January 28, 2022
Dear UA Parents,
What an exciting day it was today for our Junior and Middle School students as they participated in UA’s 1st Annual Winter Activity Day. If you are on Instagram or Facebook please check out the UA story as the teachers took over our social media accounts today to show highlights of all the different activities going on. We had students skiing, skating, snowshoeing, climbing, running, falling, spinning, jumping and most importantly SMILING!! We even had the weather cooperate for us with cold temperatures and beautiful blue skies. I hope students were able to challenge themselves and step out of their comfort zones a bit today. It is all part of growing and finding out what you are capable of.
Once again a big thank you to our school community for following our COVID protocols. It appears that we reached our peak of student absences towards the end of last week. We saw steady improvement this week and more than 50% of the students who were away (for COVID, being symptomatic, or isolating) last Friday have returned to school. I really hope that the improvement will continue into next week. Keep up the great work everyone, keep wearing your masks inside the school, and keep washing your hands.
In other positive news, many of you were able to witness a little bit of healthy competition and a whole lot of literacy fun last year in our first annual Read-a-Thon. It is exciting that our PAX, with support from our teachers, just launched our Grade 1-8 Read-a-Thon today! So sign up your young readers who are raising funds to build a Tinkerspace (like a Makerspace for Junior/Lower Middle students). There are House points and prizes up for grabs, and we are excited to see a celebration of literacy in honour of Family Literacy Day. Let the reading begin!
Just a brief reminder that as always, if you have any questions or concerns about anything that you are hearing from your child about school, please reach out to the teacher first for clarification. Most often this is a quick and easy way to get clarity if something doesn’t seem quite right. We always strive to work as a team with the parents to provide the best educational experience possible.
I hope everyone is able to enjoy the final weekend of January. I feel like February will have us moving away from illness-focused communications, to more exciting student-focused news about the wonderful things that are going on at UA!
Yours in education,
Mr. Slinger
