We're ONE year's old!

It is amazing what can happen in a year!!! It would not be odd to hear from many people that this has been the most difficult year of our their life. My hope is that this is the most difficult for our children's lifetime too. The effects of the pandemic have been heart wrenching no matter your age and as the vaccine deployment is underway in Canada, I can say there are also many blessings from this year which is where we need to focus.

As a family, I believe we saw and trekked more of Alberta and BC than in any other year. Although being at home for distanced learning was a challenge, there were also home lessons that I am grateful for. My kids learned how to bake some new things, we also spent a ton of time in the backyard and went on rewarding walks that included slurpees! As a business, we learned to pivot quickly. Fortunately for us, we had an online math teaching platform already. The virtual math learning for our instructor team and students was new but the forced adoption meant we picked up fast. We also wanted to help our community but didn't know how. We could only imagine the challenges of being on the frontline while also homeschooling. After a week, we developed a free math homework help program to assist AHS employees. This was a 100% volunteer effort from the Mathnasium of Killarney tutors for which we are very proud of their commitment.

The summer proved challenging. I think many would agree that after all schools migrated to online, it was difficult to think about more online math lessons for the summer so we are grateful that our city slowly re-opened and that meant we could have students back for in-person learning. We also delivered four weeks of math camp at the Alberta Tennis Centre. Even the students that told us math was their favorite subject admitted that there was learning loss from not having done school work in so long. We hope some of the math strategies, practice and games we did together prompted them to have some math fun at home. 

September then came and as we suspected, we had new families join that recognized the challenges of the past year on their child(ren). We launched the fun calendars as well as BINGO through to the end of the year and it was awesome. Students came in full spirit for Pajama Day and everyone came in costume to trick or treat. Popsicles were a welcomed surprize during our great weather and Popcorn Day continues to be very popular. We can't say enough about how happy we are to work with all these amazing students and when we see their improvements, we love celebrating with them!

We wrapped our year with more than 136 hours of free math homework, low income and scholarship support to students in our community. Teachers were also recognized for their incredible efforts with St Michael school winning a fully stocked fridge. We also ran a free camp and hosted a holiday decorating event to collect food for the Veterans Food Bank. We wouldn't be here without our community and we want to encourage everyone to continue supporting small businesses, recognize the efforts of your teachers and if you need math help, call us. This team is built on 5 values: 1) Instructor Excellence, 2) Student Success, 3) Growth, 4) Teamwork and 5) Community. We love what we do and when your student works with us, you can tell.

It's been a good walk down memory lane, but now let's celebrate being ONE!!! Due to ongoing restrictions, the big party is delayed but that doesn't mean we aren't having fun. We are giving away a Lenovo Ideapad Duet touchscreen Chromebook to one lucky student in the city. With that, we are also rewarding a couple of amazing teachers. In centre, students will be getting surprizes all month long too! Check out our Facebook page for all the details. https://www.facebook.com/killarneymathnasium