Dear families of Division 6,

Oh how I have missed spending time with your children!

 

On Monday, we reviewed the old and new safety protocols. Thank you to parents who kept their children at home this week to keep us all safe. Please continue to do the daily health check and have your child pack 2-3 extra masks to keep in their backpacks. Thank you!

Click here for the daily health check.

Click here for information on managing Covid. Click here for information if you have Covid.

Click here for the instructions from the BC Centre for Disease for close contacts.

Black Excellence Day

Many students wore black on Friday to support Black Excellence Day. We joined in the first-ever virtual event hosted by our district.

It is a learning opportunity and celebration of Black achievements, stories, art, people, joy, love, and history.

To learn more, click here to read the Burnaby School Board’s post and a CBC article about this initiative.

We are mathematicians.

We started our new math unit on geometry by checking to see what they already knew. Let’s just say I am so very excited to see their understanding grow immensely from what they showed me on Monday! We watched a video on recognizing shapes. Click here to re-watch the video.

Homework: Finish booklet that starts with page 150. It is due on Monday.

Thank you to parents who expressed interest! Next week on Wednesday, January 19th at 7:00pm, I will be hosting a Math Games night! Children are welcome to join in! At this point, I don’t know how long it will be but I won’t keep you past an hour. I will send you an email with the link. If you are interested but have not responded to the online form yet, please just email me to let me know. I am grateful for your time and interest!

All About Me presentations

We continued to enjoy the All About Me presentations this week. If your child has not presented yet, please help them practice this weekend. We will have all of them done by the end of next week. Thank you for your support!

We are learning to type!

Students were introduced to our online typing program called All the Right Type. We are grateful to have a district license. Last year, many of my students learned how to type efficiently through this program. Imagine how much more efficient your child will be for the rest of their life if they learned how to type at their age! Consider how much time they can save if they can type proficiently. Click here to login. They brought home their login information on Tuesday. Like most skills, the more time and effort they invest, the better and faster they get.

Coincidentally, my good friend, Tim Cavey, just published a blog post about the skill of typing recently! Click here to read, if interested.

Be impeccable with your words.

Last weekend, I finished reading a book called The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. It was published in 1997 and has sold over 100 million copies. 

Our overarching school theme this month is responsibility.  So the timing was just right to also focus on Agreement #1: Be impeccable with your words. It is our responsibility to treat others this way as we aim to live our lives as a role model in all that we do. I also taught them to be impeccable with the words they say to themselves. Sometimes we can be hardest on ourselves but it is so very important to be kind to ourselves too!

We have always focussed on Agreement #4: Always do your best as one of our 3 main questions that we have permanently on the front board:

• Will you do the right thing?
• Will you do today’s best?
• What will you do in service to others today?

Please ask your child what they learned about being impeccable with their words. I challenged them to notice a time when they would not normally be impeccable with their words, to stop themselves to think first before speaking.

This is something that I often share out on social media:

Is it hard sometimes? Yes! Does it take self-discipline, self-control, and self-regulation to be kind with our words? Yes! But each interaction is an opportunity to uplift one another. If you are not uplifting someone, then you are tearing them down. There is no in between. One of my favourite songs is called Speak Life by Toby Mac about the power of our words.

We are so grateful for you and your support! Please know that your children are seen, loved, valued, heard, and appreciated as they bring us so much joy each day. Thank you for sharing your child with us. They are truly a gift! 🙂

Sincerely, Ms. Chan (and Mrs. Paulich)