We had a fantastic first week getting to know each other and building our classroom community through collaborative art and teamwork challenges. I can already tell we’re going to have a great year together!
In Social Studies, we are diving into learning about our identity by exploring self, family, community, and the land, as well as how they are all connected. This week, the students will focus on themselves, and we will be exploring the story behind their names. On Tuesday, they will be bringing home a handout with a few questions about their names. Please help them by answering these questions and talking to them about where their name comes from, who chose it, and any special meanings or stories behind it. Thank you in advance for your support with this activity.
Learning requires exploration of one‘s identity. (First Peoples Principles of Learning)
In Math, we will be diving into data analysis. We’ve already been learning a lot about each other through surveys and data collection, and I’m excited to continue.
I look forward to seeing all the students again on Tuesday. Thank you!
Greetings from Ms. Chan!
We start every morning with a soft start which we call Heart time because they get to fill their heart with things that bring them joy. I love seeing new friendships begin! I remind them to thank the people who brought them joy as they clean up before our morning message and community connection circle time. This is our regular daily routine to start us off just right!
This time of year always has me feeling like I don’t want the school year to end. The relationships and connection I feel with your children are deep. I guess it just can’t be helped when you love and care for them and think about them at night and on the weekends. As I’ve been telling you all year, they bring me such joy and I know they bring each other joy too!
Last week continued to include experiences that brought us joy.
We are communicators and writers.
We are improving in learning how to write paragraphs. We have a few goals:
To write complete sentences that begin with a capital and end with proper punctuation
To write sentences that have details that include thoughts and feelings, reasons, explanations, or examples to help paint a picture of what happened.
To support this, we used a single-point rubric to remind us of what we are working towards showing proficiency. This was given to them as a self-reflection so they were encouraged to read their writing to look for proficiency and to make changes to get closer to proficiency. Using rubrics like these make the criteria clear and something they can strive to work towards. Feel free to have your child refer to this if they do any writing at home. It can be simply used like a checklist. For some of your children, you can add something about printing legibly with appropriate sizing and formation of letters, and writing on the lines for neatness. Please let me know if you’d like a PDF copy and I’ll send it to you.
Then they had an opportunity to be paired up with a classmate chosen randomly. When we look at someone else’s writing to assess, there are different skills they learn like many of our core competencies: communication, critical thinking, reflection, personal and social awareness and responsibility. If case you missed it, I shared more about core competencies in last week’s post.
They were encouraged to share strengths (where their writing glowed) and an area to work on (where their writing can grow). I love listening in to their encouraging conversations. I wish you were there to listen too. They were kind and supportive.
We are communicators and listeners.
We played cooperative game where we were split into four teams. Each team was given the same Lego pieces. This is how the game works:
Each team sends one person as the communicator.
When the game starts, they come to me to look at the secret structure to memorize.
They go back to their team with their hands behind their backs to explain how to re-create the structure. They can come back as many times as they wish.
The rest of the team works together to make sense of the instructions by the communicator and then they have an opportunity to communicate with each other to collaboratively build the structure. They need to work together to all agree on what they are collectively building.
It really challenges them to work on their core competencies: communication skills, critical thinking, personal and social responsibility!
We played a few rounds and I was proud of how each group was able to successfully re-create each structure!
We are scientists.
We saw our ladybugs go from the first stage as larvae into the next stage as a pupa where they stop eating to prepare to become an adult. We have been making observations and recording them in our booklets.
We have also continued to work on our animal research with our partner. Some are creating a poster and others have decided to present using PowerPoint. They are working so well as partners. I am so proud of them!
We are athletes.
As you know from our Student Led Conferences, we regularly do exercises that challenge us. One of the ones they seem to really enjoy is plank so I wanted to show you a picture of us! This really helps build their core muscles. May I encourage you to try some of the exercises we do at home? Feel free to ask them what some that are often chosen. We take turns choosing three exercises each day.
Volunteer Tea
We have been so blessed to have many parents support our learning this year. If you helped on a field trip, for an in-class activity, or volunteered to help at a school event like Pancake breakfast or attended a PAC meeting, please CLICK HERE to fill out the RSVP to let us know you will join us. To learn more, click here.
Date: Wednesday, June 5
Time: 1:30 to 3:00 PM
Place: Gym
I apologize ahead of time but I will be at a meeting all day. If you are there near the end, I will see you then. We are so grateful for your time and dedication to our learning this year!
Gilmore’s Spring Fair – Community Event
You may know that my last school was Gilmore. It is located at 50 Gilmore Avenue.
You can pre-buy a punch card to save 25% off games (Wed, June 5 is the deadline to pre-buy but you can purchase at the fair). You can also enter a raffle to win $1000, $2500, or $5000.
To learn more, CLICK HERE to go to Gilmore’s website. It is a fun and well attended community event open to everyone! Feel free to invite your friends from other places to join you!
Dates to Note
Wed. June 5 – Volunteer Tea
Fri. June 7 – Pro-D day; students do not attend
Fri. June 7 – Gilmore’s Spring Fair from 5 to 9 PM
Fri. June 21 – Revs Bowling and Burnaby Lake picnic (All families are welcome!)
We really appreciate your continued support at home. Grateful for you!
I am the luckiest teacher ever to get to work with your children! Every week seems like a busy week full of learning but that’s not the best part. The best part is that we get to do it TOGETHER! What a blessing and pure joy to spend my time with them! Of course, you already know how much joy your children bring. I am always so grateful for their love, joy, and the fun we have as a classroom community.
Habit #5: Seek first to understand. Then to be understood. The lesson this time was about the importance of listening. Take a look at the image for the I statements, in particular: “I don’t interrupt whenever someone is talking.”
This has been an area that needs improvement so one thing we have been working on is being more patient by not interrupting my teaching or conversations. For example, when I am in the middle of a conversation with another adult or classmate. If you experience this at home, please remind them to be patient and to wait their turn to speak. We are working on doing this independently without reminders. Thank you!
The other thing we have been working on is responsibility for our belongings by picking up after themselves. We have many people who are willing to help clean up our classroom but if everyone did their part to begin with, there would be less to tidy up. Any opportunities at home to independently pick up after themselves will be great practice. Thank you!
Jump Rope for Heart
We started the week with Jump Rope for Heart. There is still time to donate. Please click here to learn more. Thank you if you choose to donate.
Thanks to our organizing committee, students had an opportunity to try six different stations with their big buddies and Ms. Allocca’s class. They had so much fun and were sweaty when it was all done!
We are mathematicians.
We continued to solidify our understanding of division and as it relates to multiplication. Further learning this week had us practicing the concept that we can do division by subtraction. After the lesson, we almost always practice the new concept with a partner first. Here it gives them an opportunity to practice their core competencies of communication and collaboration skills. I appreciate how quickly they set themselves up, how well they work together, and how engaged they ALL were in their learning! So proud of them!
It is also a fantastic opportunity for children who don’t know each other well yet or have had differences to learn together. This was what happened last week. A partnership between two people who had preconceived notions about each other ended up asking if they can be partners again in the future. This warmed my heart. This is one of many reasons why we explore new concepts together and with partners chosen randomly. Students have an opportunity to develop relationships and learn with others while developing their personal identities and social competencies.
How to support at home: Please review this video and ask your child to explain this concept to you. When learners can teach you, they demonstrate proficient understanding.
We were also introduced to measurement (mm and cm) and measured things around the room.
How to support at home: Take out a ruler and have fun measuring things around the home! Have your child estimate the length and then measure the items.
We are scientists.
Each week, we continue to check on the growing chum salmon in the library. This past week, we were blessed and grateful to have Ms. Reid give us a lesson on the life cycle of the salmon and to answer our many questions! I really enjoyed how curious they were by asking so many interesting questions.
They went from the egg to alevin to fry stage which is the current stage they will stay in at Kitchener until they are released in a few weeks.
The book We Are a Community was a great way to mesh science with Social Studies and learn more vocabulary about landforms and water sources. Here is an excerpt from Strong Nations website:
This book is about a river. Most rivers start high up in the mountains. As the water comes downhill, it makes little pathways in the rocks and gravel. As the pathways get bigger, they join to make streams. When several streams join, they make a river. Some rivers have waterfalls and deep pools. In some places, fast moving water tumbles over rocks forming rapids. When a river leaves the mountain for flatter ground it starts to slow down. Eventually, a river ends when it flows into the sea. Where the fresh water and the salt water meet is an estuary.
The area in and around an estuary is a good place for plants, animals and people to live because we can all find food and water there. The salmon is an important food for many of us.
People have paid attention to the life cycle of salmon for thousands of years. We have learned that sometimes we can help salmon survive by building a salmon hatchery along a river. Some hatcheries are huge while others are quite small.
There are many sizes of rivers in the world. Some are wide. Some are narrow. Some are deep. Some are shallow.
We are readers, listeners, and writers.
We read a story called A Simon for Salmon about a boy who saves a salmon by helping it get free.
If you would like to listen to the story with your child, click here.
We reviewed the three different ways we can make connections to the stories we read: text to self (a personal connection or something that reminds them of a personal experience), text to text (something that reminds them of another book or movie), and text to world (a connection that reminds them of something that happened in the world).
The Two Sisters is another book we read that is a story about the twin mountain peaks we see to the west of our school. We actually have quite a beautiful view of it from our classroom. Here is a synopsis from Amazon:
For the first time, Pauline Johnson’s “The Two Sisters,” a First Nations legend, is accompanied by sumptuous illustrations that showcase the splendour of the Salish Sea. The universal themes of Creation, courage, and peace run through this legend of two little girls who grow up to be courageous young women who help to bring lasting peace to their world. The story is supplemented by a reference section that will enable a reader, parent, teacher, or visitor to the coast to immerse themselves in the rich history of Coast Salish cultures.
The last few weeks, we have enjoyed our time with big buddies at Willingdon Park. This past week because of the rain, we visited their classroom. After helping them with their entrepreneur project, we played two games of Kahoot! We reviewed questions that tested our understanding of various life cycles and practiced multiplication with arrays. They have SO much fun playing as a team against each other!
Vancouver Aquarium Field Trip
So far, we have more than enough parent volunteers to help supervise. We are so grateful to those who have offered to spend the day with us! We can only take four parents on our trip because of our field trip funds and the number of free chaperones based on the number of students we have. If you have your own membership, please let me know. I know that some of you will need to take time off work so if you indicated you can volunteer but would like to change your mind knowing that we have more than enough adult supervisors, please let me know. Thank you!
Prior to our visit, we will be learning about some of the sea creatures we will see. This week, we started with learning about the sea otter. They really enjoyed viewing the live cam! Click here to watch them live!
Enjoy the long weekend! I am excited for our Pro-D day on Monday! One of the greatest joys this year was working alongside fellow colleagues like Ms. Hardie, Ms. Forbes, Ms. Chung, and Mr. Hunter on the Pro-D Committee to plan our learning days. We have worked hard this year in moving the school forward in terms of our two school goals of social emotional learning and reading comprehension. I love collaborating with others, using creativity, and connecting to improve the learning that happens at Kitchener!
We continue to have fun so time is flying by way too fast! It’s hard to believe it’s May this week! I am deeply grateful for your continued support at home. I love and appreciate you all!
Dates to add to your calendar
Monday, April 29 – Pro-D Day; students do not attend
Today is Earth Day and our Jump Rope for Heart event. To learn more, click here to visit our school website.
On Wednesday, classes all over Burnaby were invited to attend an Indigenous lesson. It was a Virtual Drum Circle and online teachings with honoured Guest Xwaluputhut, Patrick Aleck. As I was away this day, please ask your child about what they experienced and learned.
Mary was four years old when she was first taken away to the Lejac Indian Residential School. It was far away from her home and family. Always hungry and cold, there was little comfort for young Mary. Speaking Dakelh was forbidden and the nuns and priest were always watching, ready to punish. Mary and the other girls had a genius idea: drawing on the knowledge from their mothers, aunts and grandmothers who were all master sewers, the girls would sew hidden pockets in their clothes to hide food. They secretly gathered materials and sewed at nighttime, then used their pockets to hide apples, carrots and pieces of bread to share with the younger girls.
Based on the author’s mother’s experience at residential school, The Secret Pocket is a story of survival and resilience in the face of genocide and cruelty. But it’s also a celebration of quiet resistance to the injustice of residential schools and how the sewing skills passed down through generations of Indigenous women gave these girls a future, stitch by stitch.
After listening to this story, children may have more questions. Please feel free to have a conversation with your child about their thoughts and feelings about the many hardships that children experienced in Residential Schools. Conversations at home and school are an important part of truth and reconciliation.
We are poets!
Students were introduced to the Haiku as a Japanese structure. The traditional haikus had three lines. The first and last line has five syllables while the middle line has seven. This was great review and practice for how to count syllables.
We read Hi, Koo!: A Year of Seasons. This was a book that offers 26 haikus about the four seasons. The author moves away from the traditional 5-7-5 syllable structure because english words typically have more than one syllable per word.
I loved the way the poet painted pictures for our minds to see. We are almost all finished our good copies which will go on display in our classroom soon!
I hope you enjoyed writing a poem WITH your child during our student led conferences!
We are mathematicians.
I am always so impressed with how quickly children learn. We were introduced to division concepts on Monday and by Friday, almost all were experts!
Students really love learning together to explore concepts. So many core competencies are practiced when they learn together: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, personal and social responsibility. It truly is heartwarming to see them work so well as partners.
How to support at home: Give a division question that will not result in having a remainder. For example: 20 ÷ 4 = 5 or 12 ÷ 3 = 4
What this represents is: The total number (20) ÷ the number of groups (4) = equals the number in each group (5)
Your child then would draw four circles to represent the number of groups and then divide the total number (20) equally into the groups to discover there would be 5 in each group.
We also learned there are three other ways to write the equation. Take a look at the images for how and ask your child to show you what they learned so far.
We are artists!
This week, students finished off their springtime animal art and I couldn’t be prouder of everyone’s work! We started off with the Read Aloud: “Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox” by Danielle Daniel, a story which gives an introduction to the Anishinaabe tradition of totem animals. We spoke about the meaning of the bear and rabbit in our art. In the story, the bear is described as brave and confident, and the rabbit as creative and adventurous. Students then finished off painting their flowers, adding “texture” to their animals, and glueing their finished art onto coloured background paper. In this project, students “developed processes and technical skills in a variety of art forms to refine artistic abilities” (BC Curriculum Arts Education 2/3.)
We also worked on finishing up our Spring Break paragraphs (where we focused on the skills of sequencing events and revising our work) and “selfie” drawings. I’m hoping to have these done soon and to share them here with you. Although my time is limited with your kids, I always look forward to making new art with them every week! They bring such enthusiasm, creativity, and care into everything they create and it always shows in the final product.
We are athletes.
Students enjoyed their lacrosse lessons last week. Please ask them all about it!
Vancouver Aquarium Field Trip on Friday, May 10
The notice went home on Friday. Click here to download a PDF version. Thank you to the fundraising efforts of our PAC, the cost of the field trip was subsidized.
Unfortunately, the bus cannot accommodate parent volunteers due to space since we have three classes going. We will need one or two parents to help drive other parent supervisors. We will pay for your parking, thank you! We appreciate you!
If your child orders from the hot lunch program, a bagged lunch will be prepared for them on this day.
Gratitude
Whenever I think of you, my heart is always so full of gratitude. Thank you for your continued support at home as our partners! It really is so hard to believe that we are in our last term together. I tell your children every morning that I am glad to see them, I love them, and I appreciate how they bring me such joy. Just typing this instantly warmed my heart and brought an instant smile to my face! 🙂
Looking forward to having yet another fantastic and funtastic week with your children! Have a great start to your week too!
In appreciation, Ms. Chan
Dates to Note
Monday, April 29 – Pro-D Day; students do not attend
We start every morning with a soft start which we call Heart time because they get to fill their heart with things that bring them joy. I love seeing new friendships begin! I remind them to thank the people who brought them joy as they clean up before our morning message and community connection circle time. This is our regular daily routine to start us off just right!
