Good Morning,
I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend so far! Next week is a short week once again as Friday is a Professional Day. The teachers will be in workshops throughout the district as well as at Bayview, so you may see some of us around the school if you are in the area as well!
Important things to note for next week:

Monday:
We will have a lot of guests in our classroom. We will have two guest volunteers. My daughter Abby is home for reading break and she is coming in to volunteer on Monday as well as her friend Mike. That is always exciting for the university students to help out and an exciting opportunity for the children in the class to see some leaders of our future. Also on Monday Cecily from JKC will be in and will be teaching another lesson on Feelings. She was in last week as well and the children worked and talked about things that they love about themselves. Things that make them special and wonderful. They created some beautiful hearts that expressed their inner, self- love!

Tuesday:
I have some appointments so a TOC will be in that day. We are lucky to have our former Bayview teacher Mrs. Bailey in for that day. Please have the conversation with your child about respectful and positive behaviour with guest teachers so both the teacher and the children can have great days.

Wednesday:
Its Pink Day. The children are invited to wear Pink. Today we will celebrate anti-bullying and gender equality. It doesnt matter what colour you wear it is what you are like on the inside. We will be having an assembly in the morning which Mr. T will be hosting. The SHS club (students helping students) will be selling cupcakes and other baked goods. Funds will be donated. But I'm sorry, I have forgotten to where??

Thursday:
Our last day of the week and we will be having Mr. T join us and once again work on the Ipads.

The teaming with the other teachers in our school has been a wonderful and rewarding experience for the children. Their confidence working with other teachers has increased. They are respectful and hard working not only with me but with the others. This makes me so very proud of their growth.

Finally:
Have you seen our Platter in the display case downstairs? It is beautiful! This platter is to be auctioned off at the Gala on Friday March 3rd. Have you purchased your tickets for this great event? It is a fun night had by everyone. How do I know? I will be there!!! At the gala there will be many things auctioned off where all proceeds will go to the school and to our children. Each class has been given something to collect for the silent auction and ours is CHOCOLATE!! If you are able to donate some chocolate, or something that goes with chocolate that would be wonderful, Then it is all wrapped up in a wonderful container of sorts and it is auctioned off. Who doesnt love chocolate??? It really is one of the favourites to be bid on. I hope to see everyone there!

Thank you to all the drivers who drove us to skating and tied all the skates and skated and enjoyed and celebrated one of the fun winter sports. The children's skating improves so much from the beginning of the sessions to the end. It was certainly a joyous time for everyone.

With that,
Enjoy the great pictures of activities that we have done in the classroom.
teri

Nina and her owl bag. How lovely!

Whooooooooooooo is this?

Our owl card bags to hold all of our loot!

Yummy cupcakes!

Big smiles!

Clement and his first Valentines Day party.

The girls enjoying their cards.

Eli enjoying his cupcake!

Our love project that we did with Cecily!

Eli shares his.

Vibodh shares his book. We all love Oliver Jeffers!

Our love wall!

Good Morning everyone,
It's looking like a nice day out there...lets hope that the sun shines and the snow melts and we can bring spring on! 
I will start with our business first and then go into all the wonderful things that we did, will do and have pictures to follow!

Business:
1) Please remember that tomorrow is Family Day and the school will be closed so that you can enjoy an extra day to spend with your family. I hope everyone has sooo much fun together! It's those extra days that give us more time to relax and recuperate. Enjoy!

2) Valentine's Day is on Tuesday, February 14th. We will be participating in Valentine's Day activities all day long. We will write about love in the morning and make our little card bags, we will go to the library and write some Valentine's Day poetry, hopefully using the computers, and then in the afternoon we will have a little opportunity to hand out our cards, eat some yummy red treats (I will be bringing in some cupcakes and fruit) and doing some fun Valentine's Day puzzles etc. Please, I know I do not have to really say it, but if the children choose to bring in cards, make sure that everyone gets a card. I would hate to see one child feeling excluded if they do not get a card with their name on it from one of their friends. Thank you.

3) Please send in the 15 dollars for our Gardening Program with Nikoo. For those of you who have already sent it in, thank you. We are still waiting for a few more before I can deposit it and make out the cheque to SPEC.

We have had a great week with lots of visitors in our classroom.
Both grades enjoyed the Arts Umbrella workshops. The grade two's joined Mrs. Applebees class and used a water based black pastel to create amazing bears in their environment, as well as paint. Then later in the week the grade one's joined Ms. Jung's class and used oil pastels on black paper to learn how to use basic shapes to create their bears. Afterwards using gold, silver and bronze paint to highlight their pictures. The children were very well behaved in both groups. And their art...stunning!

We also enjoyed a visit from Deana, our first nations worker. She came in and we learned about the Long houses in the Musqueam community. She showed us pictures as well as talked to us about the amount of people that would live in a longhouse at any one time. She showed us pictures of the house posts in front of the longhouse and talked about the carvings that they would do on the posts and what they symbolized. Then we created our own longhouses and added some of them to our huge mural.

Another visitor that came into our class was Cecily from JKC. Cecily will be coming to our class for at least three more visits to talk about some strategies for understanding feelings and how to best communicate to others the feelings that you are having. They played some games and discussed some emotions that they may never have heard of before. She was very impressed by how wonderful our class is.

Katie (a volunteer from UBC plus a friend of my daughter Abby) also came in and started making some clay owls with the children.

Besides all these visitors we have been working hard in the class to do many other projects. We are continuing our study of Owls and learned about the different parts of the Owl.We labelled, we drew and then we wrote some wonderful "odes" about them. 
The grade two's also started a unit on Fractions. They are all so keen on this new unit. It makes pizza sharing so much more meaningful!! Ha ha!

Finally I would just like to end this with a thank you....a thank you for all my cooking moms, a thank you for all my lunch moms, a thank you for all the parents who have driven, and will drive for skating and a thank you to everyone who brought in socks for the homeless. WE collected almost one thousand pairs of socks. WE will be giving them to the Covenant House who will hand them out to their Outreach Workers who will then pass them out to the street kids and adults. So thank you thank you.

With that, enjoy your weekend, and the pictures.
Teri

Eli shares his favourite book, "Where the Wild things are"

Marcus shares his favourite book...a classic, "Go Dog Go"

Theron shares his favourite book, "Nuts, Bedtime at the Nut house"

Maggie shares her book, Uni the Unicorn.

Up outside our classroom for you all to enjoy.

Cecily talks and plays feelings games with our class.

Walking in a winter wonderland!!!!
Does all this snow make you want to sing the Xmas carol?
Looking out my window, it is absolutely beautiful. It is so quiet and peaceful and bright!
Getting around and out of the neighbourhood, a little more challenging, however we are trying to walk and just enjoy the moment. I hope you are too.
Due to this beautiful snowfall, we did have to cancel our skating session on Friday. We had to put the safety of the children first and the beautiful thing was how the children handled the news of our cancellation. No one said, "it's not fair" or seemed overly disappointed. They loved the snow and playing in it, so it was a great trade off for them. Have I told you before what wonderful children you have?

Last week was a short but productive week full of guest visitors, guest teachers, and special events. I will give you a highlight of our week in words and later in pictures.

Monday--was a professional day.
Tuesday--We talked about Chinese New Year and read a great book called the The Great Race. About animals who were challenged to race to the Jade Castle and see who would be first in the Zodiac calendar. Then we talked about the characteristics of the people who were born in the year of the rooster and did some beautiful art to go along with their writing. We also spent time in the library with Ms. Whitelaw and talked about poetry that "exaggerated" things. We wrote poems about how we would love our friend even if they had.....(ears as big as an elephants)...ask your child some of their exaggerations. They were pretty funny. Then finally in the afternoon the children had Mr. Tozack in and they worked on the ipads. I think they did some stop animation???? Ask your child as by now they are more computer literate than I am!

Wednesday-Happy Groundhog Day. The groundhog did not see his shadow (the Canadian one anyway) so spring is on its way...so why the snow??? hmmm??? We did some great writing in the first person. We were the groundhogs!!!

Thursday--We had our Owl visit! What a wonderful feast of information we received from Jen at the Owl Rescue Center. We also got to meet Cricket the little Australian Boobook Owl and a Peregrine Falcon whose name escapes me (but Im sure your child will remember). We joined Ms. Applebees class and listened to a one and a half  hour presentation. The children were amazing. They had to sit still and make no sudden noises or loud outbursts. They were perfect!

To continue then with our presentations, Deana, our first nations worker, came in and talked about how our communities then and now were so different. We then started our Musqueam community mural. The children created Salmon in the style used by the first stations artists. Salmon were very important to the Musqueam people as they felt they had similar DNA. And then on Friday we added to our mural by creating Owl topped totem poles. You will need to come in and see our growing mural.

As you can see our week was filled with wonderful stuff!

Finally:

Clement reads us his favourite book in French!

Saori shows us her Year of the Rooster artwork.

Nina and Eli work on their Year of the Rooster creations.

Saori does her book talk.

This is Cricket!

happy ground hog day!

our door

Our mural, just getting started

look at the intricacy of their scales!

Our school on Friday!

1) Ms. Jung and I have also been organizing more lessons with our SPEC coordinator Nikoo and have set up more dates to learn about gardening, the importance of bees in nature and so on. To have Nikoo come in and organize and support the planting as well as teach as many valuable skills about our environment and connecting children to their food, to each other, to nature and to the community we must charge everyone 15 dollars for the years lessons.
So if everyone can bring in a check or cash for this amount by next Friday that would be greatly appreciated. The check is to be made out to Bayview School.

Thats all I have,
enjoy the snow and I will see you all on Monday!
teri