Division 8

It feels amazing to be full swing into our routine again, only now it’s 2021!  What I love about returning after the winter break (after that inevitable initial apprehension that always presents itself at end of a break), is that feeling of starting fresh, but also with a solid foundation in place.  Intentions become clearer,  as it’s much easier to put all that we’ve learned so far into perspective, which leads to the realization of just how much we have actually accomplished from September to December, arguably the most grueling, emotionally demanding months of the year, especially this particular year.

For the first week back, we spent some time reflecting about the year behind us and thinking about our hopes and dreams for the year ahead.  We asked ourselves these questions:

• What do I need?
• What do I want?
• What gets in my way?
• What do I need to focus on?
• What do I want to do this year that I haven’t done before?
• What do I want to do better this year?

We had special guest Livia Chan, Gilmore’s very own  Teacher Ambassador, Head Teacher, and  Division 6 teacher, visit us to share her insights about the concept of giving “today’s best” and how she came about discovering her one word this year and last year.  She reminded us that we want to be “better today than yesterday and better tomorrow than today” and encouraged us to make a 1% improvement every day in order to see an incredible difference by the end of the year.  She also presented us with these three questions, that we now ask ourselves several times a day:

1.  Am I doing the right thing? (INTEGRITY)
2. Am I giving TODAY’S best?
3. What will I do to SERVE others?

It was a truly inspirational visit and we were all eager to continue delving into our own searches for that one word that will really ring true to each of us for all of 2021!

Here is a link to our Celebration of Learning Assembly, which includes a video that showcases our one words.  Our video can be found at 19:55.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaqnSLQ8hQM&feature=youtu.be

I hope everyone has enjoyed the first week of winter break.  I hope you had some fun in the snow, had a wonderful Christmas and are having a great time with your families!

Now that we’re into the second week of the break, I thought you might be looking for some fun online activities to do, so I have put together some ideas for you, including some of our regular online activities and some new ones to try.

abcya

Offers online games and activities for grades K to 6 divided in to math, writing and strategy/logic. Free basic subscription offered, requires email to sign in and save work.

All the Right Type

Typing practice at each student’s individual level.  Find our school code, username and pin in your Accounts and Login Info chart in your OneNote account.

CBC Kids Curio 

CBC has create an online video platform created on a subscription basis for educators. They have temporarily made this platform available for free. It includes video content on art, social studies, technology, math, and science. This will require parental guidance and support as videos are posted with a suggested age for viewing beside each link.

EPIC

Khanacademy

Lessons and activities relating to math by grade and topic, grammar, reading comprehension and computer programming. Offering free support for parents and students.  Find our class code, username and pin in your Accounts and Login Info chart in your OneNote account.

Kids National Geographic

Environmental science based short informational videos, activities and games for kids, great place to start any research projects on animals.

Prodigy Math Game

Prodigy is a zero-cost, curriculum-aligned, adaptive, online game-based learning platform for 1st to 8th grade. With 1,400+ skills covering depth of knowledge levels one to three, it’s been proven to improve student scores and confidence! Login using our class code: C6C26D5 and set up your own account.

Scholastic – Weekly Challenges

Scholastic – Resources for Families

Scholastic has created a wide range of options for kids to explore content. They have grouped daily tasks into weekly challenges by grade groupings. The challenges include appropriately leveled-articles, videos, and quizzes kids can engage with. There is also a section entitled “Resources for families” that includes a variety of links to scholastic-created worksheets, videos, articles and more.

Scratch

Lear to use basic block coding to create games, stories and animations to share with others. Requires an email to set up an account and save projects.

Symbaloo

A website that links to 50+ other educationally relevant sites in everything from writing to science to history and more. Many of those below can also be found here.

Educational Podcasts

Brain On

For the curious who love science.  Co-hosted each week by kid scientists and reporters from public radio, we ask questions and go wherever the answers take us.

Forever Ago

For history lovers and those who like to understand where things come from. Every episode explores the origin of one thing – like sandwiches, video games and clocks – while teaching listeners to think critically about the past.

Smash Boom Best

For debate lovers. Every episode takes two cool things, smashes them together and let’s you decide which is best.

Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls

For historians. Biographies of powerful females through history told as oral stories. Also they are releasing a free digital version of our I Am A Rebel Girl journal as well as the step-by-step activities that are found at the end of our chapter books for free on this site.

Physical Fitness Resources

Yoga

Yoga with Adriene is a YouTube channel with 10 – 40 minute relaxing yoga classes. They can help release stress and refocus your mind while also improving your flexibility and balance.

Go Noodle

GoNoodle videos get kids moving to be their strongest, bravest, silliest, smartest, bestest selves. Over 14 million kids each month are dancing, stretching, running, jumping, deep breathing, and wiggling with GoNoodle.

That’s it for now, but I will continue to add as I come across any more great sites!  Feel free to e-mail me to let me know how it goes, or if you run into any snags.

Wishing you all a Happy New Year and I look forward to seeing you all in 2021!

Ms. Sarrazin

 Taking our learning outside on a regular basis is definitely a silver lining that we are enjoying this year.  It gives us a chance to socialize, exercise, decompress, breathe and connect with nature.

Every morning we begin our day with a time called “Outdoor Awakenings.”  The students are eager to connect with their friends and LOVE to converse, so we all head to the field and do one ‘social lap,’ where everyone spends some time chatting and catching up.  After the social lap, it’s time to get moving!  We have been experimenting with various ways to move around the track and then making mathematical observations related to the data we collect.  This week we started the Kilometre Club, where we keep track of the distance we run as a class and set goals for ourselves.  We have also been working on getting our heart rates up, keeping our target heart rates in mind.  Finally, we head inside and chart our progress and create goals for the next day.  Outdoor Awakenings has been a great way to clear our heads and get prepare our minds for learning.

We have also been enjoying nieghbourhood walks and Forest Fridays.  We read a book called Mr. Peabody’s Apples, which is all about the impact that a rumor can have on a community.  To demonstrate how rumors spread (and how impossible it is to ‘unspread’ a rumor), Mr. Peabody asked Jimmy to cut open a feather pillow and let the feathers blow away in the wind.  Then he asked Jimmy to pick up all the feathers.  Jimmy found feathers around the community weeks and months later, and every time, he was reminded of the impact of his actions.  Our class examined this concept from a positive perspective, and it came to light that it would be just as easy to spread positivity in your community.  We wrote positive messages on feathers and the next time we went on a neighbourhood walk, we spread the feathers around for people to find.  My son happened to find one on his way home from school a few days later and was quite delighted and touched!

Our current Social Emotional Learning theme is  gratitude, and we have been focusing on the three different parts of gratitude:

• • the noticing parts of it- the appreciating, the awareness, the thoughtfulness
  • the action parts of it- expressing thanks, acts of kindness
  • the positive emotion it brings – small moments of joy that have been proven to bring us great health

When we spend time outside, we heighten our ability to notice the beauty around us.  Over the past several weeks, our eyes have been drawn to the stunning leaves falling from all the mighty trees in our neighbourhood.  We love the interesting shapes, vivid colours and plentiful variety of leaves and trees that surround us.  We have collected different types of leaves and have pressed them and used them for several art projects.  Bringing nature into our classroom is definitely a highlight of every week.

What is peace to you?  How do you find peace and how do you spread it to others?  This week we enjoyed expressing our ideas about peace through poetry, literature, art and conversation.

We started the conversation through our community circle, followed by the book Peace by Wendy Anderson Halperin.    This book is filled with beautifully detailed illustrations and thought provoking quotes, all having to do with how to build peace one person, one heart, one home, one neighborhood at a time.

In small groups, we created our own concentric circles and worked together to share ideas about what peace would look like in our hearts, homes, school, neighbourhood, city, country and in the world.  The students added their favourite quotes from the story to each section.

Check out Wendy Halperin’s By Heart Project to find peace quotes from the book with illustration guides!  Peace #65 has guided illustrations for the Peace book that we read.

We created Haiku poems and Lantern poems, carefully choosing words to create meaningful patterns that conveyed thoughtful messages about peace.  Haiku poems have 5 syllables in the first line, then 7 in the second line followed by 5 in the third.  Lantern poems start with one syllable, then two, three, four and back to one, in order to create a poem that is in the shape of a lantern.  We had lots of fun brainstorming peace-related words of all different syllables and then combining them to create different patterns.  The poems were beautiful!

Finally, we created realistic poppies, inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s close-up, large scale flower paintings, and in particular her paintings of poppies.  We took notice of her technique of using rounded lines and vivid colours, and created our own works of art using oil pastels.  We love how unique each students’ artwork turned out to be.