our found poems and art creations.

our senses poetry

Good Morning,
What a beautiful and sunny weekend we are having! The cold is easy to manage because you can bundle up from top to toe. No rain is always such a wonderful thing to wake up to!! As it is rather cold, this is a reminder to please send your children to school with warm jackets, maybe mittens and hats as they are expected to go outside during recess and lunch for fresh air. If all items are labelled it does make it easier to ensure that we know whose mittens belong to whom (does that make sense??)

A big thank you to everyone for the contributions to our love hampers. Lucia's (boy) and Maria's families are going to be very happy when they receive our gifts of love. We will continue to take contributions till December 7th, so if you would like to give the families some gifts or food items, then we will gratefully accept them.

We have had a very busy week at school learning about bats. We have worked with Natalie and have now written three different types of Bat poems. The first was a senses poem, the second was a found poem and the third was an acrostic poem. Ask your child if they know what types of poems these are. They have done an incredible job on their poetry and have really enjoyed working with Natalie on this Poetry unit. We have also discussed why a bat is considered a mammal and not a bird and completed a project to show their understanding. Ask your child if they can think of the five things that makes a bat a mammal. Your children are very very clever and should know this!!

On Monday afternoons (from 230-300) we have been learning how to fill our buckets and how to fill other's buckets. We also know that we do not want to be a bucket dipper!! Pauline a youth and family worker from Kitsilano comes in and has a very interactive lesson with the children where they talk about their feelings of the day and things that they did that day that filled other's buckets. We read a very good book on this today that gave the children a clearer picture of what this is.

We will continue to learn about Bats for the next couple of weeks.  We will also be starting our holiday unit where we will learn how other countries celebrate their Christmas's.
We are starting this next week by having Annie's dad, Andrew in to talk about Hannukah. He will be visiting us on Friday and celebrate Hannukah with us. He will tell us the story of Hannukah, we will eat some special donuts, and then the grade two's will make delicious latkes for us all to sample. I can't wait.

This next week will be full of visitors and it will be starting on Monday.
Here's our schedule for next week:
Monday:
Compaigni V'ni Dance will be presenting a one day dance, games and story telling workshop that will celebrate the Metis culture. We will learn a dance at 900 am till 1000 am and then everyone will regroup at 200 till 300 to share all the dances that we have learned with each other. I think we are very lucky to have this opportunity!
Thursday:
Starting at 900 am and going till noon we will be participating in a Geology Workshop. We will be doing a hands on workshop with rocks and minerals. We will have the opportunity to look at many rocks and pretend to be geologists for the morning. Thank you to Simon's family for organizing and sponsoring this excellent workshop.

From 100 till 300 we will then be having a BAT WORKSHOP. Ronnie from the Urban Ecology Center at Douglas College will be leading this informative workshop. She has done this workshop in my class before and is excellent at sharing her passion and knowledge about bats with us.

Friday:
Our Hannukah presentation with Andrew.

As you can see we have a wonderful, busy, exciting week ahead of us.
Stay healthy and we will see you all on Monday!
Teri

Ryan our student of the week.

What we know about Bats, plus the print making art that we did.

Hi Parents,
Your kiddies had a very busy day Tuesday. We began with a morning run in which some students ran 4 laps. Most students were running consistently and were very motivated.

Nora (Angelina B’s mom) helped our groups out with readers theatre and the new plays are coming along great. Our ‘Little Red Hen’ group performed in front of Ms. Kochan’s class. They did a great job getting the K’s and Division 10 to giggle by just making the expression of the characters a little unpredictable.

The students have almost completely learned how to find a core in a pattern, expand and develop a pattern, determine the terms and describe a pattern.

In journals today we first read a book called ‘The way I am’. The students then shared what they like about themselves. Answers varied but here are a few:

I like myself because...:
...I am good at catching bugs.
...I am a girl.
...I can fix stuff.
...I am very smart.
...I can draw and bike fast.
...of my spelling and because I can run fast and because I can do Karate.
...I like that my friends are nice to me.
...I can draw pumpkins and draw bats.
...I lost a tooth.
...I can carve a pumpkin
...I am a boy
...I am good at writing and math.
...I can do the splits.
...I like how I’m dressed.
...I am good at speaking other languages
...I can play jingle bells on the piano.
...I am so funny and goofy and silly.

In Health and Career, students worked on goal setting today. We spoke about setting a goal (buying a toy or improving certain skills like running and soccer) and expanded on actions we need to take in order to achieve that goal. Many students are well on their way to understanding goal setting!

That is all for now.

Hope everyone enjoys a sunny week!

Mrs. Jennifer King

Good Morning Parents,
I hope everyone is have a day full of Peace and love and thoughtfulness. I also hope that the children are filling your bucket as well as filling their own. They have learned these terms from one of our guest teachers who will be coming in on Monday afternoons to talk about Bucket Filling. If you hear the children talking about Pauline....this is our Youth and Family Worker from Kitsilano Area that will be doing this program. It is a valuable program that will help the children talk about peaceful and helpful ways to make not only their day better, but others around them happier as well.

Our class has been lucky that we have been able to have so many people in to share their expertises with us. For the last few months we have had a wonderful volunteer named Natalie come in to our class. She is a very enthusiastic writer and poet and really wanted to share her passion with the children. So together we created our Bat Poetry unit. The children experienced Bat sounds, talked about all the senses that a Bat would use in his daily life and after a very involved hands on discussion with Natalie, the children sat down and wrote some amazing five senses poems that are going up in the classroom. Come in and take a peek.

We also had the opportunity, once again to have Catriona (from Spec) come in. She did a morning on leaves. They talked about simple leaves, versus compound leaves. They looked at veins on the leaves, the shape of leaves, the function of leaves and even some of the names of leaves. After talking about leaves they played a little detective game where they had to ask questions of a partner and then try figure out what type of leaf they had that was taped on their back and then draw what they thought...then to look at the leaf that was on their back and see if they were accurate. After they were given a bunch of leaves and they had to determine if they were compound, simple, palmate etc....They loved the lesson and they loved having Catriona come in. This is the last of our Catriona sessions for this year. We will be planning a few more lessons for the winter and spring in 2014. Stay tuned for some awesome lessons!!

This week we did many activities on Rembrance Day. We did Remembrance Day writing, art and poetry. Our culmination of Remembrance Day was an amazing assembly. Didn't our children look so beautiful and handsome??? It always brings a smile and a tear to my eye. Their ability to do the Poppy Procession after such a short practice time, along with Ms. Jung's class was beautiful.

Believe it or not this Friday we started a poster that our class is making for the winter craft market that Bayview has had for the last few years. Soon you will see some beautiful Grinch art (oxymoron????) up throughout the school. Our Bayview Market this year will be held on December 7th...so stay tuned for more information.

Sent home by hard copy on Friday was some information on two families that we are providing Love Hampers for. Bayview traditionally collects for families from the Hastings area to provide them with some Holiday extras that they may not normally get. Due to the size of the families I agreed to take on two families. I would like to focus on the children and food. We have one girl (8 years old....Maria) and one boy Lucia (6 years old) and then the families. I will have two boxes going one for each family and then a box for food that i will divide up between the two families. If you are choosing to give gift certificates, give them to me and I will hold on to them so that they don't get "taken" or "lost".

Thank you again for reading all the information on the blog and for being such active and participatory parents. I love it! and I love your kids!!
Take care and give them all a hug from me!!
Teri

Natalie, having the children experience some Bat sounds.

our student of the week.

Lest we forget!


AS the computer is glitching.....I did want to add more pics...but will try at a later date...there are some great ones of our little scientists at work!!! argh argh...
teri

Dear Parents,
Nice day with your kiddies.
Off to a running start was cancelled due to slippery conditions.

Your children started the day off with finishing up math, Halloween language arts and health and career work. The completed work was sent home with them yesterday for you to enjoy.

In keeping with Remembrance Day awareness, the students watched a video from the song "Pittance of Time". We talked about the importance of taking two minutes on the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour to remember those who sacrificed their lives so we can live free. We went on to discuss how to write a thank you letter. The students wrote a thank you letter to a soldier thanking them for fighting the 'bad guys' so they could be free. The second half of the letter was to tell the soldier how they enjoy their freedom through playing in the park with friends, eating candy, playing sports etc.

Your children are really coming along in patterns. I am very happy with their progress in being able to determine the core of a pattern, the number of terms, describing the pattern extending a pattern. We will be finishing up this unit in the next few weeks; Great job kids!

Concerning Readers Theatre, thank you to Norah who has volunteered to help out our groups. The group to be performing to Ms. Kochan's class next week is The Teeny Tiny Woman group.

That is all for now. Have a great week!

Jen King

Good Morning everyone,
I hope everyone enjoyed their extra hour of sleep, not to mention all this beautiful sunshine!!
We had an amazing week last week, filled with excitement, singing (during our Sigmund Brower presentation) and lots of  hands on activities.
We spent the entire week looking at pumpkins. We read pumpkin stories, looked at pumpkin pictures and talked about pumpkin life cycles. We read factual information about pumpkins, did some pumpkin experimenting (does it float or sink, it is heavier/lighter than....and used our five senses to describe), did some pumpkin poetry and finally ended our week with some pumpkin art, using oil pastels as well as chalk pastels...but we are not finished with our pumpkins...next week we will paint them and they will be part of our Remembrance Day assembly, this art project is called Pumpkins for Peace...wait till you see them.

Next week:
1. We will be beginning our Bat Unit. If you have any bat books, bat paraphanalia to send in, you are more than welcome

2. We will be talking about Remembrance Day and why we spend  time thinking about what happened. WE will be focusing on Peaceful things and peaceful activities. This Friday we will be having our Remembrance Day assembly at 1100 in the gym. I hope you will be able to attend as we always are invited to do the poppy procession with our friends in Ms. Jung's class...so lovely, it will bring a tear to your eye. The children are all asked to wear black, white and red for this assembly and try to stay clean till the assembly is over.

3. This Thursday Catriona will be in to do a lesson on leaves. This lesson will help set us up for our field trip to the Pacific Spirit Park, the week after. If your child can bring in 6 different leaves...(not all oak, or all maple, ) that would be great.

Reminders:
1. Lice, in classroom, please do lice checks daily right now.
2. Send in the money and permission slips for the field trip. asap.

And with that I am going out to play in the sun and I will see you tomorrow,
Teri