Category: Social Emotional Learning

Dear families,

What a productive week of learning! Each day this week, I felt an incredible sense of pride for how hard your child and our class as a whole worked. Each child is taking their learning so seriously. Don’t get me wrong. I feel this way every week but this one in particular felt a higher level of focus and dedication. So whatever you are feeding your children, keep feeding them, please! 😉

We had the great pleasure of having Ms. Kim join us this past week to get to know your children and to learn all about our classroom.

Here is a special message from our student teacher

Dear Families of Division 11,

I am greatly pleased to say hello to all of you. I am Grace Kim, a student teacher from Simon Fraser University. I have been an EA (Education Assistant) in the Burnaby School District for the last 4 years. I am also a mom of 4 children ranging from Grades 5 to 11.

Yesterday, I completed a full week of in-class observations. I often had eye-opening moments, witnessing the ideal classroom environment that I have ever imagined. I gratefully embarked on learning how to build a welcoming and inclusive classroom community not only from Ms. Chan, Mrs. Paulich, and Ms. Connell but also from 21 students in Division 11.

As I return to SFU for the next 2 weeks, I am very excited to be back on February 21st to start teaching and continue learning how to set up core values and beliefs in education as well. I hope all of the families in this warm community are well. See you soon.

With gratitude and warmth, Grace

We are authors.
We really dug into our writing! After developing our characters, planning our storyboard, learning about what makes a great story, we started writing! We call this time Writer’s Workshop. I wish you could be there in the room to see how focused and engaged they are in writing their stories.

My goal for each time we work on our stories is to teach something new they can bring into their writing to make it even better. They are asked to read over their writing before they start writing again with the purpose to self-assess for improvement. Students were encouraged to

• review their opening sentence. Is it interesting? Does it hook your reader in to want to read more?
• introduce their character. When we describe our character and their core values or what they believe in, it is easier for your audience to make a connection to your character. Did you include some details about your character?
• describe the setting. Do you describe where the story takes place so that your reader can paint a picture of where they are?
• include quotation marks for dialogue between characters. This lesson was SO much FUN! It was the first time I introduced quotation marks. We used “bunny ears” to represent quotation marks (because they look like beginning and ending quotation marks). This was to show someone is speaking. So to practice, we all got up to talk to classmates. Anytime we talked, we had to put up “bunny ears”. Wish you saw the big smiles on everyone’s faces! I just love to make learning feel like an experience!
• add adverbial phrases. As an extension to dialogue, we learned how to describe how someone said something. For example: “I just can’t believe it,” said Julie with her head hung low. Add this extra phrase really helps to paint a more descriptive picture to enhance the dialogue.
• review the number of times they used the word: said. Many children this age overuse “said” so they we learned there are other ways like: replied, shouted, cried.

I read The Best Story by Eileen Spinelli. Feel free to watch it read to you with your child. I absolutely love this story. I use it when I do presentations on the writing process. What I love about it the message: Write the story that is in your heart. Students were encouraged to write the story that is in their heart. Interesting enough, one student asked if he could start over. Of course, I said yes. At the end of the writing time, he came to me to tell me that his ideas flowed so much faster! That’s a win!

We are communicators.
On Wednesday, we MCed the Celebration of Learning for Literacy Week. Again, this was one of those moments where I beamed with pride because of their courage to speak in front of the school. An extra high five to Chloe, Katelyn, Cristina, and Addie for reading their letter to Mother Earth at the assembly! So proud of you all!

We are readers.
Reading groups are going so well now! We have six groups to better match our varying reading levels. All groups meet at the same time. We built in a system that works beautifully. Each group receives their book bag for the session. One person in the group goes to get a white board, marker, and eraser. They use this board to write down words they are unsure of. Students were taught not to just tell the person struggling with sounding out a word. Instead, collectively, they try to attack the word with their understanding of how to break up the word, phonics, letter sounds, syllables, and overall knowledge of words. I love how they help each other! During this time, I have the freedom to move from table to table listening in and supporting as each person takes a turn reading a page. Again, I wish you could see how well our reading groups run. You would feel so proud of how well your child works in their group, respectfully taking turns, and supporting each other’s reading development.

New learning this week was to spend some time talking about the connections they are making to what they read.

We are scientists.
After having some practice last week with researching oceans as a class, we thought we’d try our hand at doing our own research on lakes. I vetted five websites to learn more. We found some very interesting facts like not all lakes are freshwater! They started by recording what they know about lakes and then adding what they wonder about lakes before discovering facts. We learned that we cannot just copy word for word what we find. We need to

We are athletes.
So far, we had two tennis lessons. They already showed improvement the second session! Thank you for ensuring your child has runners on Tuesday and Thursday. They have two more sessions next week!

We are mathematicians. [Repeated from last week’s post.]
As you may or may not know, our school growth plan has a numeracy focus now (new this year). So, if I hosted a Math Literacy Fun Night for you and your child to attend, would you be interested? The purpose of this would be to teach you some fun games you can play to help your child improve their number sense, number concepts, and learning of math facts. I understand that it’s one thing to ask you to help your child practice their math facts, but it’s so much better if I show you how and have you practice and play with them at school so you can replicate the fun at home! 🙂 Please CLICK HERE to fill out this quick questionnaire to share your interest and availability. Thank you!

We celebrate!
One of my beliefs is that we need to recognize how hard we work, our learning and growth, and to celebrate it! I’m a firm believer that children don’t do things to please me. It’s important they work hard at all aspects of their learning because it builds on their personal strengths, recognition of their accomplishments, and self-regulation (core competencies). Students are provided with frequent opportunities and guided to celebrate small wins especially when they are so invested in their learning. We foster a sense of pride by giving ourselves a high five and sometimes giving each other high fives. It has been scientifically proven that when we high-five, it improves our mood. How? When we high-five, our brain releases dopamine which increases happiness! When people are happy, this activates all areas of the learning centre in your brain so we learn better!

As always, my heart is full of gratitude for being your child’s teacher. They truly bring me so much joy every day I get to spend with them! Even if I don’t tell them, I am hopeful they know I love them because they see it on my face and feel it in their heart. On Friday, we learned how to send an email using Outlook mail in O365! They made me feel so loved in their email messages…truly heartwarming!

If your child has not memorized their login ID and password, please continue to work on this. Those who have it memorized are feeling very efficient and are able to step up to be leaders to help others who need support. Thank you for supporting them to memorize it at home!

For extra practice logging in while at home, feel free to go to the Gilmore website. Click on

Then login with pupilnumber@edu.burnabyschools.ca. It would look something like this with their personal number: 4561237@edu.burnabyschools.ca and their password would be the same. All Burnaby students can download O365 on devices at home.

For extra practice communicating, go to Outlook Mail. I responded to all emails so there should be an unread mail from me. If your child wishes, have them reply back to me. Feel free to review with them why we type a few words in the subject line and then our message below. The next lesson will be about how we typically form an email with a greeting, message, and signature while also paying attention to complete sentences that begin with a capital letter and end with proper punctuation.

I am grateful for you and your continued support. Have a most wonderful weekend!

Gratefully, Ms. Chan

Dear families,

So many things to celebrate about your children and our class! We hope you thoroughly enjoyed celebrating them and the school at the winter concert. I felt so proud of them as they practiced and and I was watching them perform!

Communicating Student Learning Report
Another celebration for all of their hard work in learning since the beginning of the year! Each child contributes to making our community such a wonderful place to be. Each of them is a leader in their own way. We have had a few teachers work with our class and each one comments on how sweet they are and I agree! We hope you intentionally took the time to celebrate your child’s learning and progress as you read their report with them. Please read last week’s blog post for more details about the Communicating Student Learning report and what to pay attention to.

Please feel free to write a comment on the envelope and sign it before returning on Monday. Thank you for your continued support at home! We appreciate you!

Since it’s a formal way to celebrate your child’s learning, I wanted to make it a special event. It was surprising to me that at the beginning of the week, there were a few groans when I mentioned they will be receiving their progress report at the end of the week. It should be a time to celebrate! Do we all have things to work on and improve? We all do! But let’s recognize the gains they have made so far and continue to INCLUDE them so they take ownership and feel accountable. Learning is a process! This was just a snapshot of their learning journey. We still have six more months of successes to celebrate together!

“Learning takes patience and time.” – First Peoples Principles of Learning 

I originally suggested we have cake to celebrate but in discussing this plan with them, they suggested cupcakes would be better. Rather than buying from a store, I thought baking our own cupcakes would be way more fun so we did! We really try to make school an experience every day and offer something they look forward to and get excited about!

Click here for the link to the cake recipe. For the frosting, we melted chocolate chips and added the thick part of a can of coconut milk in a pot on medium heat. That’s it! Add icing sugar and sprinkles and voila!

We are creators.
Thank you to the generosity of Ms. Connell, our EA in the class, students had a wonderful opportunity to decorate their own trees to bring home! They were so engaged in this activity. It was so lovely to see their creativity at work, how they inspired each other with ideas, and to feel the joy of the experience. We appreciate you for this opportunity, Ms. Connell!

Mrs. Paulich did a directed drawing of gingerbread houses. Look at their beautiful creations!

Our Christmas sensory poems are finished too. Click here to read them all!

On Monday, we have a new student and family joining us. Her name is Lisa. Please help us welcome her to our class and Gilmore! The children are excited to meet her!

We hope you have a wonderful weekend ahead! It’s hard to believe we are already nearing the end of the year. Time flies when you’re having fun and feeling joy! And that we do in our class!!

With a heart full of love and appreciation for you and your children, 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 families,

We hope you are enjoying your weekend so far! We had another great week together! Students have continued to work hard and show kindness to each other. I so love my time with them!

We can reflect.

Two of our core competencies are critical thinking and reflective thinking. We reflected on our learning, experiences, work, and progress and set some goals too!

We read a story called Sorry! by Trudy Ludwig and Howard B. Wigglebottom Learns It’s OK to Back Away (animated story). Then children reflected on their experiences with the word “sorry” and backing away from conflict. Then we wrote about our connections for each story. READ MORE !