We have had a fun first week back after spring break! We hope you had a restful and relaxing break as well!
We are dancers.
We started Hip Hop lessons this week. It is incredible how quickly Sue, the dance instructor, can teach them so many dance steps in a short period of time! They loved the music she chose. We are looking forward to sharing our final performance next week! Just a reminder to go to Cash Online to pay $6 for your child’s portion of the costs. Thank you so much to the Parent Council for matching the remainder of the costs!
We are mathematicians.
On Monday, we went back to our math platooning so the grade 4’s are taught by Mr. Anchor again. Both grade 4’s and 5’s are learning about multiplication. This is a great reminder to have your child practice their multiplication math facts every night at home. Five minutes a night will make a difference! Thank you for your support!
We are scientists.
On Wednesday, students attended their first Gilmore University science class on anatomy! Professor Chan introduced the circulatory system. Ask your child to teach you some facts they learned. They are learning how to take notes. A tip from memory guru and brain coach Jim Kwik: If you teach someone the concepts you just learned, you get to learn it twice! Here is the Circulatory System video for Kids we watched if you’d like to rewatch it with your child at home to review.
Side note: I really enjoyed reading Jim Kwik’s book Limitless and also thoroughly enjoy listening to his podcast Kwik Brain. Have a listen and let me know what you think!
We are artists.
Check out our art! Students worked so hard on these projects. Thank you, Mrs. Paulich for teaching art!
We had a blast today for April Fool’s Day. Ask your child about what we did to “celebrate”! What a fun day together!
Thank you so much for your continued support at home. We appreciate you!
Gratefully, Ms. Chan and Mrs. Paulich
Looking ahead, we will have an early dismissal on Thursday, April 14 at 1:45pm. Your child will bring home an agenda with work samples to share with you.
We had a productive week with lots of learning and connection! Your child’s personal information sheet (from the office) went home on Friday. Please review and return as soon as possible. Thank you!
Almost all students are arriving at school on time. Thank you for respecting our start time of arriving before our first bell at 8:50am. We appreciate it!
Here are some updates from Mrs. Paulich on the subjects she teaches:
Social Studies
We spent much of September getting ready for the year, organizing our binders, and developing a growth mindset. Each student created their own motto to turn to when they need that extra push and support. We spent time discussing and reflecting on Truth and Reconciliation and what that means to Indigenous and Non Indigenous Canadians. Most recently, we have been digging deep into our roots and origins with a look at Canadian Immigration.
Physical and Health Education
Students have most recently begun developing their Volleyball skills.
French
We have been looking at simple conversation and greetings. Students are encouraged to practice this simple conversation at home!
We are writers.
This week we dove further into paragraph writing. We learned about opening and closing sentences along with adding details, reasons, and explanations that include our thoughts and feelings too. They were introduced to a single-point rubric for personal writing. This helps them truly see what areas they need to improve, where they are proficient, and strong aspects of their writing (which are strengths and they should keep doing these things!).
Grade 4 – click image to view PDF
Grade 5 – click image to view PDF
We are mathematicians (Grade 5).
I am SO enjoying teaching math this year! They keep me hopping but it’s so much fun teaching math! I was very happy with how they did on their pre-tests because of how proficient they showed themselves to be. I am so very proud of how hard they are working and learning.
This week, we continued to learn about expanded notation and counting up and down by 10s, 100, 1000, and 10 000. HOMEWORK: Finish page 43 & 44. Review Pre-test and worksheets. Test on Monday, October 18. It will look similar to the pre-test. Continue to practice Math facts +1 -1 +2 -2 strategies.
We practiced our math addition facts and comparing numbers by practicing on a new website: 99Math. They absolutely LOVED it! They are enjoying Math Tappers: Finding Sums too. If you have an iPad, please download this FREE app and have your child practice regularly to improve speed and accuracy. We started a tracking sheet this week. You can do the same at home. Thank you!
Career Education
One of the things I really believe in is that every child can develop leadership skills. On Friday, there were a few examples of how people stepped up on their own volition to demonstrate caring behaviours toward others and our classroom. Feel free to ask your child how they have contributed positively to our classroom community and space.
This week, we came back to the book written by Steven Covey: The 7 Habits of Happy Kids (same author as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People which some of you may know). The lesson focused on planning and setting goals. Here are the first two habits covered so far:
Be Proactive – take initiative
Begin with the End in Mind – focus on goals
They wrote three goals plus small action steps and chose one to record in their planner for next week. Please have a conversation about the goals they set and in particular, the one they chose to record in their planner. Next week, ask them to reflect daily on their goals.
I love the image I showed them. It’s about making seemingly small steps that amount to a big change over time! They can get 1% better every day! We are building healthy and effective habits.
Click here to learn more about the 7 habits we will be learning about.
Personal Information Test
Thank you for taking the time to help your child study. We had 6 students get all of their information correct! Please continue to have your child memorize their O365 email address (login) and password. We will start using the laptops next week! The true test will be whether they can successfully log in.
As for memorizing their address and your cell numbers for safety reasons, we will leave that for you to decide the importance of keeping that by memory. Students will not be tested on this again in class.
Passion Projects
After having three opportunities to share what topic they chose as they went milling to music (ask them what that is!), they had an opportunity to share their 30 second elevator pitch about what they want to learn about. If you are not sure, please ask them what topic they decided. Hopefully it’s something you would LOVE to see them explore too!
Masks – Please have your child keep an extra mask in their backpack plus wear one to school. Thank you!
What a fantastic first week! We are having fun getting to know each other’s names and learning more about each other.
Please feel free to watch the video for a run-down of our week and what’s upcoming. If you don’t have time, simply read the blog post as it is a summary of what I shared in the video.
Why do we share weekly blog posts?
The purpose of our weekly blog posts is so that it connects school to home and us to you. Our hope is that the information shared will give you greater opportunities to have conversations about school, what they are learning about, and to take a concept and dive deeper.
How you can support at home:
Be curious. Ask questions that may spark more conversation. Instead of asking, “How was school?” try asking more targeted questions:
What are you most proud of today?
What did you do to help others today?
What is one thing you learned that you can teach me? This question reinforces their learning.
What made you smile or laugh today?
What’s one thing that made today fun?
What’s something you are grateful for that you experienced today?
What’s one thing you learned that you’d love to know more about? Let’s do some research together!
We push ourselves to grow.
We are learning about growth mindset. The thoughts and language we use determine the outlook we have. The power of yet.
We learned about comfort zones. We want students to be challenged in their stretch/growth zone. I was interviewed about this last spring. Read the post here on the Teacher2Teacher blog to learn more.
Healthy Habits
This week, we started reading a book written by Steven Covey: The 7 Habits of Happy Kids (same author as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People which some of you may know). It begins with a story about a character who finds himself bored and looks to others to help him find something to do; the character discovers that it is his responsibility to be proactive and not rely on others to “fix” his problem. Be Proactive – take initiative.
Click here to learn more about the 7 habits we will be learning about.
As we are practicing classroom expectations, students are encouraged to build the healthy habits of attentive listening and strong work habits. They are regularly asked to self-reflect and to do better next time.
We are readers and writers.
For our first introduction lesson to writing, we read a story called “I Am Story” by Dan Yaccarino and then we started working on our heart maps. They also shared how they feel about writing. Learning about their mindset about writing and setting a goal for themselves helps inform me of how I can better support them.
Please encourage your child to read at least 20-30 minutes every night. This is their homework. They will have library orientation next week and library book exchange begins on Wednesday.
We are athletes.
We started our Running Club this week.
We will go to the gym every Tuesday and Thursday morning. Please ensure your child wears appropriate clothing and runners.
We are scientists.
Students were introduced to Mystery Doug. We watched a video on pizza. Click here to watch at home.
West Coast weather
Please have your child dress appropriately for the weather. They will go outside even in the rain unless it is raining very hard. Read West Coast Recess & Lunch to learn more.
Looking ahead!
On Monday, September 20, we will begin our “Me in a Bag” presentations. Please help your child decide on 4-5 items to place in the paper bag provided and practice what they will say about each item so they will feel more confident. They will tell us about each item and share a story about why they chose it and/or what it represents and why it is important to them. Be creative! For example, I cannot bring our guinea pig, Hazelnut, to school but I can brought some hay to represent her. I also brought a picture of me in my ringette gear when I talked about being a coach, player, and ref.
Next week, we will start Math on Monday! The grade 4s will go to Mr. Anchor. They will need a 1″ binder.
Monday is a big day! They will also have an online learning module for the Learn2Ride program.
We are so excited to see you on Tuesday, September 21 at 7:00pm for our Meet the Teachers night! A Zoom link will be shared the day before in the reminder email.
On Wednesday, your child should bring their bike helmet (even if they don’t bring a bike) and are encouraged to bring their bikes too. Starting at 8:40am, they can bring their bikes into the school for storage. Our bike session will be between recess and lunch out on the field.
We are equally excited to meet you during our Parents and Partners Conferences! The purpose of these will be to learn more about your child. If you have not signed up to book an appointment, please do so before the deadline: Sept 21 at 3:00pm. The link to the conferences will be shared via email after our Meet the Teachers night so as not to confuse anyone. Our meetings are set for 10 minutes so please arrive on time. You will be placed in the lobby and we will let you in when it is your time. Thank you SO much for your time and interest to meet with us!
Reminder: Early dismissal on Thursday, September 23 at 1:45pm.
Friday will be our first school Pro-D day. Students do not attend.
If you’d like to learn a little more about me, feel free to visit my website: livchan.com.
For the school supplies list, click here. Please send items as soon as you can. Key items to get first if you don’t have time to get the rest yet: 1.5″ binder and dividers. Grade 4’s: an extra 1″ binder for Math. Thank you!
On Friday, we celebrated Grandparents Day by inviting them into our classroom to join in the fun. We started our morning with our usual Flex time where they got to enjoy various activities. Some unstructured activities included playing cards, reading, building using KEVA blocks, or showing off some of the work we are proud of on our iPads. Then we gathered in our Community Circle, as we do each day, to share a memory or what makes our grandparents special. After that, we had a movement break by doing 75 jumping jacks. It was great to see some grandparents join in our physical activity! Next, students interviewed their grandparents to learn more about them before they dove into an app called ChatterPix to shared their life tip: the one lesson you wish to share with our youth. This app allowed them to take a picture of an inanimate object (a puppet in this case) and draw a mouth so it looked like a speaking animal. We had an opportunity to share all of their work before grandparents left us. There were some great tips so I hope they will take some to heart! Students also had an opportunity for Ms. Lewis to take a special picture of grandparents with grandchildren. Soon, there will be a display of these images on the bulletin board across from the Library. Thank you to all of the grandparents who joined us! What a special event to celebrate a special bond. If you received an update on how their morning went with us, please feel free to post a comment on our blog. I would love to hear what they thought!
Last Thursday, Jocelyn, a special guest speaker from Vancity, visited to help us develop our financial literacy by teaching us about the history of money. She defined what money is, the evolution from barter and trade to modern currency, Canada’s different forms of currency, what money is made of and the features included to prevent counterfeiting, and some fun facts regarding Canadian currency. Jocelyn ended with a story called One Cent Two Cent Old Cent New Cent by Dr. Seuss. They each received a tin can to take home to save money.
For PE, we have been learning basketball skills. We started with ball handling skills to get to know the ball and the feeling of it in our hands. Then we learned how to dribble. Last class, we learned and practiced the different kinds of passing. I used to play basketball in high school so it’s been fun to practice my skills again. There is something to be said for muscle memory!
We have seen our little buddies more often lately because we have been creating samples of kind acts using a new app called Sock Puppets [FREE to purchase on an iPad]. They worked on their storyboards together and then recorded their projects. These will be showcased at our Pink Shirt Day assembly next Wednesday afternoon! I have so loved watching them be such patient leaders when working with their little buddy and I have enjoyed witnessing the fun they are having together.
On Monday, we welcome back Ms. Grewal, our student teacher. She will be with us for the next four weeks. During her absence, she has been attending classes at SFU where she has been learning and working hard on her lesson plans. She will begin to teach some lessons next week.
Things to look forward to next week:
Mon. Feb. 24: A new student joins our class, Brentwood Park Talent Show, and Ms. Grewal returns
Tues. Feb. 25: Ice skating at Burnaby Lake Arena – Thank you to our volunteer drivers!
Wed. Feb. 26: Pink Shirt Day and assembly – Wear pink!
Fri. Feb. 28: District Pro-D day – School not in session
