What's new in Division 2 and Welcome to Ms. Orbach!

Today we welcomed, Ms. Orbach,  a teacher from UBC who will be working with us on Thursdays through the month of November and again in the new year. Please check on this blog to learn more about her in our teacher section.

It's been a great first month in Division 2! Thanks for making the time to attend the goal-setting conferences with us and your children.

Here is what we've been up to; there is always a lot going on in our classroom and we love to see the students embrace the new challenges.

Vancouver Writers Festival and Gordon Korman: We are very fortunate to have been chosen as the school that Gordon Korman will visit next Wednesday. He is a YA author of over 44 books and we have been reading some of them during silent reading to prepare. IN the aftternoon,we will be heading to the VWF to attend an author event "Seeking Refuge". This will compliment our Social Studies and Lnaguage Arts curriculum.

Art: Ms Holms brought in an art kit from the Burnaby Art Gallery and we worked on different portraits based on a series of different portraits by local artists. We will continue this next week.

Social Studies: The Model UN mini-simulation has begun and we have been working on researching country positions on child marriage and how it affeects women's and girls rights. Eventually, we will join forces with Mr. Turner's students for a UN special assembly on world issues.

Math: Our first math test is complete and we are working on allowing students to continue to learn math at their own pace. We feel this will allow us to pull small groups together for teaching sessions while those who are able continue to work, mark and check in. Students will learn all about this new approach tomorrow (Friday). Problem of the Week continues to be an extension activity that challenges all our students.

In French,  we are focusing on oral language, particularly emotions and expressions and high-frequency vocabulary,  through songs and games. The kids have been great at participating!

In Language Arts, Article of the Week and Word Work continues- we are seeing great improvements in effort levels for both of these tasks. In writing workshop, we are building our pre-writing strategies (free-writes, mapping, webs, lists) and the tools needed to write engaging memoirs.

In Science, Ms. Holms has reviewed the scientific method with gummy bears and is also working on lab report writing skills.

Core Competencies: Tomorrow, students will submit their "resilient garden" ( see assignments tab)- this is a visual representation of who they are as learners right now. We will look back at this at the end of the year to help us reflect on how far we've come, particularly in response to the new Core Competencies in the BC Curriculum.

Thanks for reading,
Ms. House and Ms. Holms