch of our OK Clean Water Project and 1000 lbs of Food on Ash Wednesday.

Friday, Feb 23rd  Jersey Day/ Hat Day. Make a donation to wear your favourite team jersey and/ or hat.  Some friendly contests will be held during the day.

Thursday, March 1th    Mile of Coins Day.   Let’s line the halls with our loose change donations and see if we can’t go all of the way around the library.  How many coins would it take to do that?  

Friday, March 9th     PJ DAY! Make a donation to OK Clean Water and wear your favourite PJs for the day.

Friday,  March 29th    Presentation of our school donation to Ms. Horan and the OK Clean Water Project at our April Assembly.

We are encouraging students to donate coins from their allowance or money they have earned so that, in a very real way, their efforts and donations are making a direct and positive impact on the lives of others.

Next week is Winter Olympic Spirit and Kindness week. There are many things scheduled for the week. Please take a look at what we have going on!

• Winter Activity Day: For grades 1-6, our winter activity events are Wednesday morning.  Spirit and Participation  points will be awarded for each event, except the hot chocolate station. Our station leaders (St. Paul students) will award the spirit and participation points.   
• We will be having a winter fun block for the afternoon class! Stay tuned for more information!
• Hot chocolate for all. Donations will be collected in homeroom class.
• All outdoor activities are weather dependent.
• Monday is Family Day.

DAY	TUESDAY, FEB 20	WEDNESDAY, FEB 21	THURSDAY, FEB 22	FRIDAY, FEB 23
THEME	TEAM CANADA DAY DRESS IN YOUR RED AND WHITE	OLYMPIC SPIRIT DAY	PAY IT FORWARD THURSDAY	ALL ABOUT SJA FRIDAY BLUE AND GOLD
ACTIVITY		Grades 1-6 Winter Activity Events AM (St Paul Students)	Rosary Leaders in AM	Back-Up Day for Winter Activity 1-6  AM Assembly: Block 4 Class Spirit Songs, Chants, Dances. Spirit Winners!