Category: Indigenous Education

Dear families,

We had a fun week returning from spring break! We hope you all had a lovely time off with your family! This past week, students started learning their Hip Hop routine. Please have your child wear black and/or white on Tuesday, April 4th. Entrance to the performance will be through the Dundas/Gilmore door to the gymnasium. The doors will open at 1:00 p.m. and seating will be first-come, first-served. We are looking forward to showing you our dance moves!

We are story creators.

Students listened to the story A Salmon for Simon but first, they had an opportunity to work in small groups to collaborate on creating their own story based on 6 images from the book. They put the pictures in the order that made sense to them. Then they wrote sentences to tell their story. It was great fun to have each group go up to read their version!

We received our pen pal letters!

It was exciting to receive our pen pal letters from our buddy class at Brentwood Park! We are in the process of brainstorming ideas with details to write back to them this week.

We are scientists.

Thank you to Ms. Kim, we continue to be immersed in our learning about life cycles. We had a special guest speaker, Ms. Barndt, share her knowledge about salmon in BC.

Students created a lilypad filled with the 4 stages of the frog’s life cycle based on their research. They also researched the life cycle of humans.

Web of Life activity

Ms. Kim showed them a video called “Everything is Connected” as an introduction to the Indigenous Peoples’ perspectives on nature. Each student had a role. As they listened to the story, when they heard their role mentioned, they received the ball of yarn. At the end, this created a beautiful web so students got to see that every action no matter how small is connected to others and causes a ripple effect on the whole ecosystem. This was a powerful way for students to learn about environmental stewardship to help them understand the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of taking care of our planet.

This is Ms. Kim’s last week with us. We are so grateful for her dedication to planning engaging lessons for us! We wish you all the best in your teacher education!

ADST

We continued to develop our skills in O365 using Word. We learned how to create text boxes. This practice prepares us for learning how to add text boxes in PowerPoint. Very soon, I am SO excited that we will be diving in to Passion Projects! Please begin to have conversations with your child about what interests them most. What would they LOVE to learn more about? They will be doing research and then preparing a PowerPoint presentation. I believe that communication and presentation skills are important skills to develop plus a passion for learning!

Here’s what we learned so far in Word:

• bold, italicize, underline
• changing fonts, sizes and colour
• alignment: left, center, right
• adding images and text boxes

Please feel free to have your child login to O365 at home to practice using these tools. If you wish, you can introduce them to PowerPoint to get a head start! I’m sure some of them would love to become mentors when we start using PowerPoint!

Spring is almost here!

We practiced drawing tulips and then created our own with white pencil crayon. We traced over our image with white liquid glue and made them come alive with chalk pastels. I hope you enjoy what you see! Students added a new post to their SpaceEDU account. Please login to view their reflection on learning and feel free to leave a comment for your child to enjoy!

April is Autism Acceptance Month (also shared from the Community Office email shared on Friday)

April is Autism Acceptance Month and Gilmore will be celebrating and recognizing this important topic all month long! Students will be provided with facts about autism and other disabilities in the morning announcements and with a variety of in-class and school-wide activities throughout the month. For example, all classes will be participating in a sensory day so students can experience the feelings of challenge that individuals with a disability may feel on an everyday basis. Students will also be doing pointillism art using their non-dominant hand. It is our hope that these activities will help our students to gain valuable perspective taking, understanding and empathy!

As a way of giving back to the community, we will also be raising money for the Canucks Autism Network through an ice-cream sandwich sale on April 14 ($2 each at recess and lunch) and by selling paper fan hands on School Cash Online throughout April. For every $5 paper hand purchased, your name will go into a draw for some prizes at the end of the month. (Prize winners will be announced on Monday, May 1). Prizes will include Canucks memorabilia, 3 EA Sports video games of your choice and a FIFA 23 ultimate team jersey.

Thank you for your continued support at home. We appreciate you!

With a heart full of gratitude, Ms. Chan

Dear families,

I hope you are having a great weekend so far! Tomorrow, February 13 is Jump Rope for Heart. CLICK HERE to learn more and here to donate. A reminder to wear RED tomorrow and runners. If your child doesn’t have red, then Grizzly gear is great too!

We are authors and storytellers.
I read the story Ralph Tells a Story by Abby Hanlon. He discovered he not only had many stories to tell, but they had value and are worth telling. It taught us that stories are everywhere. We are story. Each day, we have an opportunity to share a part of our story with each other during Community Circle time to develop our connections and understanding of our similarities and differences.

Students have continued to enjoy working on their stories. This week, they had an opportunity to read it to a classmate to receive feedback on how well they described the characters, setting, problem, and solution. Some took their feedback to make improvements in their story right away! We now have some ready to begin publishing!

“All that we are is story. From the moment we are born to the time we continue on our spirit journey, we are involved in the creation of the story of our time here. It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind,” 

-Richard Wagamese 
Ojibway author from Kamloops B.C.

Speaking of story, I wrote an article for SFU that was just published recently on their education page – a first for their Share Your Story series. CLICK HERE for the link to the article. I’d love to hear what resonated with you. Please feel free to share in the comments or send me an email. Thank you!

We are mathematicians.
Grade 2s continued to work on our addition and subtraction math facts using our random numbers chart. If your child no longer has theirs at home, simply take an 8.5 x 11″ paper and randomly write 0-9 on one side and 10-20 on the other side. You can choose to have another sheet with all the numbers from 0-20 to practice. Here are the facts we covered thus far:

• Commutative property: a+b=c and b+a=c. You can switch the addends and the sum is the same.
• +0 & – 0
• +1 & – 1
• +2 & – 2
• +10 & – 10
• Making tens (combinations that equal 10 like 0+10, 1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6, 5+5)
• +/- 9 NEW this week! Students loved learning the +9 and -9 strategy for addition/subtraction in math! It was like magic using the power of digital roots! They liked my magic wand I used for the effect. Please add these to your child’s skill practice. Thank you!

Look at the Addition Facts Chart below. If your child memorized the strategies so far (listed above), they would have learned 105 facts with only 45 left because of the commutative property! We still have some strategies up our sleeve, so let’s keep practicing with our random numbers chart at home! Thank you for your support! I practiced these with my kids at home and over the years, they have thanked me to “forcing” them to practice and memorize them. It just gives them more confidence in math overall especially when they move into the intermediate grades. Grade 3’s can  use these strategies to practice this too!

Next up: Doubles and Doubles +1. Then we’ll only have 35 facts left!

We also started learning how to add two-digits together with regrouping through play. Each person had a partner. They rolled two dice to create random numbers to solve the equation together. They were so engaged and worked well with each other!

We are communicators.
We had our second session of emailing on Friday. I am grateful that almost everyone memorized their login credentials to make the login process so smooth for us all. They are definitely reaping the benefits of being able to login efficiently! Thank you for your support! Students also are learning the basic parts of an email and are becoming better communicators by adding:

To: [Email address]
Subject line: [Short description of the email]
Salutation or greeting phrase: [Dear Ms. Chan,]
Body: [Message]
Closing: [Gratefully,]
Signature: [Ms. Chan]

We can reflect. 
It has been a while since we visited our eportfolios in SpacesEDU but last Thursday, we worked on two posts: Art and a reading.

The expectation is they share all of these in their reflection:  

• Describe what we did
• What I am proud of  
• Two “I can” statements  
• What I would do differently next time  
• What I learned about myself

We are artists.
Students thoughtfully considered and wrote what love means to them around Valentine’s Day. They also had fun hiding their name in and amongst all of the words! Here is a sample of a reflection and an image of our bulletin board.

Valentine’s Day
Thank you to parents who already communicated what your child will be contributing to our Friendship Fruit salad on Tuesday. If you wish, they can bring in their fruit on Monday, and I will keep it in the fridge for Tuesday. So far, we have contributions of raspberries, oranges, grapes, apples, kiwi, and a banana. Repeats are ok! Thank you! We will have bowls and spoons for them.

Your child should have brought home a list of classmate names on Thursday. If they are preparing Valentines, we would like all children to be included, please. Thank you for fostering inclusion.

As always, we appreciate your support at home. Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to ask. Your children are working so hard every day to improve. We are so very proud of them!

Don’t always have time to read our blog posts? Looking for a real reason for your child to read? Here’s a tip: Have them read our weekly blog posts TO you as you cook OR instead of something else they are reading OR read it together so you can talk about what they are learning in school.

Grateful for you all and loving being their teacher because they bring me such joy, Ms. Chan

Dear families,

It has been such a fun-filled delightful last two weeks of school!

Thank you to everyone’s support and donations for our annual Jingle Bell Walk yesterday! We appreciate Charlotte’s mom and Jeremy H.’s mom for joining us on our walk. We are also grateful to Xavier’s dad for being our driver to help us bring the items back to the school. Your time and help is very much appreciated! There were over 80 parent volunteers who helped on our walk, collection, and serving of hot chocolate! We are so blessed to live in such a generous and caring community!

We are readers.
We were the very first class to visit the Scholastic Book Fair almost a couple of weeks ago. What an exciting time to shop and get excited about books! Thank you for all of your support! If you ordered books, they have arrived. You will receive them this week.

We are continuing with our daily silent reading and reading groups. Here, children are put into groups to read with others who are at similar levels. We talk about effective strategies I see them using (I notice, name, and nurture.) and what other things great readers do. Letter sound combinations are reviewed and we practice breaking up unfamiliar words with decoding strategies. We listen to and support each other as we read out loud to practice our fluency and expression. We talk about our background knowledge and make predictions before and while we read. Students make connections to their experiences, other books/movies, and encouraged to wonder by asking questions about what is happening in the story. Many of these strategies are to help children gain a better understanding of what they read and engage with the text on a deeper level.

Ways to support at home: As you read with your child, we encourage you to follow the same strategies for pushing their critical thinking and reflection skills as they read. One of the most important ways to supporting your reader at home is to talk about what they are reading before, during, and after to help them make sense of what they read. Comprehension and connection is key! Another important piece is to help them recognize what their strengths are as a reader so they know what to continue doing. When you notice them using a reading skill or strategy, be specific to name it so you can nurture it. We need to make it explicit what “good” reading looks like, sounds like, and feels like so they understand what they are working towards. Nurture the joy of reading!

If you have any questions and would appreciate a 1:1 conversation about how to better support your child specifically with reading or writing, please let me know and let’s make it happen! I am happy to support you and your child! 🙂

Communicating our Learning in Science
Your child should have come home with the Matter booklet and a letter with how they were to communicate their learning. They had fun pretending to be a parent as they listened to their partner practice explaining all of the concepts page by page as review. To see the concepts taught, click here to go to our We Are Scientists page. We hope you had fun doing the matter exercise around the house with the sticky notes!

We have an exciting in-class “field trip” on Mon. Dec. 12: Metro Vancouver Watershed Water Cycle. Here are the details on the workshop:

For over a decade, Skye Consulting and Metro Vancouver have provided watershed education to grade 4/5 classrooms across the region but NOW we are extending that to grade 2 classrooms. Metro Vancouver provides clean, safe drinking water to 2.7 million residents everyday, all thanks to our amazing water cycle. They are pleased to offer to your classrooms a fun and hands-on classroom workshop that brings the watershed to you! This is free of charge.

Discover the treasures of Metro Vancouver’s watersheds through an engaging, curriculum connected, in class workshop where our facilitator visits your school with a series of activities and videos to bring the watersheds alive in your classroom. We will explore how the water cycle provides our drinking water, what makes watershed ecosystems important, and concepts of water use and sustainability. Once you’ve experienced this workshop, you’ll be reminded every time you turn on the tap!

We are communicators.
I wish you could have been there to witness their sheer delight and excitement when we received letters from our pen pals from Brentwood Park’s Division 12!! Each one came in their own decorated envelope addressed to them! This past week, we focused on communication through letter writing. We learned the standard form of letters and how to add details about a personal fact that we really wanted our pen pal to know. I am so proud of their overall writing development since the beginning of the year! Our reflective journal writing is progressing well too!

As a class, one area that needed review was: What makes up a sentence? Some students are still learning and some are working on their consistency.

Teaming with Ms. Kapusta, our ELL teacher, we brainstormed what all sentences have. Then we taught them that every sentence has two parts besides it starting with a capital letter and ending with proper punctuation. It has also a subject and predicate.

We had a super fun activity where they each received a subject and a predicate on separate slips of paper. Then they went around the room choosing different partners to make silly sentences. Big smiles and laughter all around! 🙂 We ended the lesson by playing charades. Students chose a predicate and the rest of the class had to make up a complete sentence after it was acted out!

Ways to support at home: Encourage your child to write for real reasons and to cultivate the joy of writing. Keep a journal to record what they did each day. A gratitude journal is a great way to count our blessings! Write a letter or list. Many students love to write stories. Have them create a book!

Illnesses
Last week, we had a number of students away due to illness. We dearly miss your child when they are away. Thank you so much for keeping your child at home when they are sick. Our wish is that they feel better very soon so they can return. When they do feel better at home but aren’t well enough to come back to school just yet, here are some suggestions for what to do, if you wish, and of course, only if they are up to it:

• Snuggle up and read together on EPIC. Your child has access from 7am to 3pm. Use the suggestions mentioned above to talk about the book.
• Wonder together. Think of things they are curious about. Do some research together!
• Practice writing by finding a real reason to write. Perhaps write a note or letter to someone like a grandparent or me! I LOVE receiving letters from students!
• Make something together! Be creative. Use random materials to see what you can come up with!
• If you work from home while your child is recovering, these are all things they can do on their own too!

Always such a joy to see your child’s face and smile when they do return feeling better! 🙂

Winter Concert
We have been working hard to prepare for a delightful winter concert next week! Here are some details you will need to know:

• You will receive TWO tickets on Monday. There are two tickets per child. Please bring your tickets with you to the performance.
• What to wear: a light blue, silver or grey top with dark pants, black socks, and black shoes
• Dress rehearsal on Wed. Dec. 7 at 1:00pm. If you have other family members or younger children, this is the best time to watch! No tickets necessary.
• Please have your child wear their outfit for the dress rehearsal too.
• Wed. Dec. 7 – Arrive at 6:15pm. Report to our classroom. Please not earlier than 6:15pm. Thank you.
• Parents will leave the gym through the outside doors.
• After the concert, please meet your child OUTSIDE at the doors they always line up and leave from. This is where they will be dismissed.

Communicating Student Learning
We are excited to provide you with your child’s learning update on Friday, December 9th! As you read through their progress report, please understand that this is a strength-based document. There are many areas of learning to celebrate. Focus on and recognize their strengths as you sit side by side to read it with them. They are written with a lot of care, love, encouragement, and a supportive heart. I really do enjoy working on these because it gives me dedicated time to deeply reflect and think about your child, their strengths, goals, and next steps in all areas of their learning and development. What a joy and a blessing it is to be your child’s teacher this year! I feel so much gratitude in my heart every day that I get to spend time with your precious children. What a gift they are to each other and our community.

These are written to your child because I believe it helps them take ownership over their learning AND with their voice included, they can see themselves as a big part of their goal setting and progress.

Just like in reading as mentioned above, they need to know what they are doing well so they know what to continue doing. This is a snapshot of how they are doing at this time.

Please refer to this as you look through the different subject areas:

Proficiency Scale   

You will not be receiving a written overview of what we covered in the first term from me. The purpose of the overview is to inform you as to what we learned. Instead, please review the blog posts since the beginning of the year and the We Are Learners pages on our blog to learn more about what we covered since September. Thank you!

We look forward to seeing continued growth as we all work together in their learning! Please know that we recognize that their development doesn’t happen without your valued support at home. We deeply and sincerely are grateful for your time and effort. Please review the “Goals” and “Next Steps” section to specifically learn how to best support your child at home too. Let’s continue to work together to support your child in the joy of learning! As always, please reach out if you have any questions or would like further details. We’re partners!

Invitation
We appreciate all feedback we receive from you and your child as to how much they enjoy coming to school. We do make an effort to making it a fun, engaging, meaningful, and novel experience for them! If you would like to be more involved in our class, please let me know what area of expertise or interest you have and let’s make it happen! We’d LOVE to have you come into our class to teach them something new! It doesn’t have to be something new either. Your presence and your story will enrich our lives and it would be such a gift to learn from you. If you’d like to share something from your culture, for example, or come in to read a book as a guest reader, we welcome that too! Share your ideas with us! If you feel that this is in your stretch zone, what better way to model how you find courage to overcome discomfort and expand your comfort zone! Nudge nudge. 😉

Have a most delightful rest of your weekend! I love and appreciate you and your children!

With warmth and gratitude, Ms. Chan (and Mrs. Paulich)

Dear Division 11 families,

Although it was a short school week, we still fit in a LOT of learning and we had a FANTASTIC week! One of the sweetest comments from one of your children this past week really touched my heart. She said, “We have the sweetest class.” Every time I think of her comment, my heart was tickled with warmth and love. This lovely thought has visited numerous times since she said it! We DO have the sweetest class! 🙂

Names are important.

Our names are a very important and significant part of who we are. They have power. They can have deep personal, cultural, and historical connections too. It is a part of our identity, may be a part of the communities we belong, and our place in the world. 

We learned that many Indigenous peoples are gifted a traditional name or names that carry deep cultural meaning. We listened to a story called Thunder Boy Jr. Feel free to listen to the story again at home by clicking the image below. Then we did some writing about our own names and will be doing more activities with our names. These activities are meant to help each child learn more about themselves, their family, and each other as we share.

Because names are a person’s greatest connection to their own identity and individuality, it might be the most important word to them. This is one way that children are seen as a part of our  classroom community. This is the reason why your child is greeted by name each and every morning when I pick them up outside. Then during Community Circle, they are greeted by the person to their right so before recess, they would have heard their sweet name at least twice already!  READ MORE !