Dear families,

Happy Lunar New Year! We read a story called Sam and the Lucky Money. If you’d like to learn a little more about some of our traditions as well as to listen to the story, check out this video:

Anyone interested in ringing in the new year of the rabbit, Brentwood Mall will have a lion dance at 1pm (today) on Saturday, January 21 starting at 1pm in the Upper Centre Court. They will go through the Skybridge into the Grand Lobby for the second act and end at the Plaza.

We are readers.
I love finding authentic and real reasons to read and write. This past week, we scoured through many joke books from our school Library. Students chose a few that we enjoy to share over the PA next week during Literacy week. Some students will have an opportunity to read their jokes. Please have your child practice their jokes at home so they can read it fluently with expression and enthusiasm! It’s all in how a joke is delivered! Everyone has a joke to practice at home so just in case someone is away, they can be the backup person. Thank you for your help and encouragement!

We are authors.
We continued to develop our characters for our story by considering what they look like, their character traits and what they can do, and their core values and beliefs. Then we moved along with our storyboards. We thought about how our stories would begin, what the problem would be in the story and how it is resolved. I love how enthusiastic they are to work on and tell their stories!

How you can support at home: Ask your child to tell you all about their character(s). Have them explain what happens in the beginning of the story, what the problem is, how the problem might get worse before it gets better, how it is resolved, and then how the story has a satisfying ending. The more they practice telling their story verbally, the easier they will find writing it down!

We are scientists.
We were body scientists learning about our private body parts. How you can support at home is to have conversations to solidify what they learned and to answer any questions they have.

This week, we dove into learning more about oceans. We learned about our 5 oceans with some facts about each one. One of the things that resonated with many was pollution in our oceans and how that is affecting our wildlife in the oceans. We practiced taking notes during our learning. This will help prepare us for when we do our own research!

We all logged in!
Thank you so much to parents who helped their child memorize their usernames and passwords. It really helped to make the lesson run more efficiently and helped them have a better first experience. For the students who are still trying to memorize, please continue to support at home. Thank you! We were all so proud of ourselves to learning how to log in successfully! We practiced it a few times!

The next step next week will be to learn how to log in to Office 365. Since your child has a school account, they can download O365 onto your computer at home or just use the web version in a browser. Want to give your child a head start? Practice logging into O365 at home so they will be proficient the next time we use laptops! Please feel free to go to the Gilmore website and click on Office 365 (2 options):

A new login box will appear:

Type in the username@edu.burnabyschools.ca so it will look something like this:

#######@edu.burnabyschools.ca [no spaces]
The number is the same one they were memorizing. It’s their pupil number.

They will need to be taught where to find the @ sign. Teach them to press down the “SHIFT” key while they press on the number 2.

When students can’t login successfully, most of the time it is because they forget the “edu” at the beginning or they spell “burnabyschools” wrong. As you know, every letter, number, and symbol of the username and password has to be accurate or they cannot log in successfully.

Once they login, you are welcome to explore but the key point is just to learn how to log in to O365. So, practice logging in, teach how to log out, and practice logging in again.

I have to say that everyone was very patient and understanding especially when they had to wait their turn to receive their username and password. Great resilience! Proud of how quickly they learned!

Thank you!

We are grateful for your continued support at home. Thank you for your time to extend learning and to discuss what they learned at school. We appreciate your consistency with bringing planners to and from home too.

It’s not too late to bring gently used books for the book swap this Thursday! Looking forward to a fantastic Literacy Week!

Have a wonderful weekend! 🙂

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