STETTLER ELEMENTARY SCHOOL -- With Music Festival, Kindergarten Dance and Earth Day, Stettler Elementary had another exciting and busy week. Music Festival kept our students and staff quite busy. Tuesday was an extremely busy day for the chorus numbers and Wednesday was very busy with Choral Speech entries. We are very proud of all of our students and all of the positive comments that we heard from the adjudicators. Special congratulations go to 3HT and 3KR for being chosen as Adjudicator's choice this year. We would also like to congratulate the grade 3/4 students at Big Valley School who were chosen as Adjudicator's Choice for their classroom choral speech performance, and were asked to perform at the Grand Concert on Sunday. Our grade 2AH ad 2DB classes also ranked very well in this category and were recommended for provincials in Edmonton. We know that there is a great deal of work that is put into all of these performances, so in order to allow students to perform a second time, and to allow fellow school mates to enjoy the performances, we held a festival highlights concert in our gymnasium on Thursday, April 21, for students in grades K-4.
Also on Thursday, we held our annual Kindergarten Family Dance from 6 p.m. – 7 p.m. We had a number of families attend and we had a great deal of fun doing the chicken dance, the hokey pokey, the limbo, the cowboy dance, etc., etc.. The students also had fun playing in the bubbles and with the hola hoops. Overall, a great time was had by all, and we are already looking forward to next year's family dance.
Mrs. Lang and Mrs. Sylvester's Grade 1 classes had a great time synergizing on Friday as they celebrated Earth Day in style. They focussed on helping the earth by walking to West Stettler Park (instead of taking a bus), and they picked up garbage once they arrived. The classes were then put in groups of three where they synergized once again to find certain "Spring" items for their scavenger hunt. The heart shape rock turned out to be the trickiest item to find, but in the end all the groups were successful and found all the items on their list (wow – now that's thinking win/win)! After having a picnic lunch it was time to head to the park or roll down the hill (after all they did work first and now it was time to play). The group returned to the school feeling refreshed and tired. According to Mrs. Sylvester's fitbit, this journey accumulated a total of 10 771 steps! Remember that's adult steps, so the students may have had closer to twice that number of steps. (No wonder they wanted to have naptime in the afternoon). Well done, Grade 1s. Bravo on your willingness to help out our earth!
Our staff and students also worked to help out the earth by taking part in the Swap and Sale. Over the past several weeks, we have had students bring gently used books from home, that they were finished with, into the school in exchange for a credit to be used at the sale. Over 2000 books were swapped and sold throughout the week. Monday and Tuesday was for swappers, and then other students were given an opportunity to purchase "new" books at 25 cents a piece on Wednesday and Thursday. It was fun to see the students excited about their new books and about reading.
Our students are continually learning great things and having fun at school, but this could not happen without professional development opportunities for our teachers. Therefore, Monday, April 25 was a PD Day at the school. On this day, our teachers worked collaboratively to learn more about and to create new Project Based Learning assignments for our students. We are now looking forward to implementing these in our classrooms.