Category: We are authors.

Hello Division 6 families!

We have had another great week! Our Kindness Projects are coming along well! Please ask your child what they are working on to invite conversation at home.

Speeches

Every year, all grade 7’s in Burnaby have an opportunity to participate in the District’s speech competition. This annual event began in 1983 to provide the opportunity to develop confidence and pursue excellence in public speaking. Students are generally given a sentence starter. While your children have had opportunities to present Science and Passion Projects with PowerPoint, we have not practiced writing and presenting speeches yet so I thought this would be great writing practice. This past year, the grade 7’s were given this sentence starter: The lesson I learned in 2020 was…

Since the grade 7’s wrote their speeches in January and we are now in May, students were given this instead: The lesson I learned in 2020/21 was… This is to be a minimum 3 minute and a maximum 5 minute speech. They will be timed.

We started our brainstorm today as a class. Some themes that came out of our conversation were:

• • • Flexibility/adaptability: go with the flow; things happen, move on
    • Be positive.
    • You can learn anything.
    • You don’t always have to be happy.
    • We have taken things for granted: what we missed the most
    • We are braver than we think: I have courage.
    • We can do hard things. I am a hard worker.

Please have a conversation with your child about what they have chosen to write about. They will be encouraged to choose one central idea and write some paragraphs in support. They will be asked to provide details like examples, reasons, explanations and to dive deeper into their ideas. Having a detailed brainstorm sheet will make the writing process flow better. Click here to print out the graphic organizer if you wish.

Math

As Mathematicians, we had to think critically as we dove further into perimeter and area. Click here to learn more about perimeter. Click here to learn more about area. For grade 5’s, they are expected to be able to measure the area of squares and rectangles (area = length x width), and how they are related to but not dependent on each other. So, this past week, we learned that you can have the same perimeter but different areas. If your child did not complete the homework that was due this week, you should have received an email from me tonight. Click here to view page 129 and 130. Students were asked to complete #1, 2, 3 and 7. If you need grid paper, click here to print.

On Friday, students wrote a division quiz to check their understanding. Your child will come home with their sheet for you to review next Tuesday, May 25. Please take note of the sections your child struggled with, review the concepts, sign, and return the next day on Wednesday, May 26, thank you!

Spelling

Your child brought home their spelling test on Thursday. They were asked to share it with you. If you haven’t done so already, please review, initial, and send back to school. Thank you!

Passion Projects

Click here for the criteria. Here is the presentation schedule. After consultation, your child agreed to the following dates. Please help us support your child to be ready BEFORE their presentation date. We are practicing holding ourselves accountable to deadlines. Thank you!

Library

Next Friday, May 28th, will be their last day to sign out library books. ALL library books will need to be returned the following week on June 4th.

Should you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Thank you for being our partners in your child’s learning. We appreciate you!

Gratefully, Ms. Chan and Mrs. Paulich

Dear Division 6 families,

I sincerely apologize for missing the last two weeks of updates. A lot of exciting things have been happening since the last update!

First of all, congratulations to all of our doctors for presenting at our successful Medical Conference! A special thank you to our two keynote speakers, Mrs. Helland and Ms. Jiwa. We so appreciate your time with us to inspire us!

All of the presentations were uploaded to FreshGrade. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, please do! All students received small sheets with Two Stars and Wish from all of their classmates too!

I felt so proud of them for all of their hard work! Their presentation skills continue to improve each time they present!

We hope you enjoyed your Student Led Conferences at home! If you have any feedback, please send me an email. Thank you so very much for taking the time to fill out the Two Stars and a Wish for your child. We appreciate you!

This past Friday, it was I Care About You! day. Our class created a collective PowerPoint project where each student was assigned one slide to write a message to their classmates. Click here to view the project!

In Math, we started our unit on division. We are learning how to do long division and dividing in different ways. This weekend, please review this concept with your child. Help check they understand the basic steps. This will go a long way as we move forward next week. You can watch this video by Math Antics on long division or choose a different one on YouTube. You can start with the video on basic division. Another way to help your child is to practice their multiplication facts too. Then they won’t have to rely on the multiplication chart to calculate every question. This will help them in grade 6 and beyond too!

Last week, we started a Kindness Project. Students are working in groups to come up with a project that shows kindness. They are so motivated to work on their ideas and I am so proud of them! You know they are engaged when they ask if they can work on it and they bring it outside at lunch to work on it! Yesterday, they presented their proposals. They received compliments and suggestions on how to make their project even better. I loved the collaborative mindset!

Last week, we also started an Ignite your SHINE course by LaVonna Roth. She encourages us to be SHINEtastic.

Students are learning about themselves through the acronym SHINE.

Self – Know your strengths

Heart – What are you passionate about

Inspire – How to inspire myself when things aren’t going well

Navigate – Take action towards a goal, find a way to make it happen

Exceptional – What makes you exceptional

This coming week is Emergency Response week. Every day, we will focus on one type of emergency response and practice the procedures.

On Monday, May 10, Mrs. Paulich and I will have a parent meeting at 7:15pm on Zoom. The link was sent to you via email last week. We hope you can join us!

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

Sincerely, Ms. Chan and Mrs. Paulich

Dear Division 6 family,

What a week! It flew by! I did not receive any suggestions on how this blog space can better serve you so if you have any recommendations, please feel free to share anytime. You can finish this sentence starter:

• On this blog, what I like is _________.
• I wish _________ .

Please share it as a comment on this blog or send me an email. Thank you for your input!

For Math, we started our unit on multiplication. At first, students were given a blank sheet of paper to see what they know already. This was used as a pre-assessment and will be used to compare what they know at the end of the unit to show growth. Next, we did a Number Talk (in the curriculum) with the number 10 together. The next day, they tried doing a Number Talk with the number 12 on their own. A number talk is a brief discussion that focuses on student solutions for a chosen math concept. Students are asked to share their math processes while I record their thinking visually.

Please continue to have your child diligently review (memorization would be so helpful!) their multiplication math facts to increase their computational fluency and accuracy. Many students struggle with computations when we multiply larger numbers so becoming familiar with the facts is a huge advantage to gaining confidence much quicker!

As scientists, we started our next body system: the muscular-skeletal system. We watched this video to help us understand better. Click here to watch at home.

As scientists, some students started researching their disease. As mentioned before, we are one step closer to our Gilmore Medical Conference where our expert doctors in their field will present on a disease of interest. Any students who are finished early will help with the organization of our event like creating the conference tags, signs or posters, the schedule and program for the day, etc. If any of you are in the medical field and would like to be a guest speaker on our conference day, please let me know! We will need a keynote speaker to begin our morning! More details to come in the following weeks!

On Friday, we co-constructed our criteria for our presentation. Click here to view the PDF and make a copy if you wish.

The opening slide should introduce themselves as Dr. _____ so if I was researching heart attacks, I would be Dr. Chan from Cardiology.

Please review the criteria with your child. Thank you!

The class has been visiting the library to work with Mrs. Papapanagiotou on learning how to properly cite the resources we use. This project is a fantastic way of practicing our new knowledge as responsible digital citizens who properly acknowledge the work of others. If you have any questions at all, please reach out to ask for clarification.

Report cards will be going home at the end of this week.

When we think about parents at home and the support you give to your child, we deeply appreciate you!

Gratefully, Ms. Chan and Mrs. Paulich

Dearest Division 6 family,

I so appreciate you for your time to read my blog posts every week and your interest to stay informed. It is hard to believe we are finished another month and more than halfway through the year! These updates are for you so I’m looking for feedback on these weekly posts. What is something you really enjoy? What would you like to see more of? What suggestions do you have to make this space more beneficial to you? Thank you for your feedback! Please comment on the blog or send me an email at Livia.Chan@burnabyshcools.ca. Thank you for your time!

Last week, students worked hard on their self-assessments and reflected on what they are proud of. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading all of their responses. I felt so proud to read their thoughts. Reflection is such an important part of learning.

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” – John Dewey

To understand the importance of reflection, it was ADDED to our revised curriculum in our Core Competencies under Thinking – Critical and Reflective Thinking. I recently found an article on FreshGrade’s website about reflection. You will see some of their reflections in their report cards in the Student Voice section. They were so honest and open!

I also took this opportunity to have my students write a “report card” for me! I asked them for feedback on what I am doing well and what I could be doing better. Their honest feedback was so appreciated. I firmly believe in the power of reflection, the power of voice, and self-advocacy. If there is something I can change to make their school experience a better one, I am open to listening and we can co-create the curriculum in response!

This past week, we continued to work on our stories that Ms. Lee, Oscar’s mom, encouraged us to write. On Thursday, we were on Zoom with Ms. Lee again! She taught us some valuable tips on overcoming the fear of sharing our writing and speaking. Thank you to Olivia H., Quinson, and Rasul who pushed themselves outside of their comfort zone to read their stories. They were so SO good! I would have loved to see more students dive into their stretch zone to read their stories. Please encourage your child to find the courage to share, thank you! We SO appreciate her time and for sharing her expertise with us! Ms. Lee also wrote and shared her own story based on the collective brainstorming they did last week. The story was so engaging! We were SO blessed to have her teach our class! Thank you so much, Ms. Lee!

Students finished some window art and thank you to Ms. Paulich, it beautifies our windows! I loved seeing the different designs and colours. It’s always so amazing to me that students are given the same instructions but the final results are so varied because of the creativity in their brains!

Coming up, we will begin to learn about multiplication so if your child does not know their multiplication facts, please have them practice at home. We will learn some games they can play at home to review too so get a deck of cards ready to have some fun and you practice your math facts with them!

As always, we really appreciate your continued support at home. At any time, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Thank you for being partners in your child’s learning.

Remember, I’m looking for feedback on what you like and what you’d like to see more of in these blog posts, so please share!

We also have some exciting news! We have a new student named Dante who will be joining our class in the morning! He comes from a nearby Vancouver school. Welcome, Dante, and your family! We are thrilled you will be joining our school family!

With a heart full of appreciation, Ms. Chan and Mrs. Paulich