Our Learning Commons

Our LC is the hub for our school learning community. It is for available to all students and is for research, reading and quiet study. As an integral part of the total educational program, the LC caters to the educational requirements of the school and ultimately to the needs, goals, interests and creative potential of the individuals that it serves.

Expectations

• Students respect the rights of others by maintaining an atmosphere conducive to reading, studying and researching. 
• Students earn the privilege of using resources, equipment and facilities by caring for them properly at all times.

Services

• Resources for assignments and personal interest:
• • Books (reference, non-fiction, fiction), 
  • audiovisual materials, 
  • magazines, 
  • newspapers, 
  • on-line databases, 
  • ebooks, 
  • internet, 
  • educational software and 
  • video streaming. 
• Computers, laser printing, photocopying, digital video and still cameras for in-school use, A-V equipment for class presentations. 

Borrowing Rules

A three-week loan is standard with overnight loans available for reference materials, periodicals, and high demand materials.

Hours

Hours of operation are posted on the door of the Learning Commons.

Electronic Resources

Passwords for all electronic databases and resources are available in the Learning Commons. Electronic resources are available 24/7.

• Learn Alberta Online Resource
• • Canada In Context 
• • Global Issues in Context 
  • Science In Context 
  • World History In Context
• eBooks
• Career Cruising 
• Plagiarism.org Are you plagiarizing? Find out here
• Referencing and Citations
• I.B. Extended Essay

What's New in Your Learning Commons

   The phenomenal fifth book in the Hunger Games series!

When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.

    After the murder of her best friend, a librarian’s search for answers leads back to her own dark secrets in this "searing and timely" novel about a woman transformed by war, family, vengeance, and love, from the author of the beloved bestseller The Life We Bury (Kristin Harmel, author of The Paris Daughter).

"Fans of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale or Kate Quinn’s books will be caught up in this story of a courageous woman."―Library Journal (starred review)

"Exquisitely written, profoundly affecting, and undoubtedly one of the best books I will read this year.”―Louise Fein, author of The London Bookshop Affair

Hana Babic is a quiet, middle-aged librarian in Minnesota who wants nothing more than to be left alone. But when a detective arrives with the news that her best friend has been murdered, Hana knows that something evil has come for her, a dark remnant of the past she and her friend had shared.
 
Thirty years before, Hana was someone else: Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in the mountains of war-torn Bosnia—until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter her entire family before her eyes. The events of that day thrust Nura into the war, leading her to join a band of militia fighters, where she became not only a fierce warrior but a legend—the deadly Night Mora. But a shattering final act forced Nura to flee to the United States with a bounty on her head.
 
Now, someone is hunting Hana, and her friend has paid the price, leaving her eight-year-old grandson in Hana’s care. To protect the child without revealing her secret, Hana must again become the Night Mora—and hope she can find the killer before the past comes for them, too.
 

    In this high-stakes heist novel, an alchemologist and a con man team up to steal a rare necklace—but complicated feelings of attraction and deception threaten to destroy everything and everyone they love—for fans of Alexandra Bracken and Judy I. Lin.

Within the dazzling halls of London’s Crystal Palace, the event of the season has arrived: The Great Exhibition. An opportunity for the greatest minds of the century to come together under one roof in an unprecedented display of art and invention. And for two unlikely partners in crime, it’s about to become the score of a lifetime.

Charming con man Kane Durante works alone—or on occasion with his best friend, Fletcher. But when his boss, the infamous Kingpin of London’s magical dark market, gives him the impossible task of stealing a priceless artifact from the Great Exhibition, he knows it’s a job he can’t pull off alone. Enter Zaria Mendoza, daughter of one of London’s greatest alchemologists. Ever since her father’s death, Zaria’s been struggling to keep her underground business afloat, and impatient clients are becoming violent. When the infuriatingly handsome Kane offers her the promise of enough money to get out of debt and leave London entirely, she knows she can’t walk away from this dangerous partnership.

But robbing one of the most public, heavily-guarded buildings in London isn’t going to be easy, especially when love and betrayal threaten to ruin everything they've worked so hard for.

    Join the fight.

Sam Pope was one of the UK’s finest soldiers, serving over a decade as an elite sniper. After a near fatal shooting brings an end to his career, Sam returns home to his family and a potential new career in the Metropolitan Police. When disaster strikes and his bond with his family is broken, Sam takes a job as an archive officer within the Met, hunting down criminals that have beaten the system and delivering his own brand of justice.

When a terrorist attack at the London Marathon shakes the city to its core, Sam decides to open his own line of investigation. Venturing into the world of organized crime and police corruption, Sam soon finds himself as the number one target…and faces a race against time to expose the truth.

    Who is killing off members of the Falconer family and why? Such is the challenge confronting highly skilled, extraordinarily intuitive Mary Wandwalker when she finds herself single, sixty and jobless. Long ago as an Oxford student with an unplanned pregnancy, Mary knew the Falconers as the family who refused to help when her fiancé, David Falconer died in a car crash. Now the baby boy she gave up for adoption is a policeman, George Jones, and he wants to meet her. Can Mary bring herself to confront her past? She must, for lost in her memory is a clue that could save her son’s life.
Back in 1979, Mary wrote to the Falconers and was rejected. Now forty years later, key phrases from her letter appear in the faked suicide note of Perdita Falconer. Neither Perdita nor her killer had access to Mary’s document. Too exact for coincidence, the link is the pseudonym of the drug dealer who supplied her fatal dose. He or she is known as “the Kestrel.”
When Mary was romanced by David Falconer in the 1970s, “the Kestrel” was codename for a Russian spy entertained at Falconer House. Could the resurrection of the nom de plume be connected to Viktor Solokov, the Russian oligarch renting the Falconer estate with his beautiful wife, Anna? For the Falconers have dark secrets, some centuries old.
When George Jones’s wife Caroline begs Mary to save her husband from treacherous Anna, and the murderous talons of the Kestrel, Mary must act.

    It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies.

In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression.

"Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review

    When Mrs Ramsay tells her guests at her summer house on the Isle of Skye that they will be able to visit the nearby lighthouse the following day, little does she know that this trip will only be completed ten years later by her husband, and that a gulf of war, grief and loss will have opened in the meantime. As each character tries to readjust their memories and emotions with the shifts of time and reality, this long-delayed excursion will also prove to be a journey of self-discovery and fulfilment for them.

Rich in symbolism, daring in style, elegiac in tone and encapsulating Virginia Woolf's ideas on life, art and human relationships, To the Lighthouse is a landmark of twentieth-century literature and one of the high points of early Modernism.

    Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally. During her uncle's absence in Antigua, the Crawford's arrive in the neighbourhood bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation. Mansfield Park is considered Jane Austen's first mature work and, with its quiet heroine and subtle examination of social position and moral integrity, one of her most profound.