Even with a unexpected short week last week, January is still jumping along at a 
feverish pace. We were super busy this week, making up for our lost days due to snow. It is a pleasure to say that you are always ready and raring to go so we have been learning a lot and getting through so much in our time together!
We started the week by sharing our Genre Advertisements. Some of you pre-recorded them while others performed them live. It was impressive to see the creativity many of you showed in your ads. Many of you were able to incorporate themes from your genre into your ads to get the audiences attention and make us all laugh or pay close attention. 
Well done! Unfortunately, some of you did not put in the planning, effort, or practice needed to present your ads to the best of your ability.
Hopefully, seeing the ads of your classmates who did take that time will inspire you to try harder next time.
We put a pause on our Force and Motion unit this week to investigate a little about Matter so we would be prepared for our in-class workshop on Wednesday. We talked about the properties and states of matter. Also, we learned about physical and chemical changes. 
We investigated how matter can change states and learned a lot of vocabulary we can use to describe properties and describe how states change. Most important, we learned that temperature, heating and cooling, are the main factors involved in changing matter from one state to another.
Wednesday, we had a visitor from SCWIST (Society for Canadian Women in Science and Tech) name Shirley. 
Shirley volunteers her time to visit schools to teach and provide hands on learning experiences for
classes just like ours. We were so very lucky to have her come and teach us all about the world of Ooblek. 
Ooblek has properties of both liquids and solids. You can slowly dip your hand into it like a liquid, but if you squeeze the oobleck or punch it, it will feel solid. You all had lots of fun making your own and exploring how it felt. Shirley was impressed with how much you already knew about matter and its phases and we were very proud of how engaged you all were in both the discussions and the hands on activity.
We continued our study of Viola Desmond and the impact she has had on Canadian history. Our mini books are well under way as you illustrate each page to match the text. You all have a collection of clipart to help with the illustrations, but, remember to ADD your own illustrations to make the text come alive even more. Next week, classes will be going on a gallery walk to view doors or bulletin boards celebrating Black Excellence. Our door will tell Viola’s story– through the use of 10 information cards that you worked on in small groups. It’s going to be fun to see what other classes have done and who they have chosen to highlight!
As part of our career study, we have begun a program called “Our Business World”. This is an extension of what we are doing around money with Mrs. Gil and will help prepare us for a pretty exciting project in the future!
We also started an exploration of the people of our world using the book, “If the World Were 100 People”. Every week we are looking at questions posed in the book about the population of the planet. Since there are approximately 8 BILLION people living on earth, the book has reduced the population to 100 people. We predict our guesses using a pictograph ( of 100 people) and then we hear the actual statistic. Since we’re using 100 as our total, we can graph the information using a pie ( circle) graph. This is helping us get familiar with percentages and how to divide the circle accurately.
On the horizon, we will be starting our Hip Hop unit in PE over the next few weeks. We will be working with a Hip Hop instructor to learn a routine that we will be performing for the school audience as well as for parents. 
Our class will receive 6 lessons to perfect our moves. For some of you this will be very familiar but for some of you, this may be your first time experiencing this. We hope all of you will give the instructors you best focus and attention so we can all have fun and make this the best performance it can be!
Here is your blog response for this weekend:
In anticipation of HIP HOP , list 3 songs that you think would be fun to do a dance to:
Have a great weekend Division 6! See you on next week!
Mrs. Gil & Mrs. Davis
Welcome back everyone! It is so nice to see you all again. It was a wonderful break for all of you from the sound of it and we, your teachers, are well rested and ready to work as well. It is sure to be an exciting beginning to 2024 and a wonderful rest of the school year. There is much to look forward to and lots of growth to experience.
Next week, you will be creating an advertisement that will be performed live in the classroom or videotaped/recorded at home. These advertisements will be no more than 30 seconds long and they will try to “sell” your genre to your classmates. Let’s see how many of you can convince someone in the class to give your genre a try.
Many of you have piggy banks while only a few of said you have a bank account. During our discussions we talked about the importance of savings accounts and how your money can grow if you invest it somewhere that collects interest for you. 
If you don’t have a bank account maybe you can convince your parents to help you take you piggy bank money and put it into a savings account so you can start earning that interest!
This week we spent some time reviewing the Laws of Motion, which many of you have learned about before and next week, we will prepare ourselves for our upcoming experiments.
Our “Graph of the Week” lessons are embarking on a new type of graph: the pie/circle graph! We learned that pie graphs are created using fractions and the percentages that those fractions represent. How do we calculate percent? Great question! Well, we have to use division to convert the fraction into a decimal number. Then we multiply that by 100… which will give us a percentage. The formula is “N( numerator) divided by D (denominator) X 100”. Our first GOW this week asked us what we would choose to do in the snow and that is the data that we used to create our first circle graph. We’ll be practicing that a LOT more in the weeks and months ahead!
We played some two on two and three on three games and it looked like you had a lot of fun. 
We will continue to work on basketball in gym until the end of the month. Our Hip Hop dance unit will begin the last week of January and after two weeks, we will have a choreographed dance to share!
We did some brainstorming about who she is and then we read some information and watched some videos about her life. Yes, she is the face on our $10 bill… but there’s a lot more to that story! We will continue to explore more about Viola Desmond’s life next week too!
Monday is also a Young People’s Concert Day. We will be leaving the school at 10:15 for a 10:30 show at the Michael J. Fox Theatre. We will be back at school in time for lunch.
We made it! What a wonderful final week of 2023 it was with you Division 6 and what a great way to usher in the holidays and some much needed time off school! We had some great fun with our little buddies this week: first with some crafting of Christmas tree ornaments ( SO CUTE!!) and then at the end of the week with our pancake breakfast! 
THANK YOU for all the teacher gifts you showered us both with!! Honestly… it really is overwhelming the kindness and generosity you show towards us! We are truly blessed and so grateful to you all! Thank you so much!
Finally, we’d like to wish you all a wonderful time of rest, celebration, and the opportunity to spend some quality time with each other. However you celebrate this season, we hope it is memorable and brings you joy and happiness. Have a great start to 2024 everyone! We’ll see you all “next year”!
What a wonderful way to end last week, with the Winter Concert. You were wonderful to watch and the audience enjoyed every minute! Well done, Division 6.
Your Unique School Project presentations went very well and the hard work, time, effort and practice really showed. We invited all the grade 4/5 classes to come and take a tour of our unique schools and EVERYONE was super impressed with your final projects! Congratulations Division 6! For the limited time you had to get these done, you certainly did a great job and should be very proud. If you want to show your final project to your family, the photos that were taken can be found in our TEAM. Remember, if you aren’t taking your project home, then please de-construct it, recycle what can be recycled and throw away what can’t be used next week.
On Friday, while the grade 6’s were enjoying a day at the movies, the rest of us played “99” and completed the first round of our tournament. 
We’re now in the semi-finals which will determine our last 4 players. IF we get time on the last day of school ( Thursday), we’ll finish this tournament and crown a CHAMPION! This might be a game to play at home this weekend too– I bet your family will love it just as much as you do!
If you would like, you can even start to type your work into the assignment up on the TEAM. Next week, we will have time to type, print and start work on the posters. We sure hope you are learning a lot about a new genre and we look forward to the presentations so you can learn about all the other genres from your classmates.
We have been watching a version of the story in chunks so we can write in the same sequence as the original story. The main difference is instead of Scrooge being the main character, you are! Looking at the Christmas’ of the past and present while dreaming of what might be in the future, you are all creating some clever and creative stories that we will be sharing with one another next week. You will also be taking those stories home for the holidays and hopefully, you will share them with your loved ones at home to help them feel the Christmas spirit as well.
There were smiles all around and Ms. Di Spirito mentioned how excited they are when they know you are coming. Next week, we will be helping our buddies make some beautiful ornaments to take home and you will be making your own as well!
You all received your Secret Santa wish lists on Wednesday. We would like you to bring in your wrapped gift to school before Wednesday next week. Please label the gift with who it is for but not your own name….that is the secret part! Gift exchange will take place on Thursday, the last day before the break.
Your report cards went home on Thursday and we hope that you have had some time to go over our comments with your parents. Please remember to return the signed envelope and bring back the blue “core competency passport” as well. You can keep everything else at home. We’d like to have all envelopes returned by Thursday of next week. Thanks so much!
Have a wonderful weekend Div. 6… We’re heading into the final four days before Winter Break with lots of festive fun ahead!
With many short weeks and lots of fun activities December has arrived in a flash. 
As we wrap up the term and prepare for the next, we are working on a number of interesting projects. You are busy building your unique schools, creating visual conclusions in Science and researching your genres like mad for Literacy. It is amazing to see you all so engaged, focused and excited. We are really enjoying our time with you Division 6. You are a wonderful bunch!
You will have some time on Monday and Tuesday to review and practice in class before the test so you can ask any of your questions or work with friends to review all that we have been doing this unit.
The Kaboom game is available for you to play during the week if you wanted to brush up a bit more before Friday. The festival we looked at this week was CHRISTMAS!! 
We watched a video and learned that Christmas is celebrated by many cultures all around the world and in a variety of ways. We did our Graph of the Week around the Christmas traditions we have in our homes. Some of the options were: decorating the outside of our homes, setting up a Christmas tree, doing special baking or crafting, going to see holiday events, and visiting Santa. 
What we discovered was that a huge majority of our class not only celebrates Christmas but also engage in at least one or more of those traditions. Which traditions have you already done as part of your Christmas preparations?
Next week, we’ll set aside time to fill out a “wish list” and do our Secret Santa draw. We’ll have our Secret Santa gift exchange on the last day before the holidays which is Thursday, December 21st.
your families will be invited to watch during the day on Friday. Our performance for families is between recess and lunch that day. Your costumes should be a red or white top with black or dark bottoms please. Please make sure you have them with you on Friday so our class looks great up there on stage!
Have a wonderful weekend Division 6!
We fit into 4 days what we normally do in 5! As always, we are very proud of all your hard work and focus all week long. We are so impressed by all of you!
The band played us a mixture of percussion instruments that make up their unique sound, from the Zimbabwean marimba’s to the West African djembe to the Afro-cuban conga’s and timbales to the drum kit which provides a steady driving groove. 
We clapped along to the wonderful rhythms and you were a wonderful audience. For our first time in a theatre together, we were really impressed with how engaged you all were. Most interesting to us was that the group learned their instruments and music right here in Vancouver when they were just teenagers.
Rather then just writing what we learned, we are adding visuals to communicate what we have learned, connections between ideas, and describe our understanding. It is still in the early stages, however, from what we have seen so far, these are going to be very interesting and unique. This week you were also handed a criteria/rubric to help you ensure you are including all the key elements to demonstrate your learning in the best most thorough way possible.
Many of you are working on similar goals. You want to read smoothly, at a good pace while paying attention to punctuation. There has definitely been some improvement and the feedback you are giving each other has been very helpful. Would you agree?
The workshop was all about Bacteria and Artificial Intelligence. It was a technology focused workshop that was able to mix together learning about bacteria with learning about “chat bots”.
I had never worked with a Chat Bot before, had you? You all seemed to enjoy being on your computers, answering surveys, and learning alongside each other in this new way.
We are hoping this will be a way to expand your reading horizons. Many of you are stuck reading the same author or type of book. If we learn about other genres and authors that are out there, we may try out some new books in the future. Make sure you give some thought about what genre you want to research as we will be starting on Monday. Don’t forget, the goal is to learn about a genre you do not already read!
So, on to “Plan B”… which involved all of us watching the same two videos ( one about each festival) and we took some notes as a class. Your homework is to go over the text, highlight any other information you think is important, and finish the last two boxes of your recording sheet. The videos are available on TEAMS, so if you want to watch all of them, you are absolutely able to do that! There are some similarities between both of these festivals as well as several aspects that are unique to each. Can you think of any of those?
We spent Thursday afternoon continuing with our unique schools building. All of you are so engaged and have been busy cutting, gluing, painting, and creating using a variety of materials.
Your projects certainly are coming along, and more and more progress is evident after each session of building. Time is ticking away… with only THREE more sessions of building before we set up our gallery and share these with each other and maybe another class or two??
These short weeks seem to go by super fast because they are so jam packed with work to make up for the day we missed. Do you feel that way too?
We have really been trying to improve our clarity when writing about science facts and summarizing information into our own words. It seems that with time, practice and review, you are all developing your understanding and skills nicely in both areas.
Does your family know what your goals are? Can they help you stay on track and find time to work on them? Families can be great tools to help us reach our goals, give it a try!
Routines are things that are frequently and consistently. These can be daily, or multiple times a day! Traditions, on the other hand, are much less frequent and are things that are done that have been handed down from one generation to another. After some brainstorming, we noticed that traditions usually are connected to celebrations or special occasions! 
And so began our mini Social Studies unit on international traditions. The first festival/tradition we looked at was Diwali. 
This is a festival that actually just took place and is celebrated mainly by people from India. We learned a bunch of things and also had the bonus to hear from Mrs. Simar ( one of our EA’s) who celebrates Diwali every year! We also collected some data surrounding festivals/traditions that WE celebrate in our ‘graph of the week’. Our data showed some interesting things! Almost ( if not all) of the class has traditions around Christmas and birthdays and there was also a big group that have traditions around “other” occasions too. It’ll be fun to explore some festivals that NONE of us have traditions around and find out what those are and how they are celebrated.
An important note to you and your families is that our time to leave Brentwood Park that day is 9:00 am SHARP! We have to be at the Michael J. Fox Theatre for 9:30 show start time. We will not be able to wait for anyone so if you do not arrive on time you will have to stay back at the school and wait for us to return. Please be at school at least ten minutes before 9 so we can let you into the classroom early and get ready to board the bus. THANK YOU!
I wonder if we will be able to connect what we learn to what we have been learning about the Life Systems of plants, animals, and humans? We cannot wait to find out!
We will come together as a big group and reflect about what we have been doing in our classes to work on goals we set together earlier this year. See, you are not the only ones who goal set! Adults do it all the time too. Learning doesn’t stop friends, it is a life long journey so enjoy it!
. We have asked you to take time to think about your strengths and stretches. We have also asked you to set goals and plan how you are going to achieve them. As the week came to an end, we were asked to remember the soldiers who have served our country to bring us the peace we enjoy in our daily lives. 
Do your brains hurt? They should, that is a lot of deep thinking going on!
![Parent Tips] Goal Setting with Your Child | Edmentum Blog](https://blog.edmentum.com/sites/default/files/styles/blog_image/public/images/ParentGoals.png?itok=Xw2Whrds)
If you can master the art of creating achievable and realistic goals for yourselves, you will all be successful at whatever you put your minds to!
This is still a challenge for some of you but as we practice and share our work with one another, we are learning how to make sure we are using scientific vocabulary in our work, to synthesize what we are learning into clear statements. While this week we did all our work in small groups to help each other and learn from each other, next week you will be asked to demonstrate you summarizing skills independently. We know you have practiced these skills and are ready to tackle the next two systems, circulation and senses, on your own!
“Two heads are better than one”, and “None of us is as smart as all of us”, are both very true statements and we certainly made use of each others’ learning around The Dr. David Suzuki Public School. In preparation for our assessment on Friday, we had the opportunity to study together in small groups as we worked through a collection of activities. We had to illustrate text, define vocabulary in context, write captions, and recall what we learned about the school. 
Working together REALLY helped us remember some of the smaller details that we may have already forgotten. On Friday, when we saw the ACTUAL quiz, we were quite surprised to see that it was EXACTLY the same as the ‘buddy study” activity! NOW we know what Mrs. Davis meant when she said she was “setting us up for success”!
ADST stands for “Applied Design, Skills, and Technology”. Regarding this project, we are focusing on the “design” aspect of ADST in that we are designing a 3-D model of the unique school we researched. 
On Friday we spent a good portion of our afternoon planning what our model will look like, what materials we will need to build it, and sketching and drawing some initial ideas of what we’re imagining. This is an important step and one that might change as we get into the actual building of our model. Start collecting the items you need for building, because next week, once your plan has been approved, your team can get started!
knowing those facts and being able to recall them efficiently is going to help you as you move onto the upper grades. Do not forget there is a times table chart in your planners to help you if you need it. Maybe this could be an academic goal for some of you next week?
All of you have shown you know how do multiply 1×1 and 2×1 digit multiplication problems and we are now moving on to practice 2 and 3 by 1 or 2 digit multiplication problems. Once we have practiced those skills, we will be turning our attention over to division. Most of you already know that division is just the opposite of multiplication so, if you have memorized your times tables up to 12, division is going to be a snap for you! We added a few more games to our skill reinforcement collection as well. We played “Multiplication Scramble” “T-Ball multiplication”, and “High Times/Low Times” in small groups. These are games you could teach your family and play at home too… how about teaching them one over the long weekend?
It is so wonderful seeing you all be so kind and warm with the K’s. They look up to you all and it is great to know they will have you as their role models all year. Make sure you say hi and visit with them on the playground if you see them. Ms. Di Spirito always says that makes their day.
as we celebrated Halloween with sweet treats and costume fun while the second half of the week was much more somber. We went from playing games with our friends and enjoying laughs and candy to discussions about war and the PAIN wars cause.
Remembrance Day is coming up this month and so we are thinking about how lucky we are to live in such a peaceful place and showing gratitude for those who fought with their lives to give that to us. 
All the while, we know that right now, in our world, there are several devastating wars happening where innocent children and civilians just like us, are caught in the middle and are definitely not living in peace. So many emotions wrapped up in one week!
Feelings can be illustrated by the author through descriptions of body language, facial expressions and even words. For example, if someone is jumping up and down yelling “Yippee1”. it is a strong inference to guess the character is happy. When inferencing about motivation, things get a little more complex. Motivation is a larger idea that explains the WHY someone is behaving the way they are or feeling the way they are. We shared how some times of motivators can be money, ambition, acceptance, love, friendship etc. 
You are all developing great detective skills and we hope it helps you to dive deeper into whatever it is you are reading right now. At the start of next week, we will be having a small “check-in” to see how you can inference independently.
Multiplying by multiples of 10’s is pretty easy, as long as you know your basic facts! That is why we hope you are continuing to memorize you multiplication facts up to 12. Being able to recall your facts quickly and easily will definitely make all other math problems easier to solve.
Most of you took home some math homework this week that is asking you to apply what we have been learning all year. Applying your estimating and multiplying skills to problem solve problems and explain your thinking is a great way to become a more confident mathematician. You all work really hard in class and are very focused, it is very impressive to see. Next week, we will be moving on to solving 2 and 3 by 1 digit multiplication problems. Keep working on those basic facts everyone!
Most of the class opted for playing a board or card game while a bunch of us also thought of other activities such as doing a sport, going swimming, or baking. All great options! 
Since we had to pick a first choice and a second choice from the options, a double bar graph was one way we used to represent the results. A pictograph showed the results of the combined data.
Overall, we learned that reproduction in all is for the purpose of continuing on with the species and increasing population. On the other hand, some plants are able to self reproduce.
Most species need fertilization of some kind to occur in order for reproduction to be successful. Next week, we will be looking deeper into how these species support themselves, protect themselves and move.
Just a reminder that your research for your Unique School project is due on THURSDAY November 9th. On that day, you need to come ready to share what you have found with your group mates so that together you can compare notes and choose the most accurate information for your presentation. So.. if you still think you can find some more bits and pieces about the unique school you are researching… do it! 
Also, it would be wise to “brush up” on what you know about the David Suzuki Public school for our quiz coming up next week. 
We discussed how important it is to set goals and to always be working on ourselves. What was the most interesting was how many of you were able to quote Albert Einstein from memory to explain that failure only comes from not trying. 
You all continue to amaze us with your knowledge, it was a very impressive moment this week. We used this discussion as a springboard to set a few goals for ourselves with a plan to get there as well. We will be checking in regularly to see how our goals are coming along and setting new ones whenever necessary.
I am Peace. 
This week has been filled with birthdays it seems. Olivia this past weekend and Howard and Daryl this week. Happy Birthday to all of you! It sure is nice to spend the week celebrating such happy occasions.
looking for clues in the text to help us understand what we are reading. Being a detective and using clues is also an important skill as a scientist. When we are studying science, we often have questions that we are trying to answer. Often times, we must come up with a hypothesis (educated guess) before we begin testing and researching to find the answers. We have to make inferences using our background knowledge and through more reading in order to move forward in our exploration of topics. Being a reading detective is a skill we need and use all the time.
Congratulations everyone! All of the oral presentations have been done! We’re still looking forward to hearing one more, but Kendrick has been away lately so he hasn’t been able to share about himself yet. All of you did very well! It is pretty intimidating to speak in front of such a large group of your peers, but you all handled it beautifully! It was lovely to hear all of you encouraging your classmates by providing positive and constructive feedback after each presentation. Way to go!
We rounded out our work with the scientific method by talking about some important vocabulary that we need to understand in order to be successful in our experimenting. We used our gummy worm experiment as a model and figured out what these terms meant:
Using the text from Off to Class by Susan Hughes we read to find out the 5 w’s behind the school (Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How). Our inferencing practice is also coming in handy as we read, because many of those answers aren’t explicitly written on the page… there’s some digging involved. 
Now we’re all in groups of 2 or 3 and have a unique school that we are learning about and collecting information on. By next week, we are aiming to have all our research completed so that we can compare our notes with our team members and write a description about the school researched.
In Math we are continuing to have daily practice of subtraction with borrowing and multiplication drills. Once those are complete, we practice different multiplication and division strategies. This week we worked on skip counting, doubling and halving, and some “tricks” for questions involving numbers like 6 and 9. The strategies are important to learn and practice but, once you have the hang of them, you can choose your favourite and use that strategy to help you solve problems all the time. 
We continued to reinforce our multiplication skills with a few games on Thursday. We completed our first round of our Multiplication War tournament. Next week we’ll continue with round 2. We also played “Connect 4” using a deck of cards and a multiplication chart.
Our Graph of the Week this week focused on Halloween. We created pictographs and a bar graph to represent the data. Then, in keeping with the Halloween theme, we worked on a coordinate graphing hidden picture activity. 
It was quite challenging as it required plotting points and connecting the dots. Two of you were able to successfully complete the picture while the rest of you are still working on it. Try to finish this at home this weekend or at least by Tuesday… Halloween day! What was the hidden picture of?
going to dress up, make sure it is an appropriate costume for school. To celebrate we are going to spend the last hour of the day playing games together. Please feel free to bring in your favourite board game from home to share with your classmates. Also, you can bring yourself an extra afternoon snack for our game hour if you like.