December 18th, 2017

Hello everyone,

Coffee Connections is tomorrow at 9:15 a.m. in the school library.  Join Kristy Gall to make a craft and brainstorm ways to keep kids health and happy and busy over the holidays.  Coffee and treats provided.  All are welcome. If you are interested in meeting privately with Kristy, please contact Ms Givlin in the office to set up an appointment.  Kristy does not work directly with students but is here to listen to parents and help to find the needed support.

The first holiday concert is tomorrow at noon and should be done within an hour.  Guests are asked to bring a donation for the food bank and to remain for the entire performance. Thanks for providing an audience to celebrate student learning.  The gym has been transformed with our students’ seasonal art and the performances are full of joy, enthusiasm, pride and talent.  You are in for a treat!

We have the results from our Jersey Mike’s fundraiser! Through your donations and with the tremendous support of Jersey Mike’s, $1211.25 has been raised to support off-campus excursions.  If the money is not needed for off-campus trips, it will go to supplement our playground fund.

We were not successful in our grant application for the Placemaking Challenge despite our excellent efforts.  There were over 20 applications for the $20 000 grant we applied for but we were near the top which is encouraging.  We need to do a better job showing how the playground will be used by the community in addition to Alpine school.  Stay tuned – our next application will be for the Neighbourhood Matching Grant of $15 000 which we will be submitting in January 2018.  We intend to keep fundraising and applying for grants until we have that new playground.  Alligators never give up!

While we are on the holiday break, we ask parents to support all grades 1-6 students are using Dreambox for three 20-30 minute sessions each week.  We are seeing some very positive gains with the recommended use.  It is not too late to complete the DreamBox survey for parents. Of course, we also hope you will find time to read some great books together!

I am very pleased with how many Alpine staff are on twitter. If you want to see what is happening in our school, please follow us at @alpwrdsb and like and retweet our tweets.

As always, if you have any questions, concerns or celebrations to share, please feel free to contact me at the office.

I am wishing each of our families a wonderful holiday – not the perfect images we see on social media or in movies but time to relax, connect, have fun, work through the problems that arise and just go at a slower pace than usual.  Enjoy!

Ms . Givlin