From the office of the Principal

It is a pleasure to have your children at Holy Cross School. It has also been a wonderful journey for all of us at Holy Cross. After opening our doors on December 10, 2007 we have grown and developed in culture and learning.

I would like to remind you of our school mission statement:

At Holy Cross School ...

Our students are preparing for a changing world by:

· Learning to value

· Learning to follow Jesus

· Learning to learn ...

We make a difference ... for life.

Our culture of Social Justice has evolved with the leadership of Mrs. Wight and all teachers through the Youth Ministry Program. This Social Justice is strongly supported by a very strong moral intelligence program where your children are exposed to and expected to enhance their own skills in virtues such as, empathy, conscience, self-control, kindness, respect, tolerance, perseverance and fairness,

Our teachers continue to upgrade themselves throughout each year with various professional development as needed.

Teachers at Holy Cross regularly are involved in peer observations and lesson study. This is the idea of teachers watching teachers teach to improve instruction.

Some of the benefits to this are;

1. Trying recently learned professional development in the classroom

2. Enhancing and improving instruction by analyzing what works and what needs to change.

3. Enhancing the learning of new teachers to our district.

So with all this being said, please be aware that at any given time and day your children may have more than one teacher in their classroom involved in their learning.

A more recent addition to our Fine Arts program has been the expertise and talents of Mrs. Petterson, who leads our music instruction.

Teaching and learning at Holy Cross is about challenging and encouraging your children as we work to form and inform them both academically and spiritually.

Please remember that we are here to help your children be successful at school and enjoy the school experience. If there is any way that I can be of assistance for you or your children in the Holy Cross School experience, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely,

Will Baker, Principal

PLC at Holy Cross School:

In Lakeland Catholic Schools and at Holy Cross School we are lucky to have 18 early dismissal Wednesdays set aside for Teacher Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). These PLCs focus on the improvement of your child's instruction. This early dismissal does not detract from the mandated 950 hours of instruction that students in elementary schools in Alberta are required to complete during the year.

What do teachers do during these PLCs?

• They work on improving instruction for your children.

• Wednesday PLCs time provide teachers with this time to collaborate with colleagues, talk about what is working and implement new professional learning in their classrooms.

• Part of this learning also includes videos of our teachers teaching, so that their practice can be viewed and discussed.

• Peer observations (where from time to time teachers observe colleagues teaching in their classroom) are planned and discussed.

• These videos and observations are used during PLC time to promote improved instructional practice and better learning situations for your children.

• In our Coyote Creed the letter “C” stands for “Community of Learners”. At Holy Cross School both our teachers and students are learning all the time.

• PLCs provide opportunities for all of the above to happen effectively.

A good analogy about improving instruction would be that, just as information techniques and methods in the medical field are always changing so is the education field. We would not want our doctors to be using the same practices and technology from decades gone by, Similarly, teachers can no longer teach in exactly the same manner, as they would have when we were students. Certainly good teaching is good teaching, however, technology is changing our world and the way students learn. Holy Cross teachers place an importance on ensuring students are engaged and that “learning is the work” for both teachers and students at our school.

I hope that you appreciate that this early dismissal Wednesday time is not about “more time off for teachers”, but rather about improving instruction and improving our world by creating good citizens who can learn how to learn.

This matches well with our school mission statement:

At Holy Cross School ...

Our students are preparing for a changing world by:

· Learning to value

· Learning to follow Jesus

· Learning to learn ...

We make a difference ... for life.