Category: Continuing Learning at Home

Dear families,

It’s hard to believe we are in our last week of May!

We are mathematicians.

Students are progressing well with our division concepts! We continued to deepen their understanding of division by sharing and division by grouping through creating their own word problems. Ms. Kim had them create their own word problems including the solution. They really enjoyed using their creativity in math!

On Thursday and Friday, we learned how to divide by repeated subtraction. They learned that this is the opposite of repeated addition for multiplication. Here, they subtract the divisor until they can’t anymore. Then they count the number of times they subtracted for the quotient. Many found this strategy of dividing straightforward to understand so they quickly showed proficiency. Click here to watch a short video for review.

Ways to support at home: Reinforcing concepts learned at school is a great way to solidify learning especially if you ask your child to teach you. The process of teaching involves higher level thinking (analysis and synthesis) than to just do questions you give them as practice. This further develops  their brain through active retrieval which strengthens neural pathways, improves communication skills, opportunities to monitor their own understanding, and increased confidence.

We are creative.

We read a story called A Squiggly Story by Andrew Larson. After the story, students were given the choice to write their own or to continue the story from the end of this story where the boy leaves on a rocket ship with an alien.

We practiced being creative by using squiggles to help us be more creative. Ms. Chan modelled some creative thinking strategies by creating her own story on the board. One tip: use the phrase “All of a sudden” or “suddenly”. This creates an unexpected turn in the story and increases your audience’s attention.

Another goal of this writing exercise was to develop our writing fluency. This is how quickly we can get our thoughts onto a page. They were challenged to write as quickly as they can. After a solid 20 minutes, we counted up our words. We saw so many really push themselves!

Unleashing Imagination: Why “What If…” Poems Matter!

Our classroom buzzed with imagination this week as students dove into writing their own “What If…” poems. It was more than just a writing exercise; it was a deliberate push to spark their incredible creativity.

You might think creativity is something you’re born with, but the truth is, creativity can absolutely be taught and developed! It’s one of our core competencies too! I was an Odyssey of the Mind coach for five years and saw our team grow immensely in their creative thinking and problem solving skills.

Creative thinking is a fundamental way of thinking and approaching challenges that empowers children to come up with diverse solutions and consider different perspectives. When we encourage this kind of imaginative thinking, we’re not just fostering artistic expression; we’re building essential skills that will serve them well in all aspects of life to think flexibly and inventively.

Ways to support at home: Have fun co-creating your own “What If…” poems! See how creative you can be with your child! Here’s a challenge: Write one with your child or as a family. Have your child bring your family poem to school to share next week! We would love to see your creativity run wild!

Learning about perspectives

We had a discussion about the picture on the left, exploring how both interpretations can be correct—even if they’re different. It’s all about point of view and understanding another person’s perspective.

We then read They All Saw a Cat by Brendan Wenzel, a book that beautifully illustrates how various animals perceive the same cat in very different ways. For example, the way a fox sees the cat is completely different from how a mouse sees it.

Inspired by the book, we created our own “cat perspective” art. Students illustrated the cat from two different viewpoints, thinking carefully about how perception can change based on who is looking.

Our students have been working very hard, and they’re excited to share their artwork with everyone soon!

We are athletes.

Tennis lessons continued last week. This week will be their final sessions.

Passion Projects

Students are moving along with their Passion Projects. We reviewed the single-point rubric that we will use to assess. Click on the image or click here to view the PDF.

They are learning to analyze and synthesize the information they find on websites and decide how to present these facts on their slides.

They are becoming more proficient with inserting images and text boxes.

We love how excited they get when we pull out the laptops! We enjoy seeing how hard they work on learning and developing their ideas in a digital form. Here are some of this important skills they are developing:

• reading, researching, and information gathering to develop curiosity and independently seeking knowledge (Core competency: Thinking skills)
• organization and planning – students must decide on the information they want to share (synthesize), what information goes together, and how to organize the information like one idea per slide for clarity
• communication skills – writing skills to paraphrase in their own words, making it easy to understand, and being concise by using bullet points
• digital literacy and technology skills – navigating between website and PowerPoint project, inserting text, adding images, and resizing fonts, for example.

Save the Dates

• Thur. May 29 at 1:30pm – Volunteer Tea in the gym
• Fri. May 30 at 2:00pm – Early dismissal
• Fri. May 30 at 2:00pm – $2 Ice cream sandwich and $1 freezie sale. Click here to learn more. Cash only in the undercover area where we usually line up.
• Mon. June 2 – All library books are due
• Fri. June 6 – Pro-D day; school not in session
• Wed. June 18 – Book swap
• Thur. June 19 at 9:15am (all day) – Burnaby Public Library visit & Confederation Park travelling by public transit.
• Wed. June 25 –Last full day of school
• Thur. June 26 – Early dismissal at 10am

Our hearts are full of appreciation for your continued support.

Gratefully, Ms. Kim and Ms. Chan

Dear families,

It was another week full of fun, joy, and meaningful learning!

We are writers.

This week, we worked very hard on opinion writing and worked with Ms. Wong-Reinhardt too.

We are passionate about learning!

To practice our non-fiction reading and writing, Passion Projects is a perfect exercise! We learned about the importance of using reputable resources. Ms. Chan taught them about the tree octopus. They all believed it was true because it looked like an informative website with detailed information, images, and various pages. Feel free to check it out: https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

We discussed the types of websites we would consider as reputable. For example, we would not use information from Wikipedia but we would use information from a site like National Geographic for Kids because it is a longstanding company with a good reputation for doing valid research and sharing it with the world.

In addition, we practiced so many critical thinking skills! (It’s one of our favourite core competencies we love having your child develop! We learned about plagiarism and how we cannot just copy and paste text into our PowerPoint presentations. Here are some of the higher level thinking skills we started using:

• evaluate which websites to use
• understand what we are researching and reading
• analyze to determine what information we want to include based on our inquiry questions
• decide which slide the information should be recorded
• change the words yet keep the facts and meaning (paraphrasing)

Students were instructed to add a Resources slide to record the websites they used to find their facts. They learned how to copy the web address and paste it into their last slide. (Triple click on the URL. Use shortcuts: Crtl+c to copy and then Crtl+v to paste.)

Working on our Passion Project helps us develop our core competencies of communication, reflective and creative thinking too!

Ways to support at home: It is like music to our ears to hear that many students are working on their Passion Projects at home!  It is important that they are the ones doing the learning and work. It is okay that you teach them PowerPoint skills, how to paraphrase, and help them read the information. Be the guide on the side and please refrain from doing anything FOR them. The more they do, the more they learn. It is still relatively early in teaching them all the skills they need to produce a good presentation. We are scaffolding their learning so the best way to help is to teach them the skills on a different topic, for example, so they are given the opportunity to practice critical thinking to APPLY their new learning to their own Passion Project. We appreciate you for supporting their learning!

We are mathematicians.

We continued with learning division. This week, we built on our understanding in representing division in multiple ways: sharing, grouping, and real life word problems.

Students had fun creating their own word problems. In order to do so, they needed to have a solid foundation of dividing by sharing and grouping. Here were some clear examples of proficiency that demonstrate their full understanding:

Ways to support at home: Have fun writing word problems together! Many found “division by sharing” word problems easier to create. However, there were only a few who truly understood how to write a real life word problem for “division by grouping” so if you can reinforce this at home, that would be greatly appreciated! If you need to review, look back at last week’s blog post or here is the link to the short video.

We are scientists.

Learning standard: observable changes in the local environment caused by erosion and deposition by wind, water, and ice

Students enjoyed the visible nature of discovering how erosion and deposition works. We blew the top of the sand hill and then slowly poured water on top of sand to demonstrate erosion and deposition. They watched the sand from the top of the hill be moved by wind and water to deposit the sand at the bottom of the hill.

Then we watched a short video to see cool examples around the world of how wind, water, and ice (through weathering) caused erosion and deposition (moved to a different location). Feel free to watch the video here to see examples. We learned from a song too! Watch it here.

Image by Laura Candler

We are athletes.

After two sessions of tennis with Marcus, they have demonstrated good perseverance, growth mindset, and skill development!

Sports Day

We enjoyed spending the morning together collaborating, cooperating, and competing in fun activities!

Save the Dates

• Thur. May 22 at 6:30pm – Kitchener Community Dinner; CLICK HERE to RSVP
• Fri. May 23 at 4:00pm – Karnival for Kids @ Burnaby North Secondary; CLICK HERE to learn more.
• Thur. May 29 at 1:30pm – Volunteer Tea; please RSVP asap
• Fri. May 30 at 2:00pm – Early dismissal
• Fri. June 6 – Pro-D day; school not in session
• Thur. June 19 at 9:15 (all day) – Burnaby Public Library visit & Confederation Park (Notice will be sent home next week. We will be travelling by public transit.)

Thank you so much for your continued support! We hope you are available to join us at the Community Dinner and Volunteer Tea! Everyone is welcome!

Gratefully, Ms. Kim and Ms. Chan

Dear families,

We are so proud of all the kids for their performance at our spring concert presentation of Let’s Eat! They did so well singing their two songs with all the actions: It’s Raining Tacos and My Ooey Gooey Cinnamon Bun. 

We hope you enjoyed the show!

Alliteration

After reading Sylvie by Jennifer Sattler, we talked about how author’s usually have a message they tell through their story.

Here’s a synopsis from Amazon: Meet a flamingo of a different stripe. When all-too-curious Sylvie learns that the reason she is pink is because of her diet, she decides to do a little experimenting! At first, Sylvie likes trying out different colors and patterns, but ultimately she learns the valuable lesson that sometimes it’s best to just be yourself.

In the story, some examples of alliteration was pointed out so after the story, we tried our hand at it. They were give some to try and then to come up with their own. Ziya and Juliette challenged themselves to come up with one for each letter of the alphabet!

We are mathematicians.

We solidified our understanding of division by sharing at the beginning of the week and then learned about division by grouping at the end of the week.

Ways to support at home: Watch this video to help you understand the difference. This wasn’t shown in class yet but feel free to use it as review. Take out some toys to practice. Ask your child to communicate the two different ways to show division: by sharing and grouping.

One of the ways we know makes an impact in how well children learn is through discovery play so they were given opportunities to make meaning and learn with partners so they can communicate their understanding.

We are scientists.

On Friday, we walked to Willingdon Park to release our beautiful butterflies. They loved how it landed on some of them – like Eloa’s wrist, and Alicia and Oliver’s shirt!

Passion Projects (ADST)

Students were excited to continue our projects. The next steps were to plan and use their critical thinking brains to come up with questions to research. Take a look at our planning sheet.

Passion Project Planning

Ways to support at home: Have a conversation with your child about what they are passionate about learning. See if they need support with coming up with questions that demonstrate deeper level thinking. Go to the public library to take out books on what they will be researching.

Here are some examples of the experts who will be teaching us what they learn: sea turtles, bunnies, hamsters, photography of dogs, Steph Curry, hedgehogs, cricket (sport), hedgehogs, sea lions, and marine invertebrates.

We are so excited to see them work hard on their projects!

Community Dinner

All families are invited to join us for our second Community Dinner this year! To learn more, click here to go to our school website. CLICK HERE to RSVP to let us know you will join us.

Volunteer Tea

Thank you for your continued support and time at home. You should have received a Volunteer Tea invitation already. This year we are recognizing all families for their support in their child’s learning on Thursday, May 29 in the afternoon (in the gym). We work as partners! Please return the card or click here to RSVP and join us.

Tennis Workshop

From May 12 to May 30, our students will be participating in a tennis program. Unfortunately, the form arrived late and wasn’t able to be sent home on Friday due to a busy afternoon. If you would like to complete this paperwork this weekend, please find the form attached below. We will also be sending home the paper copy of this form on Monday. We would greatly appreciate your support in returning the signed form before our gym class on Tuesday.

Tennis Permission Form – 2025

To all of our lovely mothers, we wish you a wonderful happy Mother’s Day this weekend!

As always, we are grateful for your time and effort at home,

Ms. Kim and Ms. Chan

Dear families,

As we said good-bye to Mr. Evoy, there were mixed emotions of celebrating a successful practicum of teaching and learning together for all of us and knowing we will miss his warm and kind presence. It wasn’t just students who learned from him but both Ms. Kim and I learned about our own philosophy and practices affirming why we do what we do as we supported Mr. Evoy so it makes us better teachers in the process too!

We are so grateful for Mr. Evoy’s dedication, hard work, and connection with us. We wish him continued success in his teaching journey! We hope to see him back as a Teacher on Call at Kitchener!

I, Ms. Chan, thoroughly enjoyed being back in the classroom on Thursday and Friday. What a blessing to spend time with your beautiful children. I am so grateful! It truly is incredible how much learning happens in one day, let alone a week, a month, and a year!

Student Led Conferences

We are grateful for your time to listen attentively to your child show you their learning across the curriculum. Thank you for being active participants and big supporters of their learning all year! We hope you enjoyed celebrating their successes. They worked so hard to prepare for these conferences and have continued to work hard since September. We are so proud of them and their perseverance!

If you haven’t done so yet, please fill out the Two Stars and a Wish sheet and return it to school tomorrow, thank you!

We are mathematicians.

Over the weekend, students were encouraged to teach you about division as we enjoyed our first lesson on Friday. If they haven’t yet, ask them to share what they learned. Pull out some candy, chocolates, or cookies with plates for each person in your family. Ask them to divide by sharing to practice what they learned. Reinforcing new concepts helps to solidify learning and builds a strong initial foundation for learning division.

Here’s what we learned so you can support at home:

Each lesson, it is important for us to post our learning intention so it is clear what they are to learn by the end of the lesson.

Two of the big curricular competencies for math is to communicate mathematical thinking in many ways and to represent ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms.

The learning intention for our first lesson in division: I can understand equal groups in division. This concept involved the idea of sharing.

We had plates with our fake gummy bears and went, “one for you, one for you, and one for you” until they were all passed out equally among everyone holding a plate. They enjoyed the real life examples to experience the why and how of division. Then students were given questions to try with partners.

This learning through “play” is one of the most impactful ways for children to learn through discovery. It is one of our favourite types of hands-on and engaging learning where students learn together and practice communicating mathematical thinking with each other. Opportunities like these also help them develop their core competencies of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and social awareness and responsibility. This also aligns with Indigenous ways of learning by de-centering the room with less teacher time talking and more student time exploring the new concepts.

Passion Projects

On Friday, we started talking about Passion Projects. We watched this video by John Spencer that introduced them to what it is although he calls it Genius Hour.

So I asked them to finish this sentence:

I have always wanted to learn more about…

We are at the beginning stages. During this week, please have a conversation about what they would love to learn more about.

Think about what you would really like to spend your time learning about. It should be a topic big enough that you can spend about six weeks on it. Here are some ideas and it’s okay to come up with their own:  

• Learn a new language
• Learn how to  do something  
  • Make a stop motion movie 
  • Photography  
  • Knitting/sewing  
• Learn about something  
  • Architecture  
  • A country or culture – design your dream trip!  
  • The Science of flight  
  • An animal or creature
• Learn about your family history 
• Learn about someone: an artist, athlete, scientist, activist, author , singer

What do you care about in this world? What can you do about “fixing” an existing problem? Think of something you can do that will make this world a better place.  

Next, we will begin to narrow it down . The idea is that they will become an expert and teach the class what they learned.

ADST

Students were introduced to PowerPoint. They learned how to create a new document, rename it, add a new title to the first slide, add an image, choose a design idea, and add a new slide.

How to support at home: Have your child login to O365, open their new PowerPoint project and add more slides. This was good practice to create slides and images. This was to prepare them for learning how to develop presentation slides for their Passion Projects. They loved it and were so excited!

Spring Concert

Our class along with our buddy class look and sound great! We are so excited for you to see them perform on Wednesday!

• Wed. May 7 @ 1:30pm – Afternoon dress rehearsal
  • Have your child wear yellow, orange, or brown tops and black or dark bottoms
• Wed. May 7 @ 6:00pm
  • Have your child wear yellow, orange, or brown tops and black or dark bottoms
  • Bring your child to the Annex, Room A6 (at the far north side of the Annex)
  • Doors to the gym open at 6pm
  • PAC will have cash only concession
• Wed. May 7 @ 6:30pm – Evening performance; bring your tickets!
  • Pick up your child at the end of the performance in the Annex, Room A6

Save the Dates

• Fri. May 16 – Sports Day; early dismissal at 12:30pm
  • Students will be travelling from station to station with our buddy class. They will be divided into 6 teams. More information to come.
• Mon. May 12 – Whole school tennis lessons begin
• Mon. May 19 – Victoria Day; school is closed
• Thur. May 22 – Community Dinner at 6:00pm
  • Everyone is welcome! Bring a dish to share.
• Fri. May 30 – Early dismissal at 2:00pm

We are so grateful for your time and support. It is hard to believe we have less than two months to enjoy each other’s company as we continue to learn together. Rest assured, we will continue to empower your child to develop their identity, be affirmed in their strengths, and grow in their stretch zone as we support them in the process. Can’t wait to continue to share our learning with you! Thank you for your time to read our blog posts!

As always, please reach out should you have any questions, concerns, or would like to share successes.

With hearts full of gratitude,

Ms. Chan and Ms. Kim