Principal’s Message September 2018

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Luke 10:27

The school bell rang, the doors were unlocked and 343 students, some with their parents, came rushing in. The hallway was filled once again with the patter of feet, this year on freshly installed flooring, the excited smiles on faces after seeing friends for the first time in 2 months and backpacks full of finely sharpened pencils and clean unmarked erasers.

Welcome back MCS Families. It is an honor to serve your family again this year as your Principal.

I would first like to start by thanking the MCS Foundation for continuing to make sure that the students at MCS have a safe, warm and welcoming building in which they can learn. If you have been in, and are a returning family, you will have noticed the new floor. The project started with moving every piece of furniture into the gym at the end of June and was completed with 4 days left in the summer.
The MCS Foundation worked hard to ensure that everything was put back in place for the first day students returned in September. Thank you.

With a new year beginning there are a couple of items that I would like to take a moment remind families about safe drop-off and pick-up procedures:

• Doors open at 8:30am
• Classes start at 8:45am
  • There will be a 5 minute warning bell at 8:40am
• Entering the building
  • Junior High students use the front entrance
  • Grade 4, 5, 6 students use south entrance on the back tarmac
  • Grade 1, 2, 3 and K students use the north entrance by the playground
• If you are walking your child into the building
  • Find a safe place to park on 158 St., 157 St., 99 Ave, or 98 Ave
  • Please walk to the nearest corner to cross safely and model safe behavior.
• If you are dropping off your child:
  • Find a safe place to pull next to the curb
    • Please do not stop in the driving lane as you prevent the flow of traffic
  • Encourage your children to walk to the nearest corner to cross the street.
• School ends at
  • 3:20pm Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday
  • 2:25pm Thursday

Please refer to the Drop-Off and Pick-Up Map.

It is the mission of Meadowlark Christian School to be a caring community, committed to developing excellence in Learning
through academics, Living in Christ, leading by serving others and Loving with strength of character. This mission is
acted out in the work of the teachers as they make sure students are successful, both academically and spiritually.

Last year we worked as a collaborative team on answering two key questions:

• How do we as a school respond when students do not learn what we want them to learn?
• How do we as a school respond when students al- ready know what we want them to learn?

It was our goal to make sure that all students get access to the additional time and support they need to be successful. What developed is a period of time each day called WOLF Time. WOLF stands for Working On Learning Foundations and is a 30-34 minute period each day where your child’s teacher will be able to work with small groups of students giving them the additional time they need.

I will use the Junior High classes as an illustration of how this time works. Every morning between period 2 and 3, all junior high students are sent to the gym to be supervised by myself. The teachers in each subject area will keep back the 5-8 students that they have identified as requiring extra support and will work with them for the 34 minute WOLF Time. In the gym, the junior high students who have not been required to stay and work with their teachers will be working on a variety of items including unfinished classwork, projects that are due in the future, independent silent reading, and cross curricular extension projects.

WOLF Time will run at every grade level and set times throughout the day, with the difference in the elemen- tary classes being that there will be only two classes grouped together and they will meet in the library. As of this week, the grade 5 and 6, as well as the junior high classes have all started using this time. The rest of the elementary grades will be starting next week once the teachers have had a chance to gather information about which students need the additional time.

If you have any questions about WOLF Time or what this will look like for your child, please contact your child’s teacher or myself at the school office.

We hope to see all of you at the MCS Foundation BBQ and Meet the Teacher night on September 11, however, if you were unable to attend you are invited to contact your child’s teacher to schedule an alternative time where you can meet.

Thank you MCS families for a fantastic first week and I look forward to an exciting year seeing learning, living, leading and loving in action.

Scott Markine, Principal