Ms. Carley's Classroom Blog

We were so excited to build our pollinator houses this week and reflect on the process in a variety of ways! We are going to be creating displays to share our learning with the school. Check out the previous blog post and our blogfolio posts to see and hear more!

As a class, we’ve been reading a special book called Whale Child, written by Keith Egawa and Chenoa Egawa. It’s a story about the importance of caring for our world and the impact we’re having on our oceans and lands. In collaboration with Div. 4, we’re in the process of creating a bulletin board inspired by Whale Child and highlighting the importance of our collective action! Here are the beginnings of our board!

In writer’s workshop, we are  focusing on paragraph writing. First, we brainstormed all the elements we could think of that make a paragraph. Next we talked about our writing process, remembering the importance of brainstorming ideas and organizing our thoughts before we begin to write. Then, we started writing! Our first paragraph draft is due on Monday! We will continue our workshop process by  conferencing with a classmate!

It was so exciting to have pajama day today! Congratulations to the UHE leadership team for putting together such a great fundraiser! Hope you all have a lovely weekend!

This week, we built pollinator houses and hotels with our ADST helping teacher, Alex! Students worked in groups to build the designs they researched and created over the last few weeks. We hammered and drilled holes to create the perfect homes. We have been reflecting on our process – what were challenges we had? How did we overcome them?

There are so many math ideas that live inside this project! In math, we talked about how we can use measurement, geometry, estimation, addition, and multiplication to dream up these projects!

What a week it has been! Div. 4 & 5 worked to create diagrams of their pollinator houses, thinking about the dimensions, placements, entrances, and inhabitants.

Click here to see more pollinator houses in progress!

• birds
• bats
• bugs

As some of our students worked on FSAs, others from Ms. Yee’s and Ms. Su’s classes joined us in creating Green Team projects!

Most of us had our first book club meetings this week too! We shared our ideas and reflected on the process. Some of us even finished our novels and started working on creating “lit bits” to celebrate and share our thinking.

We were excited to do the filming of our Remembrance Day performance, which will play at the virtual assembly next week. A reminder that next Thursday is the Remembrance Day holiday.

Not all of us had a chance to finish our blogfolio posts today, so please feel welcome to finish them at home!

We officially installed our mud kitchen this week too! Please feel welcome to visit the kitchen during after school times, but please be kind and gentle!

Div. 5 had a great week and we look forward to another week of learning and exploring!

PS. Some families were wondering about how to use the School Cash page. Please find instructions here: SchoolCash-Welcome

Wishing everyone a happy and safe Halloween weekend! It was so much fun seeing everyone’s creative costumes! Thanks for helping me come up with my costume this year too! Your ideas were so thoughtful and fun… perhaps we will need to have some more dress up days this year!

This week, we started doing some more in-depth research in our inquiry, using different sources of information. First, we started with books from the library. However, we noticed that the information we found was quite vague and we wanted to go deeper. Next, we learned some online strategies to examine digital resources with our teacher librarians, Ms. MacLeod and Ms. Neilsen. Using the school library catalogue collections, we searched up the pollinators we are curious about and who live on Burnaby mountain. Next week, we will draw up our pollinator house plans and be ready to start construction during the week of Nov. 15th! Tell you family if you are learning about the needs of specific types of birds, bats, bees, or beetles!

In math, grade 4s and 5s had their first formal assessments! We have been exploring each element of the proficiency scales. How can we show our understanding?

We finally got our first book club books and were excited to learn that they were graphic novels! This week, we examined the features of graphic novels and started noticing them in our first books! Which novel are you reading?

In the garden, we worked together to move soil from one place to another to make space for our mud kitchen! Stay tuned as we finish creating this space! And let us know if you have any old play or real kitchen utensils, pots, and pans that you are interested in donating!

Blogfolios was a fun way to end our week! On Thursday, we brought home notices with your family login information. There are many ideas for ways you can connect together on this learning! If you misplaced the notice, you can find it here:

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Happy Halloween!

This week, things went by quickly with two early dismissals and a pro d day! Thank you to the families of Div. 5 for joining me at Parents as Partners Conferences this week! It was wonderful connecting with so many of you and discussing your child’s goals.

Div. 4 & 5 are very excited to start Book Club this term! We began with reading picture books focused around growth and activism in small groups. Students used their “Say Something” organizer to make predictions, connections, inferences and share their feelings or wonders about what they read. Once prepared, students then shared their thoughts around the text with their group members and focused on building on each other’s ideas. We can’t wait to get our first book club novels next week!

We have extended our inquiry, thinking about who lives here on the mountain and why they are important to our community.  What would happen if they didn’t live here?  How are we interconnected, and what actions can we take to support pollinator populations that live here? Over the next few weeks, we will be continuing our research and using it to design and construct pollinator shelters.

We finished our week by creating Halloween art! We look forward to wearing our costumes next Friday for the Halloween celebration.

Today, we wrote a blog post together to practice creating our own blogfolio posts!

Div. 4 and 5 have started an inquiry exploring the spaces around us. We started by choosing special artifacts from the forest. Then we drew them by looking very closely.

Last week, we visited the Hidden Aspen forest to explore with our senses what we could see, hear, smell and touch. I noticed so many interesting things growing on the trees, such as special mushrooms. I also noticed that a bear had clawed one of the trees on the path. I wonder when this happened! I am glad we didn’t see a bear, but I am so happy we get to share the mountain space with such amazing animals.

We were all busy drawing and writing about what we saw.

Then, we hiked along the path and I noticed so many trailing pacific blackberries along the way. I can’t wait to continue exploring the forest spaces around us and what mysteries might lie there.

I have loved our first few weeks together! Please take a moment to fill in this survey to share about your child and family.

Thank you for your thoughtful conversations and reflections on The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation this week, Div. 5! Visit our windows to see our promises.

Enjoy some snapshots of our first few weeks! Drawing what we see, exploring the forest spaces, harvesting in our school garden, goal setting with Terry Fox, and much more!

Dear Families of Div. 5,

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the Division 5 community! I am very excited to be a part of your child’s learning journey this year and I am looking forward to getting to know your family.

Our goals for this year are community, collaboration, and creativity. The learning will take place across curricular areas, and is based on inquiry, experience, and exploration. We will be taking our learning outside into the garden, forest, and community spaces quite often, so please ensure your children bring appropriate clothing and footwear for the weather each day.

We will be using our classroom blog as one of our communication tools this year. Here you can find snapshots of our journey and materials to support learning at home. Please check the blog on a regular basis, or subscribe to our newsletter for updates about our class community. A newsletter will  be coming home this week.

I am looking forward to getting to know your child and your family as we spend this year together. Please email with any questions or concerns, or to set up a phone call or in-person meeting. I can be reached by email at kristina.carley@burnabyschools.ca.

All the best,

Ms. Carley

Dear Div. 6,

Our year is ending the way it began, with unexpected challenges. We don’t get to spend our last full day together in the way we hoped, but I hope that you are all doing well and staying safe in this heat.

I have some invitations for your day, if you are feeling up for it.

I had hoped to share this little book from our buddies. They loved spending time with us. If you would like to send a message back, please feel welcome to send me your special message and I will pass it along to Ms. Shuster.

One of the things we were looking forward to was finishing up our blogfolios – making sure we had posted everything we were working on, and writing about any new things that were important to us. You are invited to do that today and this summer at home, if you are able. You might want to write about buddies and add your forest powerpoint to a post!

Here are a few photos from some of our exciting adventures these last few weeks: removing invasive buttercup to protect the forest’s edge, harvesting potatoes, and our summer aspen forest walk. We love exploring reconciliation, connection to place, and stewardship this year. Please remember that you can save photos from Ms. Carley’s blog to your computer, or ask me for the original digital copy!

Happy Pride Month! We loved watching Robin Stevenson’s Author Talk interview with Bryan Gidinski, and reading Ghost’s Journey. See if you can use Robin’s writing tips as you write this summer! Congratulations, Div. 6! We also won a copy of Pride Puppy by Robin Stevenson for our class!

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I will pack up your supplies and hope to see you tomorrow so you can collect all your treasures, including your looms.

Love,

Ms. Carley

Wow, Div. 6 students were amazing buddies this week! We had two opportunities to connect! We love seeing Ms. Shuster and her kindergarten and grade one students from 12 different schools as they attended distance learning class!

This year, we have sent photos and padlets back and forth exploring topics of light, shadow, and looking closely. We created a unique dialogue and community across classroom and virtual spaces.

This Tuesday, several Div. 6 students volunteered to read Elephant and Piggie to their little buddies through Zoom and then everyone got a chance to share and chat about all the topics, questions, connections, and magic tricks that came up!

On Wednesday, we met our grade one buddies and presented the powerpoints all about why we love our forest! They loved hearing about our learning and reflections. Each powerpoint was so different and unique! Our buddies shared so many favourite parts from our time together!

With this project, we learned about using powerpoint as a reflective tool. We also learned how to present on zoom! The teamwork and cooperation was amazing. We were incredible leaders, mentors, and partners in learning. We were so proud to share.

We are so grateful for the time we got to spend with our little buddies this year.