If you’re celebrating this weekend, enjoy the family time and the cultural traditions.  Best Wishes for a great start to a prosperous and healthy New Year.

Wishing our Div. 6 families a healthy and happy 2023.  Our first week back has gone well and we have made a great start in our learning.  I will try and keep you posted as we go along.

Our salmon eggs arrived Wednesday.  We received 55 chum eggs and have been busy learning all about an ideal salmon habitat and starting to learn about the life cycle.  Have a look below at the video as the ladies dropped them into our healthy salmon habitat.

Have a look at what Div. 6 has been working on this term:

Harvest Pumpkin Art  and Harvest Corn Work by Div. 6

-if you look closely to the left of the corn art, you can also see that, as part of our social-emotional learning, we wrote about what we are grateful for in our lives

Spiders (not scientifically correct, an artistic rendering)

Math

Money Centres, patterning, Halloween candy graph

Math/Science

-measuring out a 1/4 of an acre because we know that up to 64 000 spiders can live in 1 acre.  Of course, we divided 64 000 by 4.

-in Science, we are observing a local living thing to see how it changes through the seasons.  Students also had to decide how they would measure and note the changes over time.

Science-spiders, our local environment/Social Studies-research process/Informational Writing

-2-3 times/week I read 1 page out of a non-fiction book  (we also talked about the unique characteristics of a non-fiction book)

-the students were then asked what fact they had heard.  I wrote those facts on strips of paper; reinforcing that in note-taking I could use keywords

-when we had amassed enough facts, the students were each given 2-3 facts and asked to start grouping them on the carpet.  The students went about this task trying to find like categories and groups.

-after organizing the facts on the carpet, we put them on the bulletin board

-in the following days (for the introduction facts category), I had the students organize the facts within that category to put them in order

-lastly, the students practiced “writing” these facts in a short research project where they were also asked to include transition words

-Phew! What a fantastic learning journey.

Students checked off the words they used.

Reading, thinking, and writing about our reading

Eerie Elementary

-comparing Eerie Elementary to Parkcrest

-writing about exciting events and onomatopoeia (figurative language)

-our favorite scenes (art)

Social Emotional Learning

-learning how to plot our feelings on a mood meter and also how to regulate our energy using our “tools”.  We brainstormed the tools we could use to regulate our mood from low energy to higher energy and happier.  We also brainstormed the reverse.  How to reduce our energy.  We found out that there are a lot of overlapping tools and students made a toolbox of strategies that work best for them.

-we also continue to develop our understanding of our own identity.  When we are being our best selves, what characteristics describe us at our best?

Reminder to all parent drivers to be at the school anywhere between 9:45- 9:50.

Please wait outside where the students line up for morning entry.   I will bring your child and the students you are driving to you.

If you have a younger child that you are also driving, please follow your youngest child’s teacher’s directions.  I will send the older sibling to the younger child’s class along with any other student(s) you may be driving.

Lastly, if your child requires a car seat and is being driven by another parent or teacher, please send the car seat in the morning.

Div. 3, 4, and 5 will be showcasing our Learning in Depth Projects.  We are inviting parents and other classes to come by and see our work.  Although our parents may have seen some parts during Student-Led conferences, in the upcoming weeks we will be working on our dioramas and preparing them for display.  For just about all our students, dioramas are a new experience.  Excited!

Thank you parents for your time and participation in this lunch.  It was a delicious and beautiful spread of food.  We ate with our eyes and our tummies.  Mr. Lee had a difficult time gaining back our attention after lunch.

We had great service, too! 

A huge thank you to the teachers on the Sports Day Committee and the Grade 7’s who designed and ran all the stations.  Great Leadership!  Thank you to the parents and alumni students who joined us. We loved seeing you.

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This year, our unit on the Cherry Blossoms (sakura in Japanese) made an impact on the students.  We learned so much about the cultural importance and significance of the Cherry Blossoms in Japanese culture, and how Vancouver had come to have its own Cherry Blossom Festival.   Above all, we learned that symbolically the cherry blossoms have come to represent a message of renewal and an understanding that “nothing is permanent“.

As well and just as important to us as a class, the cherry blossom also symbolizes friendship.  We learned a traditional saying: “there is no stranger under a cherry tree“.   These messages got Div. 6 through some dreary Covid times after the Christmas Break.  As a class, we made a simple agreement that if the weather was good, we would, as in the video we watched, put out a tarp under a cherry tree and have a picnic (a centuries-old tradition in Japan named Hanami).  We waited for spring and went out for walks hoping to have a cherry tree revealed, but we learned we did not have one.

45 min. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGtqH_Tfq8A 

Fast forward to today:  Mr. Lee made an announcement that the arborists would be trimming trees in our side park and that the students should stay away.  At that moment, an idea took hold of my mind.  During afternoon Silent Reading, I told the students about my idea, and I quickly painted our polite request on large paper.  I wanted to get the arborists’ attention and make a statement.

First, we practiced lining up the sentence.  I realized I missed the word “tree”, but the show had to go on!

Then, we went to the ridge overlooking the park and tried to get the attention of the arborists.

Lastly, a very kind and “cherry blossom aware” arborist came over to me to share his understanding of the symbolism while I shared our story.  He gave me a card with a phone number to call and the children cheered!!

I’ll definitely make the call and plead our case.  Depending on time, and since we’re working on persuasive writing (plastic in the oceans) we may just include some student letters too!

Note:  Cherry blossoms are native to Asia. They can also be found in China, South Korea, and India and they have great significance in all these countries.  Of course, they have been shared with the world and we now enjoy them too.

Taking the time to give thanks and express our gratitude for all that you do has brought us nothing but happiness this week. The children have happily buzzed around making cards and gifts.  They are filled with excitement to share everything with you this weekend.

Thank you, Moms!