2004 Newsletter excerptS
Table of Contents
Greetings from the Office
Family Support Night
Swimming Support Night
My Job Last Summer
Support Groups
N.O.T.
Later Literacy Program
APC has been so active! Congratulations to the 112 students who registered in September. Your decision to stay in school is a smart one. Our goal at APC is to provide excellent prenatal care for the pregnant students, excellent child care for the mom's babies, and an excellent opportunity for each of you to complete the credits you need to graduate. Last June, 10 students graduated from APC. We are very proud of them and the careers they are now entering. All the staff welcome you and want to help you make this year an important year for you and your child. Come to school daily, make friends, and let the staff know when you need special help. Working together, we can continue to make APC a great school!
Diane, Ruth, and Staff
Family Support Night by Jackie G.
The Adolescent Parent Centre has received a grant to run an evening group for students and their families that focuses on the importance of literacy for young children. Students will be allowed to sign up for the groups in advance and are able to bring their children as well as two other guests. There will be five evening groups throughout the year, each with a different theme. Each night will begin with the group eating dinner together. The dinner is supplied by the school and will vary with each group. The meal will be followed by that night's particular presentation. The evenings will all end with a draw of three prizes consisting of the following: food for the family, books, or educational toys for the children. The five topics that will be covered are: Rock N' Read; 1-2-3 Magic; Theraplay; Aboriginal Storyteller; and Sport Night. An Aboriginal Teacher Assistant has been hired to take part in these evening groups to help us connect with Aboriginal resources and utilize them in the groups. There will be childcare available for anybody who wishes to use it while the presentations are taking place.
Swimming at Sargent Park by Amanda S.
Sargent Park Pool is nice enough to let the girls from the Adolescent Parent Centre go swimming every last Tuesday of the month. Barb is the teacher that comes with us and helps some of the girls who need a swimsuit, towel, or a swimmer for their babies. When we go swimming, we only go for about one hour. We have a lot of fun playing in the water with our babies. Sometimes there are some pregnant girls that come along. They are very helpful to the mothers that have babies. For instance, if one of the mothers wanted to go to the deep end and go diving off the diving board, they will ask one of the pregnant girls to watch their baby. Coming from a mother, I think that the pregnant girls help us out a lot when it is time to change - and they watch over babies so we can get changed too. Barb likes it when there are a lot of girls that show up for swimming. She tells us that swimming pregnant or with your child is very healthy for you and your child. That's why when we go swimming and you take gym class, the hours that you swim are added to your gym hours.
My Job Last Summer by Kassandra A.
I was hired along with Shannon Spence and Shannon Arksey to be a custodian assistant for the Winnipeg School Division. We were hired to work with the head of custodians at each of the schools we were working at. Every week we would go to a different school and learn new and great things from all the different people we met.
On an average day, we would arrive at 8:00 and stay until 4:00. During that time, we would start by taking black marks off the walls; dust the high areas of each room; and sweep the floors so we could get ready to wash and scrub them. In order to be able to scrub floors, we had to use this big heavy machine - it kind of looked like a mini zamboni. Working for the school division was a great experience for myself, Shannon S, and Shannon A. I recommend this job for anyone interested in a summer job. Feel free to ask us more questions if you like.
Support Groups by Jackie G.
The School Social Worker will be running three different support groups in the school throughout the year. There will be a domestic violence group that will focus on the different types of violence and some reasons why people stay in violent relationships. The group will run for six weeks on Friday afternoons and will continue throughout the year. The next group will be the life skills group. This group will be run during lunch once a week with the pregnant students as part of their pre natal exercises. The group will consist of helping students with daily life activities that they will be faced with as young single parents. Some of the topics will include child care, housing, self-esteem and social assistance. This group will also continue throughout the year. The third group will be the anger management group. This group will start after the Christmas break and will run for approximately six weeks. This group will focus on techniques to control anger and how to successfully deal with stressful situations. It will help participants understand what makes them angry and how their anger escalates. There will be sign up sheets available for each group.
N.O.T. by Shannon A.
Once a week for one hour in the afternoon, several of our APC students take part in the N.O.T. (Not On Tobacco) smoking group with Jacquie the nurse. Jacquie brings a lot of information on why smoking cigarettes are harmful to your body and others around you. She shows you the chemicals in cigarettes that are used for floor strippers, pesticides, and many other dangerous chemicals. She informs the teens at APC on how the tobacco companies aim smoking ads at young people by putting their products in movies and magazines that have young audiences. N.O.T. is a support group for students that want to quit or need to know how they can quit smoking cigarettes. When the group gets together, we usually have a small snack, talk about what we did in the last week, and share if our smoking had decreased or increased. Jacquie usually then gives us helpful handouts on how to deal with stress and the facts and myths about smoking. We keep journals to express our feelings and why we are in the N.O.T. group.
Later Literacy Program by Ruth McCleary and Andrew Kinnear
Later Literacy is an exciting new program which APC, along with Daniel McIntyre, Tech Voc, Elmwood and Winnipeg Adult Education Centre, has just introduced. Students who want to raise their reading level and improve their writing skills work one-on-one with the Later Literacy teacher five days a week for ten weeks. First, the teacher finds out what skills the student needs to improve: reading, vocabulary, spelling, sentence structure, etc. Then, he or she sets up the 40 minute daily lesson. Each day the student spends 10 minutes talking about a novel she is reading for homework (25 minutes every night), 10 minutes learning to pronounce and use big words, 10 minutes learning to read information from texts such as history or science, and 10 final minutes writing 4 perfect sentences about what she has just read. These daily exercises guarantee that the student’s reading level will go up two or three grades within the ten week period. That’s fast progress! Andrew and Ruth are both involved in Later Literacy this year. Ask them if you are interested. We are both currently busy with students at the moment, but circumstances might change and we may have openings very soon. Talk to either Ruth or Andrew if this program is of interest to you.
Crystal and Andrew in Later Literacy
