Letter Shared with Staff Today

Welcome back!

I hope everyone had a good summer and you all got a chance to spend some time doing the things you wanted to do! I’m looking forward to another year of watching and being a part of the amazing things that happen every day at George Waters.

Our three main goals, again, this year are Literacy, Numeracy, and Relationships. We do an amazing job reaching all of our students and we have made some adjustments to further better our ability to reach even more kids.

A main teaching focus for all of us is enhancing our student’s higher order thinking skills and learning skills in Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, Citizenship, and Character in all classes. Kids should be saying things to their teachers, friends and parents like ’Look what I created!’ not ‘Look what I filled out’. This is not necessarily easy work but it certainly is important work. Easy would be getting kids busy with worksheet after worksheet. I encourage you to design lessons that get kids to ask questions and solve problems on topics that are relevant to them. Get them involved in designing parts of their lessons and how they will be assessed. The bottom line for all kids at GW is to ‘Get Involved’. Getting them involved in their lessons is a great way to build relationships and get them learning.

I encourage everyone to connect with another classroom within the SJASD, the city, province or anywhere else in the world using Skype or Google Hangout (or some other means of connecting) on a topic your class wants to learn more about. Get kids to show what they know to a larger audience than just their classroom. Ask them to share their work to people beyond the walls of your classroom and our school.

If we have a staff that is working together and all of our students are engaged and having fun we will have a safe and happy school. Let’s work together to maintain a school that has high standards but is flexible to take care of every one of our kids and staff. I know we will all work hard to develop a classroom community that accepts all of our kids and make our classrooms a place that everyone wants to attend EVERY DAY.

I found this image over the summer and it would be amazing if, as a school, we could check off each item. We already have a few checked off even before we start.

Looking forward to a great year together!

Mr. Mead and Mr. Abram