Here we are on (hopefully) the other side of some nasty days of colds and flus that were battering down our student and staff numbers the last couple weeks. Thank you to families who were able to keep their students home when they started to feel symptoms and to those of you who made arrangements to come to the school to pick up your children when they started feeling tough. It appears that we’re back to our normal numbers again.
It was a great chance for many families to find some extra time with each other last week with the extended weekend on the school calendar. We have a full five weeks of school ahead for the students with only the Friday off before the Christmas Break. I’m sure most teachers are going to get as much teaching squeezed into those weeks as they can after some slower days that we had to start this month.
A few of our seasons wrapped up in November with Senior Girls’ Volleyball, Football, as well as Junior Girls and Boys teams having some great matches and lots of growth and learning in those sports. Thank you to all the coaches and to you parents for arranging driving to so many after school and weekend competitions. We’ve been highlighting a need for some volunteers to help coach some basketball teams this season ahead and have mentioned a few times that Senior Boys and Junior Boys and also Junior Girls could use coaches. If you have interest in Basketball and can offer your time to work with players, or you know of someone you can encourage to volunteer, please contact our office and let us know.
Our grade 11 and 12 career fair opportunity on November 7th was cancelled due to poor road conditions to travel. If I can find an online opportunity for the students this year I’ll set that up for them. We’ll make plans to attend next year’s again as it is a worthwhile event for our students and many post-secondary schools and career paths have booths our students can stop at and check out.
Cold weather has hit us in November and I’m sure by the long range forecasts we’re liable to see more of it this winter. Please continue to send good cold weather gear with your students to school for recess times to save them from freezing fingers and ears and also so they have a chance to enjoy the winter weather at the breaks. It’s also a good idea to check what your students being transported by a bus are wearing to school – no one wants to worry about a bus having engine trouble on a route but we can all prepare to have warm clothes in preparation for those times.
The Hanley SCC Community Calendars are being created this month and we’ll look forward to selling those calendars again in December. Please contact the school if the SCC members missed you and you want to add more details to your family lists. Also contact the school if you’d like to order a calendar for yourself this year and haven’t had one before.
The SRC is arranging our annual Christmas dinner again for students and staff and we’ll look forward to having that again before we head out for Christmas Break. Thank you all for your contributions to what has been such a wonderful time to get our whole school together.
That’s all for now. For further information and updates from the students and classrooms, check out our school website at http://blogs.spiritsd.ca/hanley/. As always, Mr. Hindmarsh and I would love to talk to you if you have time to send us a message or give us a call. We’ll talk to you soon.