Category: We are scientists.

Dear families,

One thing we strive for is to make school a place we love and look forward to be. This all happens by design and with great intention as we plan engaging and meaningful activities every day. I love the connections we have with each other as we learn about ourselves and each other in our safe and caring community. Our goal is to help them cultivate joy through relationships and as we learn. We are better together and stronger together! We are so blessed to be their teachers!

Hip Hop

So proud of them! Hip Hop was a fun way to learn how to dance! If you were not able to see the performance, the video was uploaded to SpacesEDU, but there is a slight issue right now with parent access. Once I hear back from SpacesEDU and it is fixed, I will send out an email to inform you. Regardless, find the email with the invite to set up your account to view.

Introduction to Daily 5

We appreciate Ms. Kapusta, our ELL teacher, who comes into our room every Wednesday to support our learners. This week, we introduced a structure that ignites joy in reading and writing that introduced this framework. Students were also introduced to a new program called Chunk Spelling. Here, they practice putting together initial consonant sounds, blends, and digraphs with a word family. Click here to learn more. Ask your child about their first experience with Daily 5!

Introduction to Passion Projects

Passion Projects is one of my most favourite things to offer to learners! There is SO much rich learning that can happen! As written in their planner last week, students were asked to come up with three things they might be curious to learn more about. Click here to check out the slide deck. They have only seen the slides up to the links to websites. I will share the following slides this week.

Please have a conversation with your child about the top three things they would be very interested and curious to learn about and teach to classmates. Check out our initial list! Click here or on the image on the right to enlarge.

These passion projects are intended for students to work with a partner because there are SO many additional skills they can learn by working with a classmate (collaboration, communication, listening, speaking, taking turns, negotiating, co-planning, etc.) but I will offer choice to work independently. Please also speak with your child about their preference. As mentioned before, we will be using PowerPoint so if you wish for your child to get a head start, please feel free to show them some tools. I will be introducing PowerPoint this week! Many of the tools will look familiar to them since they are the same in Word. SO excited!

We are artists.

Students thoroughly enjoyed working on this art project! Always love how they all receive the same set of instructions but each one has its own personality and flare!

We are scientists.

Week after week, Ms. Kim has led our salmon observation in Ms. Barndt’s classroom. This week, we saw that they have grown to approximately 7mm and do not have their sacs anymore. We continued to learn about the chicken’s life cycle. Ask your child about what they’ve learned so far!

We are storytellers.

This past week, Ms. G. Lee had us working in groups to tell a story using various story workshop materials. Then they brainstormed their stories on a graphic organizer. Ask your child about their experience and what their story is about!

Exciting upcoming events

• April 13 – Microplastics in-class workshop hosted by Institute of Urban Ecology at Douglas College
• April 14 – Ice cream sandwich sale day
• April 24 – Pro-D Day
• April 28 – Diversity assembly
• May 4 – Student Led Conferences; early dismissal at 1:45pm
• May 5 – Walkathon
• May 17 – Arts Umbrella performance at Granville Island. We will need parent volunteer drivers, please.
• May 24 – Class photos
• June 23 – Science World field trip with Division 12. We will be taking transit and will need parent volunteers, please.

How you can support at home

As always, we are grateful for your support at home. Some suggestions on how:

• Read our blog posts each week so you can have conversations to review and extend learning. Better yet! Read it WITH your child or have them read it to you!
• I highly encourage you to be curious WITH your child.
• Ask them what else do they wonder about? Model curiosity by sharing what you wonder about based on the topic. Research to dive deeper into their curiosities to foster a love to become lifelong learners.
• Many students at this age read independently. It is important to have conversations about what they read. When my own kids were in elementary, I tried to read the books they read so we can have conversations about the characters, plot, etc. It was a wonderful way to connect and to build a lifelong love of reading.
• Many children spend more time reading than writing at home. Encourage your child to write. Find a real reason to write. We have more students in our class who are better readers than writers. Since writing is a skill, the more time they spend writing, the better they get at it. Encourage them to re-read their writing when they are finished.

On Thursday, we said good-bye to Ms. Kim. She has worked very hard during her time with us to get to know your child and plan fun, engaging lessons. We wish her well in her continued journey to becoming a teacher.

I write every blog post with love and a heart full of joy and gratitude. Your child brings me so much joy so I thank you for sharing them with us. Have a wonderful rest of your long weekend!

Gratefully, Ms. Chan

Dear families,

We had a fun week returning from spring break! We hope you all had a lovely time off with your family! This past week, students started learning their Hip Hop routine. Please have your child wear black and/or white on Tuesday, April 4th. Entrance to the performance will be through the Dundas/Gilmore door to the gymnasium. The doors will open at 1:00 p.m. and seating will be first-come, first-served. We are looking forward to showing you our dance moves!

We are story creators.

Students listened to the story A Salmon for Simon but first, they had an opportunity to work in small groups to collaborate on creating their own story based on 6 images from the book. They put the pictures in the order that made sense to them. Then they wrote sentences to tell their story. It was great fun to have each group go up to read their version!

We received our pen pal letters!

It was exciting to receive our pen pal letters from our buddy class at Brentwood Park! We are in the process of brainstorming ideas with details to write back to them this week.

We are scientists.

Thank you to Ms. Kim, we continue to be immersed in our learning about life cycles. We had a special guest speaker, Ms. Barndt, share her knowledge about salmon in BC.

Students created a lilypad filled with the 4 stages of the frog’s life cycle based on their research. They also researched the life cycle of humans.

Web of Life activity

Ms. Kim showed them a video called “Everything is Connected” as an introduction to the Indigenous Peoples’ perspectives on nature. Each student had a role. As they listened to the story, when they heard their role mentioned, they received the ball of yarn. At the end, this created a beautiful web so students got to see that every action no matter how small is connected to others and causes a ripple effect on the whole ecosystem. This was a powerful way for students to learn about environmental stewardship to help them understand the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of taking care of our planet.

This is Ms. Kim’s last week with us. We are so grateful for her dedication to planning engaging lessons for us! We wish you all the best in your teacher education!

ADST

We continued to develop our skills in O365 using Word. We learned how to create text boxes. This practice prepares us for learning how to add text boxes in PowerPoint. Very soon, I am SO excited that we will be diving in to Passion Projects! Please begin to have conversations with your child about what interests them most. What would they LOVE to learn more about? They will be doing research and then preparing a PowerPoint presentation. I believe that communication and presentation skills are important skills to develop plus a passion for learning!

Here’s what we learned so far in Word:

• bold, italicize, underline
• changing fonts, sizes and colour
• alignment: left, center, right
• adding images and text boxes

Please feel free to have your child login to O365 at home to practice using these tools. If you wish, you can introduce them to PowerPoint to get a head start! I’m sure some of them would love to become mentors when we start using PowerPoint!

Spring is almost here!

We practiced drawing tulips and then created our own with white pencil crayon. We traced over our image with white liquid glue and made them come alive with chalk pastels. I hope you enjoy what you see! Students added a new post to their SpaceEDU account. Please login to view their reflection on learning and feel free to leave a comment for your child to enjoy!

April is Autism Acceptance Month (also shared from the Community Office email shared on Friday)

April is Autism Acceptance Month and Gilmore will be celebrating and recognizing this important topic all month long! Students will be provided with facts about autism and other disabilities in the morning announcements and with a variety of in-class and school-wide activities throughout the month. For example, all classes will be participating in a sensory day so students can experience the feelings of challenge that individuals with a disability may feel on an everyday basis. Students will also be doing pointillism art using their non-dominant hand. It is our hope that these activities will help our students to gain valuable perspective taking, understanding and empathy!

As a way of giving back to the community, we will also be raising money for the Canucks Autism Network through an ice-cream sandwich sale on April 14 ($2 each at recess and lunch) and by selling paper fan hands on School Cash Online throughout April. For every $5 paper hand purchased, your name will go into a draw for some prizes at the end of the month. (Prize winners will be announced on Monday, May 1). Prizes will include Canucks memorabilia, 3 EA Sports video games of your choice and a FIFA 23 ultimate team jersey.

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

With a heart full of gratitude, Ms. Chan

Dear families,

We would love to wish you a joy-filled spring break! During our Community Circle today, we shared one thing that brings us joy at school. So many of them mentioned that seeing their friends and being at school bring them joy. I am blessed to witness their joy every day when I am in the classroom AND to experience the joy myself every time I am there with them. At the end of the day, one of the students said to his friend, “I never want to leave this class.” That warmed my heart. We work hard at fostering a safe and secure space where students feel supported, loved, valued, and appreciated as they learn together. While I will enjoy my spring break, I will also miss your children!

We are scientists.
We have been blessed to have Ms. Kim, our student teacher, here with us for the past three weeks. She has been doing some teaching every day in the past couple of weeks. Students are really enjoying the creative and thoughtful lessons she taught in Science and Math. We have been learning about different life cycles: salmon, frog, chicken, butterfly, and humans through expert groups, research, and observations of salmon eggs, fry, and alevin so far. After spring break, Ms. Kim will be with us for two more weeks. Her last day will be on Thursday, April 6 and we will be sad to see her leave.

We have continued to learn about the importance of water conservation and discussed small changes they can do at home to take care of our earth.

We are so grateful for Ms. Kapusta who came into our classroom as our TOC. She said they enjoyed themselves with making ocean art! Check out their creativity!

We are readers and communicators.
We are so proud to say that we have had an incredible term of reading growth as a result of our regular reading groups! As a result, we have shifted our groups a bit. Students now meet in their groups to not just read together, they meet to discuss connections to what they read, ask questions and wonder, and to talk about anything they notice the author does in their writing (like word choice or the way they keep the reader interested). I have loved sitting in to listen to the conversations. In one group, the character talked about being at a beach. The personal stories that followed about their trips to a Mexican beach enhanced our connection to the character and built our connection to each other. These conversations are like when adults get together for their Book Club meetings – to share our stories.

“Learning is embedded in memory, history, and story.” – First Peoples Principles of Learning

We are authors.
We continued to work on our stories during Writer’s Workshop times. Today, students uploaded an image of their stories on SpacesEDU and shared their reflections:

• What I’m proud of (2 things)
• What I’m working on
• What I’d do differently
• I can… statements (2)

“Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective…” – First Peoples Principles of Learning

I love how they are becoming much better at reflecting on their learning! All parents were invited to be a part of their learning through SpacesEDU. During spring break, we encourage you to look at your child’s posts, write an encouraging comment, and celebrate their learning. We have four families that have accepted their email invite already. It would be wonderful if you would consider accepting the invite so you can celebrate your child’s learning and reflections. I think they would love to show and tell you about their posts! Please email if you need me to resend the link. Thank you for your support at home!

Recently, we had fun learning about adjectives that describe nouns and adverbs that describe verbs. We put this learning into practice in our stories.

We are becoming tech savvy.
Using Office365, we are becoming more proficient at logging in and using Word. Today, we practiced writing in a new document, renamed the document, and we learned how to add an image! I encouraged them to login to O365 at home over spring break to either send me an email to let me know how their spring break is going or to open their “Practice writing” or “Playing with Names” document to practice using the tools learned already: changing font, size, colour, bold, italics, underline, alignment, and adding images.

We are mathematicians.
It would be great if your child continues to practice their addition and subtraction math facts to 20. Feel free to use the strategies found here.

We appreciate you.
As always, we are so grateful for your support at home. As you read your child’s report card, please understand that this is a snapshot of their learning. Learning is a journey.

“Learning involves patience and time.” – First Peoples Principles of Learning.

Please celebrate your child’s growth, discuss how they can hold themselves accountable for their own learning and reflection, and talk about how you will continue to support them. We look forward to further growth in the next few months! Have a most wonderful and memorable spring break!

Grateful for you, Ms. Chan

Reminders:

• Please sign and return report card envelopes on Mon. March 27 when school re-opens after spring break.
• Hip Hop lessons start on Mon. March 27 for us! Thank you to the Parent Council who is supporting a part of this dance program. A gentle reminder to please pay $6 on School Cash Online. Thank you!
• We are running low on pencils. If you have a stash at home, even if they are gently used, please feel free to have your child bring it to school. Thank you!
• Fri. April 7 & Mon. April 10 – Good Friday & Easter Monday
• Thur. April 13 – Microplastics in-class workshop by Institute of Urban Ecology
• We. May 17 @ 1:15 pm – Arts Umbrella Theatre Troupe performance (Granville Island). We will need parent volunteer drivers for this day, please. More details to come.

Dear families,

What a productive week of learning! Each day this week, I felt an incredible sense of pride for how hard your child and our class as a whole worked. Each child is taking their learning so seriously. Don’t get me wrong. I feel this way every week but this one in particular felt a higher level of focus and dedication. So whatever you are feeding your children, keep feeding them, please! 😉

We had the great pleasure of having Ms. Kim join us this past week to get to know your children and to learn all about our classroom.

Here is a special message from our student teacher

Dear Families of Division 11,

I am greatly pleased to say hello to all of you. I am Grace Kim, a student teacher from Simon Fraser University. I have been an EA (Education Assistant) in the Burnaby School District for the last 4 years. I am also a mom of 4 children ranging from Grades 5 to 11.

Yesterday, I completed a full week of in-class observations. I often had eye-opening moments, witnessing the ideal classroom environment that I have ever imagined. I gratefully embarked on learning how to build a welcoming and inclusive classroom community not only from Ms. Chan, Mrs. Paulich, and Ms. Connell but also from 21 students in Division 11.

As I return to SFU for the next 2 weeks, I am very excited to be back on February 21st to start teaching and continue learning how to set up core values and beliefs in education as well. I hope all of the families in this warm community are well. See you soon.

With gratitude and warmth, Grace

We are authors.
We really dug into our writing! After developing our characters, planning our storyboard, learning about what makes a great story, we started writing! We call this time Writer’s Workshop. I wish you could be there in the room to see how focused and engaged they are in writing their stories.

My goal for each time we work on our stories is to teach something new they can bring into their writing to make it even better. They are asked to read over their writing before they start writing again with the purpose to self-assess for improvement. Students were encouraged to

• review their opening sentence. Is it interesting? Does it hook your reader in to want to read more?
• introduce their character. When we describe our character and their core values or what they believe in, it is easier for your audience to make a connection to your character. Did you include some details about your character?
• describe the setting. Do you describe where the story takes place so that your reader can paint a picture of where they are?
• include quotation marks for dialogue between characters. This lesson was SO much FUN! It was the first time I introduced quotation marks. We used “bunny ears” to represent quotation marks (because they look like beginning and ending quotation marks). This was to show someone is speaking. So to practice, we all got up to talk to classmates. Anytime we talked, we had to put up “bunny ears”. Wish you saw the big smiles on everyone’s faces! I just love to make learning feel like an experience!
• add adverbial phrases. As an extension to dialogue, we learned how to describe how someone said something. For example: “I just can’t believe it,” said Julie with her head hung low. Add this extra phrase really helps to paint a more descriptive picture to enhance the dialogue.
• review the number of times they used the word: said. Many children this age overuse “said” so they we learned there are other ways like: replied, shouted, cried.

I read The Best Story by Eileen Spinelli. Feel free to watch it read to you with your child. I absolutely love this story. I use it when I do presentations on the writing process. What I love about it the message: Write the story that is in your heart. Students were encouraged to write the story that is in their heart. Interesting enough, one student asked if he could start over. Of course, I said yes. At the end of the writing time, he came to me to tell me that his ideas flowed so much faster! That’s a win!

We are communicators.
On Wednesday, we MCed the Celebration of Learning for Literacy Week. Again, this was one of those moments where I beamed with pride because of their courage to speak in front of the school. An extra high five to Chloe, Katelyn, Cristina, and Addie for reading their letter to Mother Earth at the assembly! So proud of you all!

We are readers.
Reading groups are going so well now! We have six groups to better match our varying reading levels. All groups meet at the same time. We built in a system that works beautifully. Each group receives their book bag for the session. One person in the group goes to get a white board, marker, and eraser. They use this board to write down words they are unsure of. Students were taught not to just tell the person struggling with sounding out a word. Instead, collectively, they try to attack the word with their understanding of how to break up the word, phonics, letter sounds, syllables, and overall knowledge of words. I love how they help each other! During this time, I have the freedom to move from table to table listening in and supporting as each person takes a turn reading a page. Again, I wish you could see how well our reading groups run. You would feel so proud of how well your child works in their group, respectfully taking turns, and supporting each other’s reading development.

New learning this week was to spend some time talking about the connections they are making to what they read.

We are scientists.
After having some practice last week with researching oceans as a class, we thought we’d try our hand at doing our own research on lakes. I vetted five websites to learn more. We found some very interesting facts like not all lakes are freshwater! They started by recording what they know about lakes and then adding what they wonder about lakes before discovering facts. We learned that we cannot just copy word for word what we find. We need to

We are athletes.
So far, we had two tennis lessons. They already showed improvement the second session! Thank you for ensuring your child has runners on Tuesday and Thursday. They have two more sessions next week!

We are mathematicians. [Repeated from last week’s post.]
As you may or may not know, our school growth plan has a numeracy focus now (new this year). So, if I hosted a Math Literacy Fun Night for you and your child to attend, would you be interested? The purpose of this would be to teach you some fun games you can play to help your child improve their number sense, number concepts, and learning of math facts. I understand that it’s one thing to ask you to help your child practice their math facts, but it’s so much better if I show you how and have you practice and play with them at school so you can replicate the fun at home! 🙂 Please CLICK HERE to fill out this quick questionnaire to share your interest and availability. Thank you!

We celebrate!
One of my beliefs is that we need to recognize how hard we work, our learning and growth, and to celebrate it! I’m a firm believer that children don’t do things to please me. It’s important they work hard at all aspects of their learning because it builds on their personal strengths, recognition of their accomplishments, and self-regulation (core competencies). Students are provided with frequent opportunities and guided to celebrate small wins especially when they are so invested in their learning. We foster a sense of pride by giving ourselves a high five and sometimes giving each other high fives. It has been scientifically proven that when we high-five, it improves our mood. How? When we high-five, our brain releases dopamine which increases happiness! When people are happy, this activates all areas of the learning centre in your brain so we learn better!

As always, my heart is full of gratitude for being your child’s teacher. They truly bring me so much joy every day I get to spend with them! Even if I don’t tell them, I am hopeful they know I love them because they see it on my face and feel it in their heart. On Friday, we learned how to send an email using Outlook mail in O365! They made me feel so loved in their email messages…truly heartwarming!

If your child has not memorized their login ID and password, please continue to work on this. Those who have it memorized are feeling very efficient and are able to step up to be leaders to help others who need support. Thank you for supporting them to memorize it at home!

For extra practice logging in while at home, feel free to go to the Gilmore website. Click on

Then login with pupilnumber@edu.burnabyschools.ca. It would look something like this with their personal number: 4561237@edu.burnabyschools.ca and their password would be the same. All Burnaby students can download O365 on devices at home.

For extra practice communicating, go to Outlook Mail. I responded to all emails so there should be an unread mail from me. If your child wishes, have them reply back to me. Feel free to review with them why we type a few words in the subject line and then our message below. The next lesson will be about how we typically form an email with a greeting, message, and signature while also paying attention to complete sentences that begin with a capital letter and end with proper punctuation.

I am grateful for you and your continued support. Have a most wonderful weekend!

Gratefully, Ms. Chan