Category: We are creative thinkers.

Dear families,

Happy Lunar New Year! We read a story called Sam and the Lucky Money. If you’d like to learn a little more about some of our traditions as well as to listen to the story, check out this video:

Anyone interested in ringing in the new year of the rabbit, Brentwood Mall will have a lion dance at 1pm (today) on Saturday, January 21 starting at 1pm in the Upper Centre Court. They will go through the Skybridge into the Grand Lobby for the second act and end at the Plaza.

We are readers.
I love finding authentic and real reasons to read and write. This past week, we scoured through many joke books from our school Library. Students chose a few that we enjoy to share over the PA next week during Literacy week. Some students will have an opportunity to read their jokes. Please have your child practice their jokes at home so they can read it fluently with expression and enthusiasm! It’s all in how a joke is delivered! Everyone has a joke to practice at home so just in case someone is away, they can be the backup person. Thank you for your help and encouragement!

We are authors.
We continued to develop our characters for our story by considering what they look like, their character traits and what they can do, and their core values and beliefs. Then we moved along with our storyboards. We thought about how our stories would begin, what the problem would be in the story and how it is resolved. I love how enthusiastic they are to work on and tell their stories!

How you can support at home: Ask your child to tell you all about their character(s). Have them explain what happens in the beginning of the story, what the problem is, how the problem might get worse before it gets better, how it is resolved, and then how the story has a satisfying ending. The more they practice telling their story verbally, the easier they will find writing it down!

We are scientists.
We were body scientists learning about our private body parts. How you can support at home is to have conversations to solidify what they learned and to answer any questions they have.

This week, we dove into learning more about oceans. We learned about our 5 oceans with some facts about each one. One of the things that resonated with many was pollution in our oceans and how that is affecting our wildlife in the oceans. We practiced taking notes during our learning. This will help prepare us for when we do our own research!

We all logged in!
Thank you so much to parents who helped their child memorize their usernames and passwords. It really helped to make the lesson run more efficiently and helped them have a better first experience. For the students who are still trying to memorize, please continue to support at home. Thank you! We were all so proud of ourselves to learning how to log in successfully! We practiced it a few times!

The next step next week will be to learn how to log in to Office 365. Since your child has a school account, they can download O365 onto your computer at home or just use the web version in a browser. Want to give your child a head start? Practice logging into O365 at home so they will be proficient the next time we use laptops! Please feel free to go to the Gilmore website and click on Office 365 (2 options):

A new login box will appear:

Type in the username@edu.burnabyschools.ca so it will look something like this:

#######@edu.burnabyschools.ca [no spaces]
The number is the same one they were memorizing. It’s their pupil number.

They will need to be taught where to find the @ sign. Teach them to press down the “SHIFT” key while they press on the number 2.

When students can’t login successfully, most of the time it is because they forget the “edu” at the beginning or they spell “burnabyschools” wrong. As you know, every letter, number, and symbol of the username and password has to be accurate or they cannot log in successfully.

Once they login, you are welcome to explore but the key point is just to learn how to log in to O365. So, practice logging in, teach how to log out, and practice logging in again.

I have to say that everyone was very patient and understanding especially when they had to wait their turn to receive their username and password. Great resilience! Proud of how quickly they learned!

Thank you!

We are grateful for your continued support at home. Thank you for your time to extend learning and to discuss what they learned at school. We appreciate your consistency with bringing planners to and from home too.

It’s not too late to bring gently used books for the book swap this Thursday! Looking forward to a fantastic Literacy Week!

Have a wonderful weekend! 🙂

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

Dear families,

Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful winter break with friends and family! I thoroughly enjoyed listening to all of the stories and fond memories shared.

We are authors.
For the past two weeks, we dove into our inquiry about what makes a good story. I am a firm believer that learning should be meaningful and relevant. The more we engage learners as active participants who are given time to question, explore, analyze, and eventually create, the more invested they are in their learning. When we move beyond the lower level thinking tasks that include basic recall and  instead, stretch our brains to think more critically with reflection, learning is more rich and fun!

We started with talking about the “hook” we generally find at the beginning of books we read. It is an opportunity for an author to entice a reader to want to flip the page and read on because they are excited to learn what happens next. So in partners, we studied a minimum of five books to analyze and evaluate the story beginnings that did just that. Then as a whole class, pairs had to justify why the books they chose met the criteria of having the “hook” and they had to explain why. [Higher level thinking skills on Bloom’s Taxonomy]

Next, we did various character studies by describing their appearance, traits and things they can do, core values, and beliefs. The more we learn about traits, core values, and beliefs, the better they will begin to see themselves reflected in various characters. The more they learn about themselves, the more self-aware they become about their strengths, who they are, and what they stand for.

A couple years ago, we had an author visit to teach my class about the importance of building characters in our story. Prior to that, I hadn’t placed much value on understanding our characters in our minds before we wrote our stories. We have to spend time envisioning and nurturing our main character in order to develop a strong story around them as they interact with other characters. So, students have been diligently working on creating their ideal character in their quadrant: Details on what they look like / character traits and what the character can do / core values / beliefs. I love watching them discover who their main character is and the excitement of seeing their character come to life on paper!

Today, we started building a brainstorm bank of ideas for different problems and solutions to use in our stories. Again, students were given an opportunity to work in pairs to search for the problem and solution in different picture books. They were so motivated to read and were so engaged as they recorded and added to our chart. We will continue to add to our list so they can be inspired by various problem-solution combinations. However, I will be encouraging them to be use it as inspiration to be even more creative!

I am very excited about how our inquiry into what makes a good story is turning out so far! Stay tuned!

Literacy Week
We have a fun week of activities planned for Literacy Week next week! There is one event new at Gilmore: A Book Swap! Many families have books they no longer read. This is a great opportunity to share well-loved stories with others! Please choose books published after 2010 and in good or excellent condition. Children can bring them in anytime this week.

Date of book swap: Thursday, January 26!

Grade 2 Mathematicians BUT applies to Grade 3’s too!

We reviewed even and odd numbers. They LOVED this catchy song: Even or Odd. 😉 Have a listen!

Your child should have come home with a piece of paper with random numbers (0-10) on one side and (0-20) on the other side. This is their random numbers chart. They are learning their addition and subtraction math facts. So far, they have practiced +/- 0, +/- 1, +/- 10.

This is how it works: If your child is practicing +1, use their finger to tap on the random number. Say the sum. We are aiming for this to be automatic. They are not actually calculating or adding 1 to the number, they are simply thinking and saying the next number up. Click here to watch a video of me explaining it.

If they are practicing +10, then use the (0-10) only. If they are practicing -10, then use only the numbers above 10 on the (0-20) side.

We will be moving on to +/-2. Click here to watch a video on me explaining this. Skip counting by 2s will be great practice!

We are also practicing skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s forwards and backwards, starting at ANY number. Please feel free to have fun practicing this as you walk home, in the car, or at home! You can use a deck of cards to have random numbers to start.

Listen to these skip counting songs: We’re Counting by 2’s.  Let’s Count by 5s.  10s Lift Off! More catchy songs!

If you haven’t checked out our Mathematician’s Play page recently, take a look!

With Mrs. Paulich, the grade 2s have been learning about measurement.

With Ms. Pears, the grade 3s have been learning about increasing patterns and being able to describe them: For example: “Start with one red & one black cube. Add one more red cube to the right each time.” Have fun practicing at home!

We are scientists.
Scientists in our room have been learning about sources of water: oceans, lakes, rivers, wells, and springs. As scientists, we are always learning to be curious! So after some basic knowledge about each of the water sources, we got into groups to be curious and record our wonderings on large chart paper. Each group started at a different water source. After a few minutes, they traveled to the next water source. They had to read the questions first before coming up with new questions to add. Then, we moved again to another water source to read all the questions and to add more. This strategy is called carousel because they move from station to station around the room like a carousel. They loved working collaboratively and seeing the questions their classmates came up with prior to them coming to the station! Next up will be reviewing the questions and learning about relevant questions and what makes a deep thinking question versus one where they can easily find the answer on Google, for example.

Computer IDs and passwords
Thank you so much for helping your child memorize their computer IDs and password. This will make their experience of logging in far less stressful when they know it by heart. My goal this term is to have them become proficient with logging in, sending an email in Outlook, composing a document in Word, and creating one slide in PowerPoint. Ambitious? Yes, but I think it’s possible! Consistent in our lessons will be talk about being responsible digital citizens who THINK before we post or share. More will be shared next time about this.

Gratitude & Joy
My heart is always filled with gratitude for your support at home. Please continue to encourage your child to read for enjoyment and include some time to talk about what they read and to make connections. For students who have writing as a goal to improve, please encourage your child to practice writing at home too.

My time spent in the classroom brings me such joy! If you’d like to listen to me share on a couple recent podcasts that I was a guest to get a better glimpse into my teaching philosophy, experiences, and what it might feel like to be in our class, please feel free to have a listen. I love sharing about how teaching and your children bring me joy! The things I share can apply to your life as an adult and parent too. There are multiple takeaways to help you live a better life. If you listen, I would absolutely love to hear what resonated with you. I would greatly appreciate it!

Teaching Champions with Brian Martin – EP 152

Wisdom & Productivity with Efrain Martinez

With sincerest gratitude AND joy, Ms. Chan

Dear families,

I apologize for not having this blog post ready for you to read over the weekend. My Masters ringette team and my daughter’s Open team that I coach was in a tournament. After playing ringette for 15 years, it was my team’s first time winning a gold medal!

We are grateful and at peace.

Last week, we talked about gratitude and what brings us peace. We often share what we are grateful for in our Community Circle.

We watched a part of a Tedx Talk by Louie Schwartzberg on Gratitude. Click here to watch from the part we started watching.

“Nature’s beauty can be easily missed — but not through Louie Schwartzberg’s lens. His stunning time-lapse photography, accompanied by powerful words from Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, serves as a meditation on being grateful for every day.” READ MORE !

Dear families,

Wow, what a week FULL of learning! I can’t wait for you to read all about our rich learning!

We are writers and communicators.

On Monday, we started with reading a story called Diary of a Spider as a launch pad for reflection on our own past weekend.

After reading the story, I introduced the writing process by explaining that writing is so much more than just writing. A big part of our writing time is not spent on writing but actually on thinking. I developed this graphic a few years ago and have used it to help not only children but adults understand the writing process. Actually, I believe in this so much that I created an online course about these tips and strategies to help adults become better writers too. The pre-writing stage and the during writing stage develops their metacognition about writing.

Click on the image to take a closer look!

Then we talked about how once we are finished writing, it’s not the “rush to the teacher to say I’m finished” but instead, an opportunity to make our writing BETTER before we conference with Ms. Chan. This is the after writing stage.

How is this done? We read it over at least THREE times. Each time they read it over, it is for a different purpose. Click on the image to take a closer look!

I was so impressed with their writing after this ONE lesson. Many students felt they did their best writing EVER and felt so proud of themselves as writers! I have seen such academic growth when children become more aware of this writing AND thinking process. READ MORE !