Great Resource for Teachers, Parents, and Students

Take a look at this resource created by York Region District School Board! Thank you LD@School for sharing!

Understanding Learning Disabilties: How Processing Affects Learning is a comprehensive resource designed for educators working with students with learning disabilties, but our parents and students use it too.  This resource is meant to teachers to plan and support students with learning disabilties, but it is also useful for the students to go through the resource and identify their own areas of strength and need to determine what strategies they find helpful to support their learning.  At Sagonaska, we are always trying to teach our students to advocate for themselves and to understand themselves as learners, and we use this resource as a tool to have those conversations with our students.

To check out the full resource, click here.

Free Webinar Presented by LD@School!

FREE WEBINAR: Adolescence Stress, Coping Strategies and Learning Disabilities

Presented by: Cameron Montgomery, Ph.D 
Thursday November 5, 2015 3:30 – 4:45pm EST
 This interactive webinar will assist participants in understanding the relationship between stress and coping strategies in adolescents with learning disabilities (LDs). This will provide educators and parents of our students great information on how to identify practical and effective interventions for students and children with LDs who are experiencing stress and who require functional coping strategies. Building resiliency is key for our students and this is a great learning opportunity for all, so please share with your friend and colleagues.


Click here to find out more information about this FREE webinar on the LD@school website!http://bit.ly/1VHkTKe

October's Wellness Challenge - The Importance of Mental Health Awareness

People with special needs are more vulnerable to mental health problems than the general population. Encouraging good mental health is important for all children, but particularly when your child has a learning disability. Children need to develop the skills to understand and express their emotions from an early age. 

October is Mental Health Awareness month and SAG will be discussing ways of understanding and demonstrating Mental Wellness. By encouraging open dialogue with each other we are helping to eliminate the stigma attached to mental illness and teaching kids how to identify their emotional needs along with tools and strategies for coping.

Although learning disabilities and mental health concerns are two completely different things, we recognize that students that do struggle in school can be vulnerable to mental health problems.  Over the next month, we are encouraging our students to be proud of their accomplishments and not to let their challenges hold them back.  Our students may have more struggles in school demonstrating what they know, but that doesn't mean they are any less intelligent or can't be as successful as someone without a learning disability.  Some of the greatest minds of all time were known to have a learning disability as well; people like Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Richard Branson, and even Albert Einstein!

We are asking our students to share their successes on Twitter this month with the hastags: #sag #ownmyLD! Please encourage your children to tweet out some positive messages over the next month and we will collect them all and share them on the blog at the end of the month!

Digital Story Telling

Check out how some of our former students used Claymation to tell stories and show off their fluent technology use!

September's Wellness Focus - Coping and Resiliency

Each month we are going to recognize a different Mental Health issue that could possibly affect our students or people we care about.  The focus for September was the importance of developing coping and resiliency skills. We know that living with a learning disability can be stressful at times.  Not everyone fully understands what learning disabilities are or what it must be like to face LD-related obstacles every day.  It's important to help our students to recognize possible triggers for stress and to teach them a variety of strategies to help overcome these hurdles by building their coping skills toolbox. At our Terrific Kid/Wellness assemble for the month of September we will recognize students who have overcome something something difficult in their first month here at Sagonaska. Please feel free to comment below if you want to recognize any individuals or if you have strategies that you have used that have helped you to cope with something difficult in the past.

Integra Program - Fall/Winter Workshop Schedule

A parent of one of our students recently shared with me the name of a program that is part of the Child Development Institute (CDI), a children’s mental health agency in Toronto.  The Integra Program is an accredited  agency that provides services to children, youth and families who are dealing with mental health issues complicated by learning disabilities.
The Integra Program provides family-centred, evidence-informed direct clinical services to children and youth ages 8 to 18 with diagnosed learning disabilities and mental health issues in Toronto. Although we at Sagonaska have not attended any of their workshops and cannot speak directly to the services they provide, the program does come highly recommended by several parents.  Below is a link to their website and a quick look at some of their upcoming workshops. If you have any feedback regarding their services or workshops, we would love to hear so please comment below.

Click here to go directly to The Integra Program's website

Workshop Titles Include:

• Walk A Mile In My Shoes
• Accessing School Supports
• All About Moods: Understanding Anxiety, Depression, and LDs
• Bullying and LDs: Building Your Toolbox to Support Youth with LDs
• Introduction to Executive Function

Wesley Acres

Last Wednesday, the staff and students of Sagonaska spent a glorious day at the Wesley Acres facility in Bloomfield, Ontario taking part in a variety of team-building activities!

A favourite of the day was the Elevate Course! Everyone was encouraged to step out of their comfort zones to attempt the high-rope course, which included a zip-line four hundred feet into the woods! We were blown away by the bravery and trust demonstrated by our students, not to mention, the natural ability so many of them had for scaling the tall poles and balancing on the tight rope/balance beam across the top! Mr. Mortaley even caught some of the action on a camera on the school's drone!  Video coming soon!!

The low ropes course gave our students, teachers and residence counsellors an opportunity to put themselves in situations that require trust and dependence on others in the group. A lot of laughs and fun were had by all as groups attempted activies such as moving the whole group from one platform to the next, without touching the group, using only two 2x4s! The low tight-rope was another favourite of the day!

A true sense of community was established through a variety of team-building games, such as Human Knot, Team Rock/Paper/Scissors and What Would You Rather?

Finally, our entire group was lucky enough to take in the sights of West Lake while hiking through the beautiful grounds of Wesley Acres.

A big thank you goes out to Mrs. Brintnell for organizing such an amazing event and all the parents of our students should be proud by how respectful, polite and engaged your students were all day! It was an incredible day and it brought us together as a school community and family!