Dear families,

We continue to grow in many ways!

Student Led Conferences 

On Thursday, May 4, we have an early dismissal at 1:45pm for our Student Led Conferences which start at 2:00pm. Please CLICK HERE to read the notice with detailed information on our conferences or view image (click to enlarge).

CLICK HERE to fill out the form to choose your appointment times.

You will find a link in the notice to choose your first and second choice for appointment times. Please fill out as soon as possible. Thank you!

Autism Awareness & Acceptance Month

This week, we continued to read stories that support our Autism Awareness and Acceptance month. We have reflected on our learning through our writing. Please feel free to have conversations around what we’ve been learning about this month.

• All My Stripes by Shaina Rudolph, Danielle Royer, and Jennifer Zivoin 
• Destiny’s Amazingly Different Dreams by Molly Schaefer   
• Don’t Laugh at Me by Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin 

Read How Full Is Your Bucket? by Tom Rath. This is one of my favourite stories. It teaches us that we all have an invisible bucket above our heads. When we say and do kind things for others, we add drops to our bucket and theirs. This lifts us all up. So, every interaction with others either uplifts and adds to positivity or it does the opposite.

We are passionate.

Since students may not have seen many presentations, I worked on my own Passion Project on capybaras as an example. I demonstrated what their presentations can look like. We talked through having consistent title font sizes, using relevant images that match the information on slides, information you put on slides, and including a Resources slide. I mentioned how we don’t write too many words on a slide. Also, we can share more information on the slide than what we have listed. We talked about criteria but we will co-construct it this week.

Click here to view my Capybara PowerPoint.

Everyone is working hard on their Passion Projects! They really enjoy this time! We learned how to share PowerPoint presentations with our partner and with me. During our demonstration, they learned the power of working on a live document where two people have access.

We are cooperative communicators.

On Friday, we played a Copy Cat cooperative communication game. Students were divided into teams randomly chosen. There were five groups with four on a team.

One person from each group came up to view the hidden design they were to copy. The communicator was only allowed to use words to describe the design and were asked to keep their hands behind their backs when explaining to prevent pointing. Each person on the team had an opportunity to be a communicator.

Each turn, the design got progressively more challenging.

I was impressed with how their communication improved each turn they had. I was proud of how well they worked on each team!

Ask your child about their experience!

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

Gratefully, Ms. Chan

Dear families,

They say that time flies when we are having fun and that we are! How are we already in the middle of April?

We are learning how to research.

Mrs. Paulich and Mrs. Papapanagiotou taught us about the importance of citing our references. We will be doing a simplified version but they will be expected to learn how to properly cite in the intermediate grades.

Another important part of researching is recording what we find by paraphrasing so we learned what this meant and practiced with our Passion Project partners. I was so impressed with how quickly they grasped this! Give it a try at home! When reading a non-fiction book together or researching something online. Ask your child to take a sentence and practice paraphrasing. This is an important skill when showing others you understand when truly listening.

We learned about microplastics.

Students learned about and how they enter the environment. They analyzed samples of water from an urban area and graphed their results. They learned what microfibres are and where they came from. Lastly, they brainstormed ways to help reduce microplastics in the environment. Thank you to the Institute of Urban Ecology at Douglas College for coming to Gilmore to teach us!

We learned about autism and stuttering.

This month at Gilmore, we are focusing on learning about accepting differences. Every morning on the PA, we learn more about different ways that people are different. This past week, we learned about Down Syndrome too. In our class, we read two books and reflected on each one. I invite you to listen to the story and have a conversation with your child about what they learned and how they can accept and empathize with others.

Passion Projects

It is SO exciting to see students work so collaboratively with their partners during this time! This week, they worked hard on their proposal for their research.

Here are a few of the ideas they will be working on and teaching us in a few weeks!

• Blobfish
• Speaking French
• Chihuahua
• History of video games
• Tigers
• Lions

Next week, they will be adding this to their SpacesEDU e-portfolio as a record of their progress. If you have not yet activated your parent accounts to view your child’s reflection posts and the Hip Hop video, please do so. If you’d like me to re-send the invite, please let me know. It’s a quick click of a button!

Passion Project time is a great way to develop their core competencies:

• I can communicate in order to collaborate.
• I can apply critical and reflective thinking to acquire and interpret information, and to make choices about how to communicate their ideas. (paraphrasing)
• I can reflect on my work and experiences and tell others about something I learned. (We will be reflecting on our progress!)

Grade 2 Mathematicians

This past week, we learned how to subtract with regrouping. Some of you may know it as “borrowing”. Whether your child is in grade 2 or 3, this is a great time to review and reinforce this at home. For grade 2s, they subtract up to two-digits (75-38=__) and for grade 3s, they subtract up to three-digits (755-388=__). Our goal is that your child will be able to explain how this is done and to not simply solve the equation. As Einstein said, ““If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Just a reminder to continue to practice learning addition and subtraction math facts at home.

Thank you for your continued support at home!

Please note that our Walkathon date has been changed to May 19 due to the change in date for the all day Track Meet. There is an opportunity for your child’s artwork to be chosen and included in the Yearbook. If your child is interested, please have them submit it to the Community Office early next week.

Sincerely, Ms. Chan

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