Toronto History

Dear Parents,

After seeing the Mush Hole, we ate lunch in Berczy Park and students enjoyed interacting with the public art, like the trompe l'oeil building, the dog fountain, and the hands:

Class photo by L.B.W. Thank you!

We also enjoyed the Hockey Hall of Fame public sculpture

We had a bit of time, so we decided to take a longer route home and walk past some more sculptures in what was a kind of mini-labour history walk (the sources of inspiration for which I'm indebted to former Clinton Librarian Gini Dickie's connections to Maureen Hynes and Sue Smith).


We focused on 3 main sites as we walked west along Front:
1. WSIB Sculptures in Simcoe Park. There are two parts to this sculpture, a bronze cast of a worker carving the inscription "Remembering our Past, Building a Safe Future" by Lana Winkler and Derek Lo.

Photo fromWikipedia

Then a long shelf called 100 Workers (by John Scott and Stewart H. Pollock), covered with plaques memorializing workplace deaths of Canadians (1 per year in the 20th century). Some students were really interested in reading all the captions and names. We talked a bit about how laws and regulations were key to making people safer.

photo from Reddit

There's also a sculpture by Anish Kapoor, recently in the news for owning the rights to the blackest black (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anish_Kapoor), called Mountain. As with all these sculptures, students were keen to climb and explore.

2. The Chinese Railroad Worker's Memorial, located at Spadina and Front near the Sky Dome, is by Eldon Garnet and Francis Le Bouthillier. We spent some time here talking about the history of the railway and the poor treatment of Chinese workers.

Photo taken from Atlas Obscura

Here's a link to an Atlas Obscura Article about this history and this site: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/chinese-railroad-workers-memorial


3. Finally, we stopped at The Thimble and Buttons at Richmond and Queen before getting on the streetcar back towards school. This piece, actually called Uniform Measure/Stack by Stephen Cruise, is missing the measuring tape that used to be part of it, but still commemorates the area's history as the Garment District. 

I just learned that the measuring tape was a guerilla element, so I'll link to spacing's review of that element: http://spacing.ca/toronto/2006/12/11/thimble-art-starts-to-measure-up/ and a more recent news article talking about its removal: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2015/08/27/blog-street-art-tape-measure-removed-from-richmond-and-spadina/, just because I personally find this fascinating. (There's currently a lot of construction around here, so I originally assumed it had disappeared due to that.)

Photo from CityNews, 2015

I used this last stop to as an excuse to talk about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which was one of the deadliest industrial disasters ever. Because doors to the stairwells and exits were locked to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks, 146 people died, many of them women and recent immigrants. The outrage from this tragedy did lead to more regulations and safety standards. Here's a link to the Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire

Shirtwaist Factory Fire (photo from Wikipedia)

Spadina and Kensington Market is an area filled with the history of different groups that have emigrated to Toronto, from the Jewish community that dominated the areas in the 20's and 30's, the Hungarians in the 50's, the Chinese Canadian community and the Portuguese Canadian community starting in the 60's, all the way to the current influx of Latin American restaurants and food stores. I asked students to look for different languages as we went up the street and there were many different scripts to be found.

Of course, I barely skimmed the surface of this history in our little walk and I missed some bits that I'd loved to put in for a next time, but we enjoyed our walk and learned to always read the plaques.

Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

P.S. There are so many rabbit holes to fall into on this topic, I couldn't resist adding some more articles--especially the ones with historical photos to help show the history in some more detail.

https://torontoist.com/2017/06/protests-parades-walking-tour-labour-history-spadina/

About the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters:

We walked right past this plaque

http://torontoplaques.com/Pages/Brotherhood_of_Sleeping_Car_Porters.html
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sleeping-car-porters-in-canada

About the Yiddish Playhouse at Dundas and Spadina:
https://torontoist.com/2015/07/historicist-torontos-yiddish-playhouse/

About Queen and Spadina:
http://spacing.ca/toronto/2015/06/23/tour-queen-spadina-hundred-years-ago/

Visual History of Spadina in Pictures:
https://www.blogto.com/city/2012/04/a_visual_history_of_spadina_avenue/

History of Toronto's Chinatown:
https://www.rcinet.ca/patrimoine-asiatique-en/2018/05/22/torontos-past-and-present-chinatown/

History of Kensington Market:
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/kensington-market
https://www.blogto.com/city/2011/07/a_visual_history_of_kensington_market/

And, the history of the St. Lawrence Market:
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/12/17/once-upon-a-city-st-lawrence-market-at-centre-of-torontos-history-since-1831.html

Math Test tomorrow

Dear Parents,

Our unit math test was delayed due to picture day on Thursday, but we're back on track. Today we spent time reviewing some of the key learnings that will be on the test. As a result, we don't have a math homework piece this week, but since our Jump Math workbooks have come in, I did send them home with students.

The chapter we've been working on covers material in pages 1-20. Some of that has already been done in class in their notebooks, or sent home as homework, but students who want to make sure they're prepared are welcome to use the book as extra practice for tomorrow. Students could also review the 2 unit quizzes that have already been sent home to see where they should focus in.

Going forward, we'll use the Jump Math workbook as our main focus for in class work.



Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

Overview

Dear Parents,

As we finish another week in the classroom, I wanted to give an overview of what we've been working on:

This week students completed an artist statement based on their Kandisky work from last week in Art and we practiced a new improv game called Bippity Bippity Bop for drama.

In Gym, we've been working on co-operative games, mostly using the parachute this week, and we started our Health curriculum with a discussion about reasons people eat (Medical, Social, Societal, Emotional).

We began our Social Studies program by talking about Orange Shirt Day and some of the Push/Pull Factors for Immigration to Canada. When we talked about symbols that represented Canada, a lot of the students chose animals. When we talked about things that represented their own family's arrival to Canada, many chose to focus on cultural foods, like pierogies or potatoes. These are valid choices, but when we talked about Orange Shirt Day and the challenges that Black Loyalists faced, I felt like students engaged in the bigger ideas that ground our unit, so I hope to move forward with that. We'll be doing some of that through partnering with Ms. Khokar in the Library.

For Language, we read together from the class novel and they wrote a reading response based on a shared discussion question. For writing, they handed in a polished copy of a paragraph to show their understanding of paragraph structure, and we are busy making pop-up book pages in groups to explain some grammar terms like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and punctuation. I will start sending home grammar homework for practice next week. 

For math, we've been working through the Nelson textbook in Patterning and Algebra, with support from JUMP math. Now that our new workbooks have arrived, I hope to do more work with the JUMP program. Today, we worked on the mid-unit quiz from JUMP, which will go home Monday along with the homework--another practice quiz. I sat with all my math groups today to review their understanding of the trickier patterns that change (Patterns that go up by a new number each time are  harder to make algebraic rules to move from x to y, so we might use t-charts or pictures to support.). I will continue to send home math homework to be completed by Friday, on a weekly basis.

I also have been giving them quizzes to see where their computation skills are. For students who need to practice, the following sites have been recommended to me by Ms. Filan for good math games:

https://pages.sumdog.com/
https://ca.ixl.com/math/grade-6
https://www.brainpop.com/math/

We're using yellow folders to communicate back and forth from home, to write out our agendas, and to stay organized. We're spending time daily, reviewing those organizational details, to help students get in good habits for their future.

Sincerely,
Ms. Goegan

Wassily Kandinsky Resources

Dear Parents,

We are working on abstract art concepts in class, focusing on the example of Wassily Kandinsky. We started with Peter Reynolds' The Dot, which shows kids that we can all be artists and then I showed this slide show, which gives a couple of ideas about how to do projects based on Kandinsky's work at the end.

https://www.slideshare.net/nivaca2/wassily-kandinsky-for-kids


I also showed part of this video in class and thought it might interest some of you to review in more detail. It talks a bit about Kandinsky's synesthesia.

You can also watch this animation, which includes some inspirational music.

Here are some examples of student work.

They made their paintings fit together

Team building

Dear Parents,



I have sent some things home today in students' new homework folders. You can have fun learning whether you share your Grade 6's intelligences or if they're an opposite colour to their siblings (more on that below). I have also sent home another math assignment due on Friday. We will review graphing with patterns in class tomorrow, so it should make more sense then, if you find it challenging tonight.

This has been a bit of a crazy week so far. Because we did not go to Mono Cliffs this week, I've shifted focus in our class to some of those team building activities that would have happened there.

Yesterday, we looked at Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences and figured out what kind of smart we were. We talked a bit as a class about how different approaches can support our learning in the classroom. We all have preferred modalities and we can use them to support areas where we might face more challenge. We also talked about how we tend to like things we're better at and might need to work at balancing our strengths. We talked about the difference between interpersonal intelligence and intrapersonal intelligence at length too--how knowing yourself and your own needs is different from knowing others.

Here's a wikipedia article elaborating a bit on each intelligence and giving an overview of the theory behind it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

Today we talked about The 4 Colours Theory and how different people have different values and temperments that affect their learning. We had a lot of Orange kids in this class, which suggests we'll lead a year full of action and excitement. Surprisingly there were a fair number of Gold as well, but not so many Greens. To some extent these things are arbritary, but they're an interesting tool for self reflection and coming to shared understandings.

Here's a sense of some of the strengths we're working with:


I don't want to link to a company selling these services, but feel free to google 4 Colours Personality Test and find out more.

This morning we did a cup challenge. Students had to work as a team to stack these cups without touching them directly at all. I've included some pictures of us at work below. It's always nice to see what's happening more directly.

(As always, if you would rather not have your child's unedited face appear here, please let me know. One face has been covered because that student expressed a preference when asked in class).

I'll continue to work on team building this week and next, but we're also honing in on the academics. I look forward to reviewing that in some detail at Curriculum Night on Thursday. As always, I'm happy to respond to questions or concerns on my board email.

Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

Welcome to Grade 6

Dear Parents,

Welcome to Grade 6. It's always a busy start to the year, but I have been especially busy preparing for Mono Cliffs next week. Please get your permission and medical forms back asap or let me know formally if you're not going (i.e. return the form with a "NO").

I also sent home homework for the first time last night, which will be due on Friday. I do think regular practice is important and our math time is much too short to get that all in--I plan to start a more regular homework program once we return from Mono Cliffs, but also felt like students needed to get back in practice more immediately as well. The sheets are from Jump Math and relate to patterning. I hope that you will "help" by asking open ended questions (Sample questions: What do you think goes there? Can you read the question again to be sure?) and providing space and time to support completion of work. I will always try to give ample lead time with homework, but will be tracking who does and does not complete their work. If completion becomes onerous or takes hours, that's helpful information for me to have as well.

As always, you can be in touch via my tdsb.on.ca address (lisa.goegan), if there are any issues or needs.

Sincerely,
Ms. Goegan

Dear Parents,

For the last day of school, students have requested a Teddy Bear Picnic. We'll spend some time outside with our stuffies and snacks. Students are welcome to bring a favourite activity to play at school.

Thanks for a great year,

Ms. Goegan