Dear families,

We hope you had a wonderful and Happy Mother’s day! I had both of my brother’s family come over for the first time in over a year, and I felt so grateful for the opportunity to have our family together again. It filled my heart with gratitude and joy. Speaking of gratitude, I was recently a guest on my friend’s new podcast called Evolving with Gratitude where I got to share what gratitude means to me. I also had the greatest opportunity to talk about how gratitude is embedded in our daily practices in the classroom. If you’re interested, I’d love for you to CLICK HERE to listen. I also wrote a blog post almost a year ago called The Gift of Gratitude if you’d like to check that out too. I truly believe that gratitude is a mindset and a way of living that helps me cultivate joy every day and throughout the day.

First of all, THANK YOU SO MUCH for your generosity and dedication to supporting our students at Gilmore! What an incredible collective effort to raise funds for our Walkathon! They had a great walk around the neighbourhood last Friday! Our hearts are full of gratitude!

Grade 5s to Camp Jubilee on Tuesday, May 10. Please have your child arrive at or before 7:15am. The bus will leave promptly at 7:30am. We will not be able to wait if your child is not here on time because we need to catch the boat on the north shore.

The grade 4s will line up in our usual spot in the morning. Mr. Anchor will pick them up in the morning. Students will be spending the day with the other grade 4s in his class. Sounds like a fun day he’s planned for them!

We are poets.

This past week, we started our unit on poetry. Our monthly theme at Gilmore is creativity so poetry fits right in! We started with a list poem, writing our our personal affirmations. I follow Jon Acuff‘s work and he calls it anthems so some students have chosen to call it that too. Each student had an opportunity to share their favourite statements and wow, they have blown me away with how insightful they are. I am so excited to see their final products so they can use these as anchors in their personal development. By the way, I highly recommend looking into Jon Acuff. He’s written a number of books, his latest called Soundtracks, and has a great podcast called All it Takes is a Goal.) Click here to see a copy of Jon’s Anthem to give you an idea or google affirmations to get a better idea too.

We also tried our hand at writing tongue twisters. We came up with some creative and difficult ones to say out loud!

On Friday, we wrote an acrostic poem with the word: CREATIVITY. This was brought home for homework to finish. This is a poem where the first letter in each line spells out the word.

I think it’s always fun if you do what we do. So, if you’d like to try your hand at writing an anthem or affirmations, a tongue twister, or an acrostic poem for creativity, I would love for you to share it with your child! If you’re comfortable, have your child bring it to school to share it with all of us! I bet the other kids will think it’s so cool!

We are mathematicians.

Both grade 4s and 5s started division. Please continue to encourage your child to practice their multiplication/division math facts. It really does make a world of a difference when they just know them by heart and don’t have to check their multiplication chart, which really slows down their computations.

Reminders

Dragsters – Students were asked to bring their carved dragsters back to school on Monday, ready for our sanding party. Thank you for helping your child prepare their dragsters. I am so looking forward to seeing how their concepts come to reality! Next week, we will paint.

Coffee & Conversation – The Community Room is now open again for coffee time! Since I have Head Teacher time, I get to be a part of this wonderful time to connect with parents. If you are available, I would SO love for you to join us on Thursday mornings from 9 to 10am. It’s a great opportunity to get to know other parents better too!

Thank you so very much for your continued dedication to reading these blog posts to keep up to date. We appreciate your support at home!

Loving being your child’s teacher, Ms. Chan