Celebration of Learning
The Celebration of Learning is on Thursday, Jan. 12th. For me, it is one of the best evenings of the semester.
It is the culmination of our Christian learning and community, the two things we do really well at Hamilton District Christian High. It is a night where we invite everyone and anyone to ‘Come and See’. It’s an incredible opportunity to see the exciting learning and beautiful work of our students and captured in a really fun evening.
The learning at HDCH moves towards our students creating beautiful work: we iterate and revise our work so as to improve and progress towards excellence. Beautiful pieces of work can be anything from essays to cutting boards and everything in between. When you come on Thursday, Jan. 12th you will get to see it all.
We are going into our 5th year doing these Celebrations of Learning and we are adding a little tweak this year. Some of the comments that we have heard, over and over after our Celebrations of Learning are these:
- It’s a shame that all this work is on display only for a 3-hour evening.
- There isn’t enough time to get around and see all the good projects.
- It’s a very stressful time of the year for students to do the Celebration of Learning and get ready for Summatives and Exams.
So this year, we have added a tweak to respond to these consistent comments from our community. This year, the day after the Celebration of Learning will be a ‘Project Assessment Day’. The school will be open, but it will not be mandatory for students to attend. The projects from the night before will not be taken down after the event; we will leave them up for the Friday. There will be no formal classes for our students, however buses will run in case your child would still like to come in.
We are leaving the day open for teachers to assess projects and provide learning support to those who need it. Students are welcome to come and connect with a teacher for extra help, see other projects, and work independently or in small groups on things that they might have coming up. Some classes might even have optional work sessions for a time period.
And for parents, it will be another chance for you to come by the school during the day to see what your child has done, especially if the evening didn’t work out for you.
We are excited to take this day and offer it as a way to continue our Celebration of Learning, while also recognizing that we can address some of the stresses that this evening can bring.
Nathan Siebenga
Principal