Category: We are critical thinkers.

Dear Division 11 Families,

Thank you so much for joining us on Wednesday, even on such short notice. From identifying problems and needs, planning and sketching, to creating their cardboard prototypes, our students worked incredibly hard. It was wonderful to see how proud they were to showcase their work, and we truly appreciate your presence and support. We also had two other classes visit, and it was heartwarming to see how engaged the audience was with our inventions.

In this project, we developed so many of our core competencies of critical thinking, reflective thinking, creativity, communication, and more! Well done, Division 11!

We Are Mathematicians

In math, we have been learning about 3D objects and their properties. Through hands-on activities, such as building with toothpicks and plasticine and using magnetic rods, students explored how to count faces, edges, and vertices. As we worked through these concepts, we discovered patterns. For example, with prisms, we learned that the number of edges can be found by multiplying the number of sides on the base by 3. A triangular prism has a base with 3 sides, so it has 9 edges (3 x 3). A hexagonal prism has 18 edges (3 x 6). In a short time, our students have done an amazing job learning the names and properties of various 3D objects! 

We Are Artists 

Tying into our lessons on geometry, students explored how to use shading techniques to make their drawings look three-dimensional and realistic. They each drew a cone, cube, cylinder, and sphere, then arranged them into a creative “impossible stack.” Shading was a new skill for many, but students rose to the challenge and were excited to see their drawings come to life! 

Important Updates 

Market Day – Monday:
Students from Divisions 1, 2, and 3 are excited to share their amazing handmade products, from jewelry to stuffed toys made from scratch. Prices vary, with most items around $5 and a maximum of $10. Please send your child with an appropriate amount of money they can manage independently. 

Construction Update:
Fences will be going up around the school, restricting access to the back door from the annex/big gym side of the school. Please help your child line up at our usual morning spot by walking around the school close to Kitchener Street. 

Body Science presentations on Tues, June 17:
Students in our class will have their presentation on Tuesday afternoon. The parent information session will be on Monday, June 16 at 6:30pm on Zoom. Please see the email from the office for the zoom link. 

Book Swap on Wed, June 18:
Students who brought in at least one book will go to choose new to them books on this day! Might not be too late to bring in books on Monday! In my previous schools when we did this, almost every child brought in a book to swap. They absolutely love this event and went home super excited to share their books with their families! 

Field Trip to McGill Library and Confederation park on Thur, June 19:
We are excited to join Ms. Forbes and Ms. Rinaldo’s classes this Thursday! Please review the notice by clicking here. Children are usually extra hungry during active field trips so please bring extra snacks. It might be easier for them to wear their bathing suits under their clothes too. 

Thank you, families, for your continued support at home. We hope you have a wonderful weekend. And to our amazing dads, happy Father’s Day on Sunday! 

Warm regards, 

Cailyn and Livia 

Dear families,

It was another week full of fun, joy, and meaningful learning!

We are writers.

This week, we worked very hard on opinion writing and worked with Ms. Wong-Reinhardt too.

We are passionate about learning!

To practice our non-fiction reading and writing, Passion Projects is a perfect exercise! We learned about the importance of using reputable resources. Ms. Chan taught them about the tree octopus. They all believed it was true because it looked like an informative website with detailed information, images, and various pages. Feel free to check it out: https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

We discussed the types of websites we would consider as reputable. For example, we would not use information from Wikipedia but we would use information from a site like National Geographic for Kids because it is a longstanding company with a good reputation for doing valid research and sharing it with the world.

In addition, we practiced so many critical thinking skills! (It’s one of our favourite core competencies we love having your child develop! We learned about plagiarism and how we cannot just copy and paste text into our PowerPoint presentations. Here are some of the higher level thinking skills we started using:

• evaluate which websites to use
• understand what we are researching and reading
• analyze to determine what information we want to include based on our inquiry questions
• decide which slide the information should be recorded
• change the words yet keep the facts and meaning (paraphrasing)

Students were instructed to add a Resources slide to record the websites they used to find their facts. They learned how to copy the web address and paste it into their last slide. (Triple click on the URL. Use shortcuts: Crtl+c to copy and then Crtl+v to paste.)

Working on our Passion Project helps us develop our core competencies of communication, reflective and creative thinking too!

Ways to support at home: It is like music to our ears to hear that many students are working on their Passion Projects at home!  It is important that they are the ones doing the learning and work. It is okay that you teach them PowerPoint skills, how to paraphrase, and help them read the information. Be the guide on the side and please refrain from doing anything FOR them. The more they do, the more they learn. It is still relatively early in teaching them all the skills they need to produce a good presentation. We are scaffolding their learning so the best way to help is to teach them the skills on a different topic, for example, so they are given the opportunity to practice critical thinking to APPLY their new learning to their own Passion Project. We appreciate you for supporting their learning!

We are mathematicians.

We continued with learning division. This week, we built on our understanding in representing division in multiple ways: sharing, grouping, and real life word problems.

Students had fun creating their own word problems. In order to do so, they needed to have a solid foundation of dividing by sharing and grouping. Here were some clear examples of proficiency that demonstrate their full understanding:

Ways to support at home: Have fun writing word problems together! Many found “division by sharing” word problems easier to create. However, there were only a few who truly understood how to write a real life word problem for “division by grouping” so if you can reinforce this at home, that would be greatly appreciated! If you need to review, look back at last week’s blog post or here is the link to the short video.

We are scientists.

Learning standard: observable changes in the local environment caused by erosion and deposition by wind, water, and ice

Students enjoyed the visible nature of discovering how erosion and deposition works. We blew the top of the sand hill and then slowly poured water on top of sand to demonstrate erosion and deposition. They watched the sand from the top of the hill be moved by wind and water to deposit the sand at the bottom of the hill.

Then we watched a short video to see cool examples around the world of how wind, water, and ice (through weathering) caused erosion and deposition (moved to a different location). Feel free to watch the video here to see examples. We learned from a song too! Watch it here.

Image by Laura Candler

We are athletes.

After two sessions of tennis with Marcus, they have demonstrated good perseverance, growth mindset, and skill development!

Sports Day

We enjoyed spending the morning together collaborating, cooperating, and competing in fun activities!

Save the Dates

• Thur. May 22 at 6:30pm – Kitchener Community Dinner; CLICK HERE to RSVP
• Fri. May 23 at 4:00pm – Karnival for Kids @ Burnaby North Secondary; CLICK HERE to learn more.
• Thur. May 29 at 1:30pm – Volunteer Tea; please RSVP asap
• Fri. May 30 at 2:00pm – Early dismissal
• Fri. June 6 – Pro-D day; school not in session
• Thur. June 19 at 9:15 (all day) – Burnaby Public Library visit & Confederation Park (Notice will be sent home next week. We will be travelling by public transit.)

Thank you so much for your continued support! We hope you are available to join us at the Community Dinner and Volunteer Tea! Everyone is welcome!

Gratefully, Ms. Kim and Ms. Chan

Dear families,

As we said good-bye to Mr. Evoy, there were mixed emotions of celebrating a successful practicum of teaching and learning together for all of us and knowing we will miss his warm and kind presence. It wasn’t just students who learned from him but both Ms. Kim and I learned about our own philosophy and practices affirming why we do what we do as we supported Mr. Evoy so it makes us better teachers in the process too!

We are so grateful for Mr. Evoy’s dedication, hard work, and connection with us. We wish him continued success in his teaching journey! We hope to see him back as a Teacher on Call at Kitchener!

I, Ms. Chan, thoroughly enjoyed being back in the classroom on Thursday and Friday. What a blessing to spend time with your beautiful children. I am so grateful! It truly is incredible how much learning happens in one day, let alone a week, a month, and a year!

Student Led Conferences

We are grateful for your time to listen attentively to your child show you their learning across the curriculum. Thank you for being active participants and big supporters of their learning all year! We hope you enjoyed celebrating their successes. They worked so hard to prepare for these conferences and have continued to work hard since September. We are so proud of them and their perseverance!

If you haven’t done so yet, please fill out the Two Stars and a Wish sheet and return it to school tomorrow, thank you!

We are mathematicians.

Over the weekend, students were encouraged to teach you about division as we enjoyed our first lesson on Friday. If they haven’t yet, ask them to share what they learned. Pull out some candy, chocolates, or cookies with plates for each person in your family. Ask them to divide by sharing to practice what they learned. Reinforcing new concepts helps to solidify learning and builds a strong initial foundation for learning division.

Here’s what we learned so you can support at home:

Each lesson, it is important for us to post our learning intention so it is clear what they are to learn by the end of the lesson.

Two of the big curricular competencies for math is to communicate mathematical thinking in many ways and to represent ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms.

The learning intention for our first lesson in division: I can understand equal groups in division. This concept involved the idea of sharing.

We had plates with our fake gummy bears and went, “one for you, one for you, and one for you” until they were all passed out equally among everyone holding a plate. They enjoyed the real life examples to experience the why and how of division. Then students were given questions to try with partners.

This learning through “play” is one of the most impactful ways for children to learn through discovery. It is one of our favourite types of hands-on and engaging learning where students learn together and practice communicating mathematical thinking with each other. Opportunities like these also help them develop their core competencies of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and social awareness and responsibility. This also aligns with Indigenous ways of learning by de-centering the room with less teacher time talking and more student time exploring the new concepts.

Passion Projects

On Friday, we started talking about Passion Projects. We watched this video by John Spencer that introduced them to what it is although he calls it Genius Hour.

So I asked them to finish this sentence:

I have always wanted to learn more about…

We are at the beginning stages. During this week, please have a conversation about what they would love to learn more about.

Think about what you would really like to spend your time learning about. It should be a topic big enough that you can spend about six weeks on it. Here are some ideas and it’s okay to come up with their own:  

• Learn a new language
• Learn how to  do something  
  • Make a stop motion movie 
  • Photography  
  • Knitting/sewing  
• Learn about something  
  • Architecture  
  • A country or culture – design your dream trip!  
  • The Science of flight  
  • An animal or creature
• Learn about your family history 
• Learn about someone: an artist, athlete, scientist, activist, author , singer

What do you care about in this world? What can you do about “fixing” an existing problem? Think of something you can do that will make this world a better place.  

Next, we will begin to narrow it down . The idea is that they will become an expert and teach the class what they learned.

ADST

Students were introduced to PowerPoint. They learned how to create a new document, rename it, add a new title to the first slide, add an image, choose a design idea, and add a new slide.

How to support at home: Have your child login to O365, open their new PowerPoint project and add more slides. This was good practice to create slides and images. This was to prepare them for learning how to develop presentation slides for their Passion Projects. They loved it and were so excited!

Spring Concert

Our class along with our buddy class look and sound great! We are so excited for you to see them perform on Wednesday!

• Wed. May 7 @ 1:30pm – Afternoon dress rehearsal
  • Have your child wear yellow, orange, or brown tops and black or dark bottoms
• Wed. May 7 @ 6:00pm
  • Have your child wear yellow, orange, or brown tops and black or dark bottoms
  • Bring your child to the Annex, Room A6 (at the far north side of the Annex)
  • Doors to the gym open at 6pm
  • PAC will have cash only concession
• Wed. May 7 @ 6:30pm – Evening performance; bring your tickets!
  • Pick up your child at the end of the performance in the Annex, Room A6

Save the Dates

• Fri. May 16 – Sports Day; early dismissal at 12:30pm
  • Students will be travelling from station to station with our buddy class. They will be divided into 6 teams. More information to come.
• Mon. May 12 – Whole school tennis lessons begin
• Mon. May 19 – Victoria Day; school is closed
• Thur. May 22 – Community Dinner at 6:00pm
  • Everyone is welcome! Bring a dish to share.
• Fri. May 30 – Early dismissal at 2:00pm

We are so grateful for your time and support. It is hard to believe we have less than two months to enjoy each other’s company as we continue to learn together. Rest assured, we will continue to empower your child to develop their identity, be affirmed in their strengths, and grow in their stretch zone as we support them in the process. Can’t wait to continue to share our learning with you! Thank you for your time to read our blog posts!

As always, please reach out should you have any questions, concerns, or would like to share successes.

With hearts full of gratitude,

Ms. Chan and Ms. Kim

Dear Division 11 Families,

We hope you enjoyed the beautiful weather this weekend!

Here’s a look at the fun learning happening in our class:

Team-Building Activities

Mr. Evoy planned engaging collaborative activities to help our students develop their group work skills, such as taking turns, making decisions as a team, and resolving conflicts when disagreements arise.

One of the activities was building a marshmallow tower. Many groups asked for a piece of paper to sketch their ideas before starting. They persevered through challenges and demonstrated great sportsmanship—even when their towers fell over!

Another challenge was the human knot. We started with groups of 3–4 students and gradually increased to around 10 students per group. They learned the importance of communication and how calmly taking turns to share and listen to each other’s thoughts helped them succeed.

Pink Shirt Day

For Pink Shirt Day on Wednesday, our students brainstormed ways to show kindness. Each student decorated a puzzle piece with words or drawings that reminded them of kindness. We are putting the pieces together to create a large pink shirt in our classroom as a daily reminder to spread kindness. A photo of the completed shirt is coming soon!

We also met with our kindergarten buddies and helped them deliver ‘You’re Amazing’ keychains to every staff member in the school. Our students loved guiding their little buddies around our school.

Math

In math, we continued working on the decomposing strategy, focusing on subtraction when the minuend (the larger number) has a 0 in the ones or tens place. We also introduced the compensation strategy this week. To learn more about this strategy, please refer to the following website: Compensation Strategy.

Social Studies

In social studies, our students explored architectural innovations and inventions. As a class, we examined the Haudenosaunee longhouse, identifying its purpose and key characteristics. Students then split into expert groups to study one of the following innovations: Inuit igloos, Egyptian pyramids, and Roman aqueducts. Afterward, they shared their knowledge with classmates from other groups to deepen their understanding.

Language Arts

Our students learned about contractions by becoming contraction surgeons. They started with two words like ‘can not’ and ‘you are,’ writing them on a prescription pad. Then, they performed ‘surgery’ by carefully cutting between the words and adding an apostrophe bandaid to connect them into contractions like ‘can’t’ and ‘you’re.’

Primary Days of Music

Our students did a fantastic job at rehearsal on Thursday—they are looking and sounding great! We will be traveling to Marlborough Elementary for Primary Days of Music on March 13th. We will be departing at 12:25 by bus and will be returning to school at around 2:30.

Please join us for family reading tomorrow and reminder that we have Vancouver Warriors joining us tomorrow for gym.

Thank you for your continued support!

Warm regards,

Cailyn