Our field trip to Belcarra Regional Park was full of excitement from climbing up to the lookout points to seeing otters to finding purple starfish to hanging out with our friends! Check out the photos!
June 7, 2017
Wow! What a huge turnout at the PowerPlay Young Entrepreneurs Fair today! From fidget spinners to stress balls to soaps to squishies, there was something for everyone! Everyone in Division 3 should be very proud of themselves! Together, they were able to donate $240 to the BC Children's Hospital and took home $450 in total! The experience taught them about being hard working, learning about the business model, giving and receiving feedback, being creative, and having fun!
May 18, 2017
On May 18th, Division 3 is heading outdoors for Outdoor Classroom Day, which is being celebrated across the globe!
Here are some reasons why spending time outdoors is good for you according to the Harvard Medical School:
1. Your Vitamin D levels rise. 2. You'll get more exercise. 3. You'll be healthier. 4. Your concentration will improve. 5. You may heal faster.
may 10-12, 2017
The Grade 7s had a blast at Camp Elphinstone in Gibsons, British Columbia! We spent time outdoors at the high ropes course, on the rock wall, on the water in kayaks and canoes, singing songs, making new friends, supporting each other, eating yummy food, and having fun! Thanks to all the parents and teachers that helped fundraise for this wonderful opportunity. We are so lucky to have such a supportive community! If you want to see pictures from the trip, follow along on Twitter with #ravenscamp.
April 25, 2017
Hello Ms. Loh’s Class,
I took a moment to answer your questions! Happy reading!
1. Where do you get your inspiration for your designs? I get inspiration from travelling, bloggers, runways and celebrities. Perhaps the most important source of inspiration is social media. Our customer is constantly connected to social media, so it's important to be informed about the same likes and interests as our target consumer. Whether it's the Kardashians, Netflix shows, unicorn lattes, I need to stay relevant with our girl.
We also subscribe to different trend forecasting services such as WGSN, Scout and Shoe Planet. They are services that are dedicated to telling us what will be the biggest trends as we work 1 year in advance.
2. How do you remain calm if your product doesn't sell? We get weekly sales reports showing us how many pairs of each style, by the colour per region. Obviously, it's never a good feeling when something I worked so hard on a style that doesn't sell, but it's crucial to learn from mistakes, be flexible, and readjust the game strategy if possible. It's important to understand and analyze why maybe something is not selling, without taking it too personally. Sales generally don't lie, but if there are factors that are beyond your control such as bad weather, low store traffic, increased competition, you have to plan in advance for those things in order to reduce heartache. After all, the show must go on and you can only go forward with a positive attitude.
3. Why did you choose to design footwear? I've always known I wanted to create things, it started in art, then clothing and now footwear and soon handbags. It was just natural for me to choose this type of career. I've always like the fact that fashion is always changing and evolving and you never get bored. Footwear came as an unexpected opportunity and I feel really blessed to have this dream job!
4. How do you communicate when you travel overseas for work? I communicate mainly by email and sketches when I'm overseas or at the office. We create tech packs, which is our main tool for communication, it is the blueprint for which I will include technical sketches, material information, measurements, and other details. When I am working in China, it is the only time I get to be face-to-face with the factory technicians and shoe engineers to really explain what I want, in-person conversation is still the best way to communicate.
5. What's your favourite material to work with? Favourite material to work with is athletic sport materials. I feel like the sports industry is constantly re-inventing materials for specific uses and it's always coming up with new technology. I also like working with synthetics as Call it Spring is a vegan shoe brand. It's a very exciting time for synthetics because there are so many new things coming out on the market such as nano-technology, eco-friendly materials and realistic leather-looking Polyurethan. I believe the next step for fashion companies is sourcing sustainable materials that reduce the impact we have on the Earth.
6. How many different places have you traveled? A lot! Japan, Barcelona, Milan, Paris and London as of late. The job has it's perks in traveling to key fashion destinations, because we are a multi-national brand. We have over 400 stores in the world including Dubai, Philippines, and Latin America. It's important to travel to different regions to see what people are wearing and what competition is selling, because we have to serve so many different weather regions. It's cold in Canada in November, but in Miami it's still 30 degrees and we need to make sure we cover their needs.
7. How many hours per day do you work? It varies, I try very hard to manage my time and have a normal 9-6pm work day. I truly believe in time management and I think it's the best skills to have in life or else you would have very little work/life balance. However, when I am on a business trip, the schedule could be chaotic, wake up for a flight a 3am, have a meeting at 9am, or eat dinner at 9pm, all in the same day. I have to be very disciplined and physically strong to carry on the day, but I have a passion for what I do and doing that has built my work ethic.
Good luck on your Young Entrepreneurs Project!
Christine Tai Shoe Developer, ALDO Group
april 24, 2017
We are about 2 weeks away from the B.C. Provincial Election! Before we start looking at the different parties in the running and their platforms, let's take a look back at how our neighbourhood voted in the last election. Any questions?
april 21, 2017
Last week, we began the PowerPlay Young Entrepreneurs project and started the conversation about becoming entrepreneurs and the types of products that the students might sell for our fair on June 2nd (mark your calendars)!
Our good friend, Christine Tai, who is a shoe developer at ALDO Group (Call it Spring and ALDO) and independently does some freelance work started her career right here in the Lower Mainland before moving to Montreal, is going to mentor us during the project. She agreed to answer some questions about how she got started and where she is now. Ms. Tai has also agreed to answer some of our questions and give us feedback on our projects throughout this process. We look forward to receiving feedback from someone who is continually having to make tough decisions about design, price points, and advertising! Thanks, Ms. Tai!
april 13, 2017
The big idea for our physical and health education curriculum this year has been: Healthy choices influence our physical, emotional, and mental well-being.
Earlier this year, we learned about the Canadian Food Guide, the different food groups, appropriate portion sizes, and how to read nutritional labels when we went to Save-On-Foods and took a closer look at what we were eating during recess and lunch. As the weather begins to get nicer, we are going to take advantage of living in one of the most beautiful provinces and spend our time focusing on ways to stay active and healthy.
A huge thank-you to all the parent and teacher volunteers who drove us to and from Quarry Rock in Deep Cove! It was a wonderful day to get outside and enjoy the outdoors. For many of us, this was our first hike and hopefully won't be our last! The weather even cooperated and only rained on us a little bit.
april 4, 2017
The big idea for our science curriculum this term is: The electromagnetic force produces both electricity and magnetism.
In order to track our thinking throughout this journey, we are going to use the web application, Padlet, to create a graphic organizer as a class.
Click the link to see how our thinking evolves and deepens as we learn about electromagnetism and how electricity is generated in different ways with different environmental impacts.
march 30, 2017
Today we spent the day at Beaty Biodiversity Museum! We took part in the Eat or Be Eaten program. Our tour guide was engaging and showed us different animal skeletons where she highlighted their various adaptations. After the tour, we had a quick lunch break outside where we soaked in the sun while eating lunch. After lunch, we headed back into the museum to do some exploring on our own. Some of us participated in a scavenger hunt while others sketched some of the fossils or animals. It was such a lovely day to be at the UBC campus so we took a little trip to the Rose Garden to look out into the Pacific Ocean. We really do live in such a beautiful province (especially on sunny days)! Thank-you to all the parent volunteers.
february 28, 2017
Wow! Aren't we a lucky bunch! The CBC recognized us today for our caring community and our efforts to keep the city green! Check out the blurb on the CBC website here!
We were thrilled to receive such an unexpected surprise from the CBC! They sent lunch bags, moose, tattoos, toques, and stickers! Thanks!
february 22, 2017
Today, we will be talking about what our class has been doing for today’s Pink Shirt Day! Our class has been learning about how we are filling up our landfills with clothes. We waste perfectly good clothes! Sounds crazy, right? Well, that’s what we’re doing. We throw out clothes that are apparently from “last season”. We try to keep up with the latest trends but while doing that, we waste more five times as much clothing as we did 25 years ago. We throw away perfectly good items that could be reused for other things. In a single year, Canada produces enough textile waste to create a mountain 3 times the size of Toronto’s Rogers Centre stadium. So, our class decided to do a project for Pink Shirt Day. It was about making useful things from a shirt. First, we used old t-shirts to make prototypes and the pink shirt as our good copy. We were split up into groups of 3 and 4. Some groups made bracelets while others made bowties, hats, gloves, leg warmers, shoelaces and other cool things. Some people sewed, some glued, but we all used our imagination! Overall, everyone’s project turned out great! After a few weeks of hard work and a lot of prototypes, we have new accessories! The best part of this is that we reused old t-shirts and now, when we grow out of our t-shirts or they become not-so-trendy, we can reduce the amount of clothes that end up in landfills by creating new trendier items.
Written by Alicia, Evelyn, and Caitlin
february 16, 2017
BC Green Games contest submission is live! Go check it out and please vote! The class' participating in the City of Surrey's Lend-A-Hand program was a focus of our application. Three of our Grade 7 students, Caitlin, Maggie, and Emily, wrote our submission and we were granted a free field trip to Science World! We cannot wait to go back!
february 15, 2017
We've been practicing how to write paragraphs using the 4-Square writing method. This time, we used CBC's You're A Gem contest to write about the gems in our lives. Check out some of our submissions on Twitter with the #youreagem
january 20, 2017
Thanks to Science World for the wonderful field trip! Science World provided Division 3 will a fully paid for bus and a full day of learning. Together, we explored the Innovation 150 exhibition and participated in the Meeting Canadian Makers workshop where we learned about famous Canadian inventors and innovators. The class built their own prototypes for future modes of transportation out of recyclable materials. We also learned to extend on each other's thinking by playing the, "Yes... And..." game. For example, we discussed how we would improve our cars so that we were not wasting our time sitting in traffic and one student said, "I would want to exercise in my car," and another student responded with, "Yes, and be able to watch something on my dashboard while exercising." and so on.
A huge thank-you to the parent volunteers and Mrs. Summers for accompanying us on this fun field trip! Check out the photos below!
december 29, 2016
Happy New Year, Division 3! Check out snippets from our mannequin challenge! There's one in the VIDEOS section!
december 13, 2016 - AFTERNOON
We celebrated all of our accomplishments with a class potluck on December 13th! We sang and danced to Taylor Swift songs, too. Can anyone guess why? Thanks to all the students and the parents for baking the delicious treats! We had quite a fun afternoon!
december 13, 2016 - MORNING
We spent the day at Surrey City Hall. The tour took us to the Council Chambers where decisions are made and the mayor listens to the public's concerns. We even got to sit where Mayor Linda Hepner sits. We talked more about what it means to live in a country with a democratic government. Then, we went downstairs to the Traffic Control Room where we learned about how the traffic lights are controlled in Surrey.
november 25, 2016
Thanks to Coach Speak and Coach Base for an excellent volleyball season. The students played against the teachers in a great game of volleyball to raise money for the upcoming leadership camps at Camp Elphinstone. What a great lunch hour! Thanks for supporting!
november 18, 2016
The class participated in the Lend-a-Hand program and collected 6 bags of garbage, compost, and recyclables in one hour throughout the neighbourhood!
After collecting the garbage, compost, and recyclables, we lined them up on the basketball court to make a visual bar graph.
Ms. Han's Grade 6/7 class from North Ridge Elementary visited us on Friday and we read the last three chapters of our global read aloud book, Pax, together. It was an emotional ending and left us surprised. Sara Pennypacker left us with the quote, "Sometimes the apple rolls very far from the tree" which left us thinking about what she could have meant by it in the context of the story. Some of us thought that she was alluding to the fact that Peter is not like his father and others thought that it was in reference to how Pax was no longer like Peter since they no longer needed each other. Perhaps, Pax was better off in the wild. Nonetheless, the ending had us questioning the author's word choice and we are excited to start our final project for the Global Read Aloud.
In addition to reading the last three chapters together, we participated in a team building challenge (Make a boat that can carry 15 colour tiles using cups, straws, saran wrap, and duct tape). In groups, we sketched out our designs and then tested it out and then, redesigned our innovations to improve them.
NOVEMBER 3, 2016
Dr. Veselin Jungic from the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University came to talk to our class about how math is everywhere! He reinforced the idea that all jobs involve math. We were stunned to learn that the Twitter logo was made out of circles. In addition, he showed us some of the videos that he makes and we played with mobius strips! It was a lot of fun to be taught by a university professor!
october 31, 2016
Pumpkin Day was a huge success! We baked mini cheesecake pumpkin tarts but in order to get the recipe perfect, we needed to cut our ingredients from the original recipe in half to make 6 tarts (one for each person in our group). We counted the vertical lines on the pumpkin and the seeds in each of the pumpkins to see if there was a correlation between the number of lines and the seeds. After plotting our results on a scatterplot, we noticed that the more lines that we counted, the more seeds there were but there were some outliers. Generally, if the pumpkin had 10-20 or 20-30 lines, then there were 100-200 and 200-300 seeds, respectively. We also created our own collaborative art piece that is featured right outside of our room of Edvard Munch's The Scream. Thanks, parents and grandparents for making this day so successful!! Check out the photos!
october 24, 2016
A few Fridays ago, we visited Save-On-Foods on King George Blvd. and the registered dieticians gave us a talk about the main food groups and reminded us how to maintain a balanced diet! We looked at nutritional labels and were shocked at how much sugar is in some of our favourite cereals. Last Wednesday, we visited Hawthorne Park and planted thimbleberry and salmonberry plants. Tree planting with the City of Surrey through the Releaf Program was excellent! The students learned the importance of keeping our cities green and defined the term "urban forest". Who knew that shovelling dirt was such a great work out? We learned that it was fun to get outdoors and get our hands dirty!
september 29, 2016
Division 3 has been busy this September! In Art, we've been working on First Nations West Coast Totem Poles to represent our families. They are now featured as house posts by our two doorways to our classroom. In Math, we've been working on finding patterns in math problems (Pirate Problem, How Many Ways to Find $1, 1001 Pennies) and explored Fibonacci's Sequence. In Language Arts, we've begun writing to our pen pals at North Ridge Elementary School who we will be visiting next week! In French, we've been reviewing our basic greetings and numbers. In Social Studies, we've been learning how to infer and question through looking at pictures from newsworthy articles. In Science, we're going to begin practicing making observations and forming our own hypothesis before we explore the theory of evolution. That's just a quick sample of what's been happening in Room 6! Stay tuned for more updates!
august 31, 2016
Welcome back to school, Ravens! I'm excited to be back in Room 6 this year. Over the summer, I collected some new games and created a small reading corner that we will hopefully enjoy throughout the school year. I encourage all of you to spend the last couple days of summer break relaxing with your friends and family!