ROYAL OAK COMMUNITY SCHOOL
Jan 31, 2025
JANUARY UPDATE
Dear Royal Oak Families,
Happy New Year and Gong Hei Fat Choi as the Lunar New Year begins this week!
It has been a January to remember, with record snow, cold temperatures, but winter as us parents remember from our childhood. Snow, tobogganing, skating and true Canadiana outdoor play!
Coming back after the holidays is always a wonderful gauge of our students' progress here at school. Within a day, they are well adjusted to their well known routines, and deeply invested in new units, and there’s an audible hum of learning that is focused and meaningful here at Royal Oak. "The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist." -Maria Montessori
Our classroom updates are below to give you a good sense of the learning in each classroom, and where things are headed as we move forward. Reports will be sent home via Toddle on February 21, and these will inform you further of your child’s wonderful progress thus far.
Planning for 2025/2026 is underway here in the office, and linked below you will see our new 2025/2026 school calendar.
This calendar has a noticeable shift I’d like to inform you about, as we have built three new Professional Development days into the school year, and added these days to the end of the school year in June. Our rationale is that we have been invited to visit the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto for days of full staff learning, and this can only be done mid-school year and on days the Lab School itself is open and running. We hope this extension of the school year further into June is a good adjustment for you, our families, and I remind you that whenever Royal Oak is closed, we have a PD camp running to ensure that you have the childcare you need! You will in this newsletter, multiple forms to sign up for upcoming opportunities, including one for our PD camp next week, our March Break Camp, and even Summer Camp which runs for 8 weeks in June, July and August: 2024/25 Camps Form
Other forms to sign up for below include:
Skating at the Pillar and Post next Friday, February 7
The Ice Dogs Game on March 21 with a signing of the National Anthem by Royal Oak Students
You will notice in our skating sign up for next week, we are asking families who may have extra skates that no longer fit, or spare helmets, if you can loan these to children at the school who might not have the gear they need to participate. It is very important to us that any extra opportunities we may offer for our students are available and open to all, and that equitable access is within reach. If so, please send these in ahead of time to the office clearly labelled, and we will match them with a child who needs them!
Julia Murray, Head of School
REPORTS
Term 2 reports will be live on Friday, February 21st on Toddle. This round of reports will reflect a more detailed assessment of the students including topics that have been covered and assessed since September. Teachers have been working very diligently to articulate how wonderful all the students have been doing and what their next steps are for the remainder of the year. Please reach out to your child’s teacher with any questions or concerns as the school will not be providing formal Parent/Teacher conferences this round of reports.
Valentine’s Day:
Jump Rope for Heart and Stroke Fundraiser
Again this February, ROCS students will participate in Jump Rope for Heart and Stroke to empower kids to build healthy habits for a healthy life and learn the importance of giving. Our school community will be participating on Thursday, February 13th as part of our Valentine's Day activities. So many of our families are affected by Heart Disease and Stroke that we are again raising money for this important cause. A little goes a long way to help fund research and treatments for heart disease and stroke. If there are any questions please contact Ms. Dennis.
Clubs Began Monday, January 20th
Just a reminder that clubs started on Monday, January 20th and will run until the week of March 3rd. We have some great offerings this Winter term:
Monday: Games Club, Crochet/Knitting Club, Primary/Primary Junior Homework Club
Tuesday: Chess Club
Wednesday: Lego Club, Primary/Primary Junior & Middle School Homework Club
Thursday: Cocoa Club/Outdoor Winter Play Club
Friday: French drop-in homework club
Spring Club selections will be announced after March Break and will begin the week of April 7th.
Camp Wenonah and Week Without Walls Update
Our annual overnight camp and Week Without Walls trips are fast approaching again this year! This year the Primary/Junior, Junior Middle and Upper Middle students are invited to attend Camp Wenonah from June 3th to June 6th while our Early Years and Primary students will be staying for Week Without Walls. We will be fundraising again this year to bring down the cost of these trips. Last year, with our Coffee Cafe Friday mornings and our big Community Bake Sale in May, we raised about $2500 towards the cost of the trips. We are again fundraising and we hope to make just as much money this year. The cost will roughly be $475 per student for 4 days, 3 nights and all meals and activities included. This is with no fundraising. We are aiming to reduce this price by at least $150 with the added Coffee Cafe mornings and Community Bake sale. The community bake sale is tentatively booked for Saturday, May 10th from 9:30am to 2:30pm. A down payment of $100 will be needed by March 7th- this information will be given in a few weeks to those that signed up on the interest form. Please let Ms. Dennis know if you have any questions specific to the camp and its programming.
SEUSSICAL THE MUSICAL JR IS ALMOST HERE!
Only a month to go until the big show on Friday, February 28 at the Community Centre! With the show quickly approaching please ensure that students are bringing in their needed costumes no later than February 12th. This also means that anyone who has volunteered to make props or bring in set pieces should also bring them in by that time. Ms.McMakin and Ms.N will be hosting a Seussical Information night on Monday, February 3rd from 4:00 pm until 4:30 pm to answer any questions about costumes or props. Thank you, everyone, for your help in getting ready for one of our biggest productions! Looking forward to seeing everyone on show day!
Character Awards
January’s character trait was Resilience. The Upper Middle Class presented a wonderful discussion about what it means to be resilient and why it is important to remember to persevere throughout the year. Our character award winners are as follows and won a free out of uniform day to use in the month of February.
Early Years: Harry S.
Primary: Angela L.
Primary Junior: Scarlett H.
Junior Middle: Kiernan A.
Upper Middle: Vivian H
JANUARY CLASSROOM UPDATES |
EARLY YEARS
Happy New Year from Early Years! We came back from the break ready to continue growing and learning at tremendous rates. It was so nice getting to see all of the students again after our Winter Break. Not only did we move to a new space in the school, we were also extremely lucky to welcome three new friends into our classroom community. In Literacy, we’ve started learning about Letter Blends and Digraphs. The students are putting their knowledge of letter sounds to use to help them decode the different blends. The Secret Stories book and posters in our class are also helping to teach us some of the trickier letter sounds that we can’t decode. We’ve also continued our daily Heggerty lessons, where we are learning to listen to words and identify if they rhyme, what sound they hear at the beginning, middle, and end of words, breaking words into syllables, and much more. In Math, we’ve been working hard to sort objects in various ways, including by size, shape, colour, and more. We started off the New Year with a Health unit on Feelings and Emotional Regulation. Next, we’ll be jumping into learning about different states of matter, which will allow us to do some very fun experimentation.
PRIMARY
Happy New Year!!
Welcome 2025!! Amazing that another year has come and gone. Over the Winter Break, Royal Oak School was a busy place! Three classrooms underwent changes - the Early Years students moved to the French Wing, the Primary students moved to the Early Years Wing and the French room moved to the Primary classrooms. The Primary students are LOVING our new larger space, with a much bigger main room to move about freely. The Primary students enjoy flexible seating for all subjects and are allowed to choose a space in the room that is best for their learning. Our larger carpet area allows for more productive large group learning and activities. The extra wall space allows anchor charts to be displayed for student reference during activities. So much learning is happening in Primary! Returning to school after New Year’s, students learned about New Year’s Resolutions by listening to the story, Squirrel’s New Year’s Resolutions by Pat Miller. After a class discussion, students wrote and illustrated their own relevant resolutions for the new year. Our math focus for the month was learning all about two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional solids. Students were active participants in the creation of colourful anchor charts that they refer to daily while completing various tasks. Students have engaged in many hand-on games and activities within this unit to solidify their understanding of these shapes and solids. As always, Inquiry has been our time of exploration, investigation and research. January was a month of student-led learning of Winter Holidays, that focused on family traditions and celebrations. As well, our Morning Meetings were a time when we learned about personal hygiene and the importance of dental health and care. Wonder Wednesdays began this month. Students present a question/wondering to their classmates and students provide answers in a large group discussion, focussing on turn-taking and respectful listening. Finally, students visited the domes at The Ice Wine Festival as an introduction to our next Inquiry unit, Everyday Materials, Objects, and Structures. Looking forward to seeing what the Primary students will create while learning about structures!
PRIMARY JUNIOR
Happy New Year! Our class has had a wonderful start to the term. Students worked hard in our multiplication and division unit, mastering the concepts and even saying the unit test was fun! We’ve now started our measurement unit, reviewing what we remember from last year and diving into non-standard and standard units. Students have enjoyed measuring objects around the school and exploring conversions between millimeters, centimeters, and meters.
In Language, we continue our Daily 5 rotations, focusing on cursive writing, grammar corrections, and our novel study of The Wild Robot. We’re wrapping up our opinion/persuasive writing unit and will begin narrative writing next. Our mini grammar lessons have covered types of sentences, antonyms, synonyms, and different types of nouns.
In Inquiry, we’ve finished our Social Studies unit on Communities in Canada and have moved on to strong and stable structures, connecting it to both our igloo project and the natural structures found in The Wild Robot.
In Art, we’ve explored the connection between reading and art, creating beautiful bookmarks for our current books. We’re now focusing on pottery and sculpture, where we will look at the Japanese art of Kintsugi.
A huge congratulations to our class for winning the reward this month—yay! To celebrate, we’ll be decorating clay bowls through bubble painting, guided by "From The Art Studio."
With the beautiful snow, we finished our work early one day and enjoyed sledding with the Upper Middles. If both classes get their work done early, we may have more opportunities to enjoy the winter weather together.
It’s been a busy and exciting start to the year, and we couldn’t be more proud of our students’ progress! Keep up the great work!
JUNIOR MIDDLE
Happy New Year! We have welcomed the new year with open arms and open minds. To kick off the school year, the students each came up with a word to guide their 2025 year. These words included "belief", "artistic", "friendship", "social", "hope", "leader", and "sport"! All of these words are displayed in our classroom as a reminder for each student as we go through our time together.
With a new year comes new units! We have launched our "Structures and Forces" unit in connection to our novel study, Safe as Houses. In the novel, the class is reading about 3 children's experiences with Hurricane Hazel in Weston, Ontario in 1954. While reading the novel, the students are learning about the structure of a story as we are mapping out character developments, important plot points, and predictions for future events in the novel. This connects to our Inquiry unit as we are beginning to explore how human and animal-made structures are created to withstand natural phenomena like hurricanes.
It was been a wintery and cold start to the year, but that hasn't stopped us from enjoying the outdoors! The students have been enjoying playing and creating in the snow whenever we can. We will continue this outdoor exploration are we look at local structures, both human and animal-made.
In math, the class has mastered their multiplication and division skills and moved on to Measurement and Spatial Sense. These units will connect to our Inquiry and Language units as we will explore how we can use measurements to make houses to withstand forces.
It has been a fantastic start to the school year, and I cannot wait to see what February brings!
UPPER MIDDLE
Happy New Year Upper Middle families! As January comes to an end it has been very busy in the Upper Middle classroom. In math we are wrapping up our unit on transformations by designing board games that challenge peers to demonstrate their knowledge of transformations in fun and creative ways. In Language Arts we continue our novel study of The Maze Runner where students have been challenged to demonstrate their comprehension of characters, setting and plot in a variety of creative comprehension activities. As we move into the back half of the novel students will test their inferencing skills through predictions as well as their ability to identify and justify key events in the story. In inquiry students are taking a deep dive into the War of 1812 and learning about the history that is all around them.
Outside of the classroom, students are continuing to prepare for the upcoming Seussical the Musical Jr. Our Upper Middle students take on leadership roles in our community in the form of lunchroom monitors and ambassadors of the school during our recent open house. Our students have also been working to make our Coffee Cafe a hit! Keep your eyes peeled for our next Coffee Cafe morning! The Upper Middle class also had the opportunity to visit the NOTL museum to allow students to explore artefacts from the War of 1812 and learn about the events of the war. Clubs have begun at Royal Oak and Upper Middle students have had a creative start to these clubs in Crochet Club and Art and Prop Club. We are looking forward to an exciting February of enriching learning activities and experiences!
ROCS Anthem at the Ice Dogs- Friday, March 21st.
The tradition continues as ROCS is again welcomed back to the Meridian Centre in St. Catharines to sing the anthem at an Ice Dogs game. It will be on Friday, March 21st which is the last day of our March break but we are hoping to have a good crew to sing and then cheer on the team. The anthem performance will start at 7pm. We ask that all ROCS students who will be singing to enter through the community entrance with their tickets, and everyone else not singing through our main box office, where they can go to their seats. Our school will be seated right across from where the anthem will be performed, so parents and family will have a great view! After the performance, we will direct the choir/parents back to their seats to enjoy the game, giveaways and prizes for the evening. Please fill out the attached google form to let us know your intentions for the game this year. Unfortunately, we will need to know well in advance who will be attending so that we can make arrangements during the March Break. Let Ms. Dennis know if you have any questions. ROCS Ice Dogs Anthem Sing Form
ICE ON THE YARD - PHOTO of kids on ice and warning to parents!!!
Please be aware that there are slippery spot on our play area and in the main parts of the courtyard and side yard. These have been marked with coloured disks but with the weather being unpredictable, please be aware that there might be ice under the snow at drop-off and pick-up.
Please reach out to admin if you have any questions or concerns.
PILLAR AND THE POST SKATING - FRIDAY, FEB 7 2pm to 3:30pm Grades Primary to Upper Middle will be going skating at the Pillar and the Post outdoor skating rink. Parents are welcome and encouraged to come if children need one on one support to skate. Please sign up with the Google Form HERE https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfnOv1jh80T_svh1Xp0o8iTXYEmnlEzAPPKVLFS0W5mJu1WAg/viewform Each student is to bring skates and a helmet in a labelled bag. Bags will be collected from morning pick up zones and will be driven over for students. Any non-skaters can play with supervision of a teacher in the gardens adjacent to the skating rink. If you have extra skates or equipment to loan, please bring them to the office administrator clearly labelled and we will pair them with a child who doesn’t have any equipment. We will return them to you after the skate! If you need to borrow skates, please email the office and let us know your child’s foot size and we can do our best to find you a match. |
A Look Ahead at ROCS:
Important Dates:
Friday, February 7th- ROCS skating day at The Pillar and The Post (Pick-up at The Pillar and The Post skating rink at 3:30pm).
Thursday, February 13th- Jump Rope for Heart and Stroke School Fundraiser
Friday, February 14th- PD Day (Day Camp is available)
Monday, February 17th- Family Day Holiday- SCHOOL CLOSED
Friday, February 21st- Reports go live on Toddle (3:30pm)
Wednesday, February 26th- PINK Shirt day to Celebrate Anti-bullying in the morning, PM-ROCS student pick-up at NOTL Community Centre at 3:30pm from Seussical Rehearsal
Friday, February 28th- Seussical the Musical practice and performance. Pick-up at NOTL community centre for all students at 3:30pm. Performance will begin at 6pm. Students need to be at the NOTL Community Centre no later than 5:30pm.
March 10th to 21st- March Break
Friday March 21st- ROCS students sing the anthem at the Ice Dogs game, 6pm
February 2025
March Break And ROCS Summer Academy
Registration is LIVE for March Break Camp!
Register on our website or using the 2024/25 Camps Form.
Mark your calendars... Royal Oak Summer Academy is back! Registration information will be shared on the website, or you can fill out the ROCS Summer Academy Registration Form. New this year - if you refer a new family and they register their child, you will both receive a 10% discount on one full week of camp!
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