Dear families,

It has been such a fun-filled delightful last two weeks of school!

Thank you to everyone’s support and donations for our annual Jingle Bell Walk yesterday! We appreciate Charlotte’s mom and Jeremy H.’s mom for joining us on our walk. We are also grateful to Xavier’s dad for being our driver to help us bring the items back to the school. Your time and help is very much appreciated! There were over 80 parent volunteers who helped on our walk, collection, and serving of hot chocolate! We are so blessed to live in such a generous and caring community!

We are readers.
We were the very first class to visit the Scholastic Book Fair almost a couple of weeks ago. What an exciting time to shop and get excited about books! Thank you for all of your support! If you ordered books, they have arrived. You will receive them this week.

We are continuing with our daily silent reading and reading groups. Here, children are put into groups to read with others who are at similar levels. We talk about effective strategies I see them using (I notice, name, and nurture.) and what other things great readers do. Letter sound combinations are reviewed and we practice breaking up unfamiliar words with decoding strategies. We listen to and support each other as we read out loud to practice our fluency and expression. We talk about our background knowledge and make predictions before and while we read. Students make connections to their experiences, other books/movies, and encouraged to wonder by asking questions about what is happening in the story. Many of these strategies are to help children gain a better understanding of what they read and engage with the text on a deeper level.

Ways to support at home: As you read with your child, we encourage you to follow the same strategies for pushing their critical thinking and reflection skills as they read. One of the most important ways to supporting your reader at home is to talk about what they are reading before, during, and after to help them make sense of what they read. Comprehension and connection is key! Another important piece is to help them recognize what their strengths are as a reader so they know what to continue doing. When you notice them using a reading skill or strategy, be specific to name it so you can nurture it. We need to make it explicit what “good” reading looks like, sounds like, and feels like so they understand what they are working towards. Nurture the joy of reading!

If you have any questions and would appreciate a 1:1 conversation about how to better support your child specifically with reading or writing, please let me know and let’s make it happen! I am happy to support you and your child! 🙂

Communicating our Learning in Science
Your child should have come home with the Matter booklet and a letter with how they were to communicate their learning. They had fun pretending to be a parent as they listened to their partner practice explaining all of the concepts page by page as review. To see the concepts taught, click here to go to our We Are Scientists page. We hope you had fun doing the matter exercise around the house with the sticky notes!

We have an exciting in-class “field trip” on Mon. Dec. 12: Metro Vancouver Watershed Water Cycle. Here are the details on the workshop:

For over a decade, Skye Consulting and Metro Vancouver have provided watershed education to grade 4/5 classrooms across the region but NOW we are extending that to grade 2 classrooms. Metro Vancouver provides clean, safe drinking water to 2.7 million residents everyday, all thanks to our amazing water cycle. They are pleased to offer to your classrooms a fun and hands-on classroom workshop that brings the watershed to you! This is free of charge.

Discover the treasures of Metro Vancouver’s watersheds through an engaging, curriculum connected, in class workshop where our facilitator visits your school with a series of activities and videos to bring the watersheds alive in your classroom. We will explore how the water cycle provides our drinking water, what makes watershed ecosystems important, and concepts of water use and sustainability. Once you’ve experienced this workshop, you’ll be reminded every time you turn on the tap!

We are communicators.
I wish you could have been there to witness their sheer delight and excitement when we received letters from our pen pals from Brentwood Park’s Division 12!! Each one came in their own decorated envelope addressed to them! This past week, we focused on communication through letter writing. We learned the standard form of letters and how to add details about a personal fact that we really wanted our pen pal to know. I am so proud of their overall writing development since the beginning of the year! Our reflective journal writing is progressing well too!

As a class, one area that needed review was: What makes up a sentence? Some students are still learning and some are working on their consistency.

Teaming with Ms. Kapusta, our ELL teacher, we brainstormed what all sentences have. Then we taught them that every sentence has two parts besides it starting with a capital letter and ending with proper punctuation. It has also a subject and predicate.

We had a super fun activity where they each received a subject and a predicate on separate slips of paper. Then they went around the room choosing different partners to make silly sentences. Big smiles and laughter all around! 🙂 We ended the lesson by playing charades. Students chose a predicate and the rest of the class had to make up a complete sentence after it was acted out!

Ways to support at home: Encourage your child to write for real reasons and to cultivate the joy of writing. Keep a journal to record what they did each day. A gratitude journal is a great way to count our blessings! Write a letter or list. Many students love to write stories. Have them create a book!

Illnesses
Last week, we had a number of students away due to illness. We dearly miss your child when they are away. Thank you so much for keeping your child at home when they are sick. Our wish is that they feel better very soon so they can return. When they do feel better at home but aren’t well enough to come back to school just yet, here are some suggestions for what to do, if you wish, and of course, only if they are up to it:

• Snuggle up and read together on EPIC. Your child has access from 7am to 3pm. Use the suggestions mentioned above to talk about the book.
• Wonder together. Think of things they are curious about. Do some research together!
• Practice writing by finding a real reason to write. Perhaps write a note or letter to someone like a grandparent or me! I LOVE receiving letters from students!
• Make something together! Be creative. Use random materials to see what you can come up with!
• If you work from home while your child is recovering, these are all things they can do on their own too!

Always such a joy to see your child’s face and smile when they do return feeling better! 🙂

Winter Concert
We have been working hard to prepare for a delightful winter concert next week! Here are some details you will need to know:

• You will receive TWO tickets on Monday. There are two tickets per child. Please bring your tickets with you to the performance.
• What to wear: a light blue, silver or grey top with dark pants, black socks, and black shoes
• Dress rehearsal on Wed. Dec. 7 at 1:00pm. If you have other family members or younger children, this is the best time to watch! No tickets necessary.
• Please have your child wear their outfit for the dress rehearsal too.
• Wed. Dec. 7 – Arrive at 6:15pm. Report to our classroom. Please not earlier than 6:15pm. Thank you.
• Parents will leave the gym through the outside doors.
• After the concert, please meet your child OUTSIDE at the doors they always line up and leave from. This is where they will be dismissed.

Communicating Student Learning
We are excited to provide you with your child’s learning update on Friday, December 9th! As you read through their progress report, please understand that this is a strength-based document. There are many areas of learning to celebrate. Focus on and recognize their strengths as you sit side by side to read it with them. They are written with a lot of care, love, encouragement, and a supportive heart. I really do enjoy working on these because it gives me dedicated time to deeply reflect and think about your child, their strengths, goals, and next steps in all areas of their learning and development. What a joy and a blessing it is to be your child’s teacher this year! I feel so much gratitude in my heart every day that I get to spend time with your precious children. What a gift they are to each other and our community.

These are written to your child because I believe it helps them take ownership over their learning AND with their voice included, they can see themselves as a big part of their goal setting and progress.

Just like in reading as mentioned above, they need to know what they are doing well so they know what to continue doing. This is a snapshot of how they are doing at this time.

Please refer to this as you look through the different subject areas:

Proficiency Scale   

Emerging	Developing	Proficient	Extending
The student demonstrates an initial understanding of the concepts and competencies relevant to the expected meaning.	The student demonstrates a partial understanding of the concepts and competencies relevant to the expected learning.	The student demonstrates a complete understanding of the concepts and competencies relevant to the expected learning.	The student demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the concepts and competencies relevant to the expected learning.

You will not be receiving a written overview of what we covered in the first term from me. The purpose of the overview is to inform you as to what we learned. Instead, please review the blog posts since the beginning of the year and the We Are Learners pages on our blog to learn more about what we covered since September. Thank you!

We look forward to seeing continued growth as we all work together in their learning! Please know that we recognize that their development doesn’t happen without your valued support at home. We deeply and sincerely are grateful for your time and effort. Please review the “Goals” and “Next Steps” section to specifically learn how to best support your child at home too. Let’s continue to work together to support your child in the joy of learning! As always, please reach out if you have any questions or would like further details. We’re partners!

Invitation
We appreciate all feedback we receive from you and your child as to how much they enjoy coming to school. We do make an effort to making it a fun, engaging, meaningful, and novel experience for them! If you would like to be more involved in our class, please let me know what area of expertise or interest you have and let’s make it happen! We’d LOVE to have you come into our class to teach them something new! It doesn’t have to be something new either. Your presence and your story will enrich our lives and it would be such a gift to learn from you. If you’d like to share something from your culture, for example, or come in to read a book as a guest reader, we welcome that too! Share your ideas with us! If you feel that this is in your stretch zone, what better way to model how you find courage to overcome discomfort and expand your comfort zone! Nudge nudge. 😉

Have a most delightful rest of your weekend! I love and appreciate you and your children!

With warmth and gratitude, Ms. Chan (and Mrs. Paulich)