Ms. Carley's Classroom Blog

Dear Families,

It was such a pleasure meeting with so many families this week at Parents as Partners meetings this past week! Thank you so much for sharing your time and connecting about goal setting for your wonderful children! I am so grateful to be part of your child’s learning journey this year!

We hope you enjoy the gratitude letters we created for you this week, in preparation for Thanksgiving!

We continued our bird inquiry and wrote our first pen pal letter as a class! We looked closely and coloured our birds from our group!

In math, we have been working on graphing and data analysis! Here are a few survey questions and graphs our student’s created! Tell your family about the question you asked your classmates!

In Science, we have been working on using the Scientific method in our experiments!

Here are our beautiful Orange Shirt Day butterflies, we are excited to make a school-wide piece of art with them as a symbol of hope, love, joy, freedom, belonging, kindness, remembrance, respect, and reconciliation.Be sure to visit the display once it is up!

Please feel welcome to visit our classroom to see our space and our art if you haven’t had a chance already! We look forward to putting up  our new art soon!

A few reminders for next week:

• Please return your information forms
• Please return your Poem of the Week folder and library books to school on Tuesday
• Please make sure your Spelling booklet is finished and practice your words and dictation sentences for Tuesday’s test!
• You can practice you Poem of the Week at home and finish the activities if they are incomplete! Please bring your duotang home each Monday (or Tuesday if it is a holiday) to bring home our new poem!
• Monday is the Thanksgiving holiday and there is no school
• Field trip to the Gibson Art Museum on Thursday October 15th! (Wear clothes that are okay to get a little messy!)

We spent the last few weeks reading and learning about National Day for Truth and Reconciliation through story, sharing, and reflecting. Each class in the school created a promise for the year that we shared at our Orange Shirt Day assembly on Thursday. We created a beautiful flag to bring on our community walk.

In Science Inquiry, we have been taking our learning outside to explore with our senses. First we found colours outside, and then this week we went on a gratitude walk – finding flora, fauna, and biota that we appreciate around us. Next week, we will start with our first experiment to practice the scientific method!

We have been writing so much in our journals, about our class, our “Important thing about” writing, and in making our heart maps! Here are some of our poems:

We learned about our Amigos Alados migratory bird pen pal program with a presentation from Alison! Then we chose our bird groups, and today we created some beautiful bird art! Tell your family about the bird you chose to study this year with our pen pals in Mexico!

Last week in math, it was all about playing games to help us practice our fluency with computations! One of our favourite games was “Target Thinking”.  We started at level one which focuses on addition of 3 numbers, and some of us already moved to level 2 which involves choosing the best equation to place our counter, using addition or subtraction! Please let me know if you would like a copy to play at home!

This week, we moved into graphing and data! We had already graphed our birthdays, and now we have learned how to tally information, and how to create pictographs! We love surveying our friends. Next week, we will learn about bar graphs, pie charts, and creating our own survey questions!

Our school is working as a team to run the same distance that Terry Fox ran during his Marathon of Hope during Kilometre Club. We started this week and recorded our laps! As a class, we calculated that we ran 28 kilometres! Then, we created  personal goals for our next run!

We are excited for next week’s adventures!

Love,

Ms. Carley

Reminders:

• If you haven’t, please fill in the short survey about your children from my first newsletter email
• Our contact list survey if you would like me to share your information with the rest of the class
• I will put in a second Scholastic order on the evening of Monday Oct. 5th, for anyone interested!  Our class fundraiser code is: RC161145

Dear Families of Div. 13,

Welcome to our Division 13 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 are excited to bring our learning outside into the community!

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. I will subscribe you to updates, so please take a look when you get a notification!

Here is a look at what we think makes us the Best Class Ever!

We thought about what we could do to have a safe and caring community:

We ended our first week with Dot Day art!

Looking forward to all our adventures this week!

Love,

Ms. Carley

Dear Div. 13 Alumni and Families,

Wishing you all a wonderful year in grade 3 and 4! Please always know you always have a home in my classroom and are encouraged to visit anytime!

I will now unsubscribe you from our blog. Please feel welcome to save any of the photos from our school year. There were many more from third term that weren’t able to be uploaded due to some technical issues but I will send them along if I find a good way to do so!

Love,

Ms. Carley

Div. 13 has been having so many adventures in March and April! Please enjoy this snapshot of our learning!

We have been working hard on story-telling and story writing! Take a look at our process!

First, we used loose parts during story workshop to create stories.

Next, we planned our stories, wrote drafts, conferenced with classmates and then our teachers! Finally, we published our good copies into books! We are so proud and can’t wait to show you at student led conferences next week!

We started our Common Ground Strawberry Project! We planted our strawberry roots or plugs and we get to see how the two varieties grow! They have already grown so much! We love tracking their growth and writing to our pen pals about our adventures!

Spring has sprung! We love exploring signs of spring outside.

We were so proud of our Earth Day sharing. Our 6 presenters shared about the salmon adventures of Div. 11, 12, and 13!

From eyed eggs, to alevin, to fry, we raised our beautiful chum salmon and are preparing to release them!

We learned about salmon print making and used recycled markers to create water colour paint.

We love playing with words as we learn spelling!

Explorations brings all sorts of innovation and creativity! Recently Div. 13 challenged each other to a drawing contest.

We love exploring with our little buddies! Scavenger hunts and other fun forests tasks on our forest days!

We have written so many beautiful ideas for our salmon connections, salmon stories, and salmon commitments.

Here is another earlier photo of watching our salmon grow!

We had an amazing time at our Seymour River Hatchery field trip in April! We had 3 amazing hands-on stations.

Exploring the hatchery and learning so many amazing things about salmon in BC!

Doing a river survey exploring depth, temperature, and other important factors! Learning about the size of redds, and other salmon measurments!

Collecting aquatic invertebrates from the rocks and river to examine under microscopes!

We had an Easter egg hunt with our big buddies. We love learning with them.

Jump Rope for Heart was so much fun! A big thanks to our student leaders!

Here is some poetry from earlier this year! Now we have written so much more!

Please stay tuned for another blog post in the next few days to share more recent updates!

Welcome to the Div. 13 family, little alevins! We were so excited to come back from the long weekend and family day to see that our chum salmon eggs had hatched into alevin! We wrote and drew our observations of the changes we saw! We have been working hard on our salmon connection writing as well, writing brainstorms, drafts, and finally good copies!

We are enjoying alternating between forest days and literacy days with our little buddies! Here are some photos of our imaginative play together. Some children fished in a pond with fishing rods they found, others made a potion, and much more!

Happy Lunar New Year! We loved learning about the Year of the Horse and making crafts and decorations.

With our big buddies, we made intricate lanterns.

Valentine’s Day was so much fun! We enjoed making crafts and bags, and then filled them with so many lovely cards and treats from our classmates!

In math, we have begun exploring 2D and 3D shapes in geometry, and learning how we can measure them!

Come visit the garden and forest that decorates our hall and room. We loved chosing art for our card project and now get to finally enjoy it up on the walls!

Our forests inspired by Emily Carr look so beautiful. And our Van Gogh -inspried flowers are so vibrant!

The last few weeks have been so full of joy and discovery! Please take a look at some of our snapshots!

We loved having our garden day! We learned about the parts of the vegetables that we commonly eat – are they roots, fruits, stems, leaves, or flowers? Then we learned about ways to preserve vegetables, and sorted vegetables into these two large categories. We also got to do timely garden tasks such as removing algae, harvesting, and aerating the soil. We ate some carrots and they were delicious! We love using all our senses in the garden!

Literacy week was so much fun! On Monday, we dropped everything and read in the pod, we had a guest speaker, we shared jokes with our buddies, on Wednesday we wore words,  and on Friday we played bingo with our buddies! Here are a few photos of our pod reading and our bingo time!

We did an artist study of Emily Carr and the Group of Seven and created art inspired by her works! Here is some art in progress, and we will show you the final products soon!

We had our first session with our little UCC buddies in the forest and we were so excited to get to know them and show them our favourite forest spaces.

Div. 13 was so lovely and thoughtful in wanted to share birthday wishes with Isaak, so we made them into a little book and Isaak was over the moon thrilled with it. He loves reading it every day and remembering his Div. 13 friends.

We created rainbow trout drawings – a fish that is closely related to the salmon we are studying. Div. 13 did such a careful job of shading their fish with different colours. I love how unique they all are. We have been learning so much about salmon through math, science, language arts, and social studies!

We had our second session with our UCC buddies – this time reading to them and getting to know them through art.

We started a new art projet inspired by another famous artist, Vincent Van Gogh, and other artists and photographers who love to capture flowers. Div. 13 did such a beautiful job with this mixed media project – sharpie, oil pastel and watercolour paint.

In math, we continue to explore measurement. We started with length and height, mass, then capacity, and currently area and permimeter. Here is some of the fun we had measuring area and perimeter of words! We will be moving on to geometry next!

Our books of the week were Salmon River and Each Kindness. This week, we created little tokens of appreciation that might be coming home to you, thank you for all the care you provide them with.

Our art is so beautiful! Stay tuned for an art fundraiser that will be coming home soon!

Important days coming up:

• Feb. 13 – Valentine’s Day – if you would like to share Valentines with the class, please bring enough for our 21 classmates!
• Feb. 16 – Family Day – no school
• Feb. 17 – Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year
• Feb. 17 – Mar. 19 – Ramadan
• Feb. 25 – Pink Shirt Day – please wear pink
• Feb. 27 – Pro D Day – no school
• April 1 – Field trip to Seymour Hatchery – a notice for volunteers and drivers will be coming home shortly
• April TBD – Salmon Release at Stoney Creek – we will need drivers during this field trip as well

Happy 2026! Welcome back to our second term!

From our first day of hip hop on Jan. 6 to our performance on Jan. 15, Div. 13 has been working non-stop to learn and practice their dance! They did such a great job of learning all the elements and some of our classmates even performed extra special dance moves like cartwheels, popping, bridges and tables! Congratulations on three amazing performances!

We started with snowball math, practicing our addition and subtraction!

Then we started a new unit: measurment! After we brainstormed all the things we know about measurement, including what it was, what we can measure, what tools and units we can use, we got to work learning about measuring length and height! After practicing with scavenger hunts around the room and many other activities, we brought stuffies in to measure!

Next, we started learning about measuring weight! So far, we have been measuring weight with non-standard measurements – cubes. We love comparing the size and weight of our stuffies with our classmates!

With our big buddies, we learned about how the moon was an important way of measuring time. Then we learned the special names for Full moons in different cultures. Then we imagined how we might represent some of the January full moon names!

We have been working on our goal of running for Terry Fox! We noticed we have been doing measurement math all year long with this challenge!

One of the most exciting parts of our January so far, has been receiving our 55 Chum salmon eggs! We have been learning about salmon, their life cycle, their habitat, and ways we can safely look after them in our school. We can’t wait to learn more!

We have been reflecting on 2025 and thinking about our intentions and goals for 2026 and are excited to share all these thoughts with our New Years mobiles. Come take a look at all our lovely reflections.

We are looking forward to all our adventures this term!

• Tuesday is our second garden workshop at 10:45-12 (please let me know if you can join us)
• Wednesday is our first day of being big buddies!! Please sign the notice coming home

Wishing you all a cozy January. Look forward to seeing you all soon!

We had a little Grinch visit our class today!

We loved having pancakes with our big buddies! Thank you to the PAC for creating such a warm and welcoming event!

Ms. Carley brought in nutrackers to draw what we saw! After reading the Nutcracker story, we were so inpired. Then we used sharpie and pencil crayon to create this detailed art to the soundtrack of the Nutcracker ballet.

Almost everyone has finished our amazing bat pamphlets! They are filled with tons of interesting facts, information, photos, and games! Here are a few examples of students who wanted to share on the blog! We will share more in the new year!

We loved playing dreidle, a game that Fran taught us earlier in the month. Happy Hannukah to everyone who celebrates!

We went out looking for forest treasures to create winter ornament gifts! We were amazed at the treasures we found when we looked closely!

We dried them to get them ready for our crafts, and then we sorted them!

**Holiday gift spoilers below (if your children haven’t givent them to you already)!**

Next, we created three types of ornaments! One with clay, one we preserved in a clear cover, and one we used sticks to create trees! Each one is so unique and special! We hope you love them!

Two more classmates created their nature portraits as we wrote our portrait poems!

We revisited and created new stories during story workshop!

We made special holiday cards. First, we chose a design to emboss our paper, learned how to use the embosser, raised our cards using dimensionals, chose the perfect paper pieces to make our trees or menorahs, and then wrote heartfelt messages. We hope you feel the love that went into these cards!

They turned out so beautifully!

Our last three stories were Latkes Latkes, Good to Eat!, Ten Ways to Hear Snow, and Olive the Other Reindeer! We loved reading and learning so many strategies with these books! Here are some of our favourite ways to hear snow!

We loved hearing Kazumi share his beautiful artifacts. We loved to learn about all our classmates.

We have been working on addition and subtraction! This week was all about holiday gingerbread word problems! We look forward to starting measurement after the winter break!

Wishing you all such a joyful holiday full of love, laughter and fun!

Over the past two weeks, we’ve taken time to look closely—at one another and at the creatures and living things around us. Just as the saying reminds us that no two snowflakes are alike, we discovered countless examples of how careful observation reveals the beautiful uniqueness within everything: our cultures, families, and experiences; our art and creations; every snowflake; and every mushroom. We learned about the remarkable diversity that emerges when we acknowledge our connections, our similarities, our differences, and the qualities that make each of us unique.

It was such an honour to hear all the stories and connections from Div. 13 students and families for show and tell. Here are some photos to remind you of the treasures we heard about. Tell your families about what you learned and what connections, questions, appreciations, and comments you shared with your classmates!

We went on mushroom scavenger hunt with our buddies! Look at some of the amazing forest mushroom treasures we found!

We were so excited to see the first snowfall of the year on Monday!

We got to read some books about snow and then create our very own snowflakes to decorate the class!

This week’s main read aloud was Ten Ways to Hear Snow – we loved doing many literacy activities with it, and exploring the descriptive language and similies.

This week, we started our new addition and subtraction unit in math! We brainstormed what we knew, and then we jumped right in! We are using lots of strategies to help us understand how to add numbers together.

We love doing scoots around the room to show our math understanding! Along with using math manipulatives, we showed our understanding on worksheets and played games to improve our fluency of addition and subtraction facts!

We went on a science walk to see who we could find and Bunny found an amazing artifact! We are exited to look and explore more closely!

We are so close to finishing our bat inquiry projects and showing our learning in pamphlets! We look forward to showing you soon!

This week we were writing poems to go with our nature portrait and a few of our classmates got to create their own, after missing the first day!

Every week we get new spelling words to practice and do activities! Div. 13 brought home their booklets to practice and finish this weekend! Reminder that tests are on Monday, new words and activities on Tuesday, dication and finishing their booklet on Thursday!

We love the library! Don’t forget to bring your library books on Tuesdays! And you can bring home reading books back for an exchange any day 🙂

Come visit our beautiful school welcome weave anytime!

Looking forward to an amazing next week!

• We have a few final presentations!
• We have a fun winter buddies activity planned for this Wednesday – please let us know if you’d like to come help!