Welcome to another wonderful year at Norway. My name is James Bowen and I am the Special Education and Resource Teacher at Norway. I am also the Teacher Librarian.
In my Special Education and Resource role at the school I help classroom teachers and their students with literacy programming and coordinate early years support for our emerging readers. We are hoping to have a parent information night in the fall about reading strategies at Norway and ways you can engage your child in the many steps of language development. More news to come on that!
My other hat is as Teacher Librarian - in this role I do a few things. Each month I work with a different classroom on more in-depth programming. It might be novel circles, researching a big science or social studies project, or it might be coding for our Kindergarten classes. The second part is managing the weekly library check-outs. This year all classes have their library check-outs on Day 5 - the first library check-out is on Monday, September 8th. I will send out notices two days before to prepare families for the return of library books. Please look for these notices and to help keep the check-out and return of books going smoothly. If a student has more than three books checked out, we will pause library checkout for the student until the books have been returned.
Building a games centre in the library, this year, we are creating a games centre in the library for some students to use as a chill space in the library. If you might have a gently used game that your family is no longer using and you would be willing to donate it to the library that would be greatly appreciated. You can email me at James.Bowen@tdsb.on.ca to confirm if it is a game we already have a copy of.
Book Donations - every year we get offered a number of book donations by families, it can be challenging for us to take in some donations, but if you happen to have copies of popular books for example Dog Man or some graphic novels that you think your family is no longer using and they are in good condition, we might be able to use them in the library. Feel free to reach out to me at James.Bowen@tdsb.on.ca
Finally, each year we have a small group of parents that are able to volunteer in the mornings usually between 8:45 and 9:30 to help read in a one on one setting with our Grade 1 and 2 readers. If you think you might be able to help support us with this program. Please reach out to me at James.Bowen@tdsb.on.ca, once I have a group ready I will connect with the group to plan for some training around goals and working with the students.
Thank-you for reading and have a wonderful weekend,
James Bowen