This week's cultural focus was on "le carnaval de Québec", a week-long festival in Quebec that celebrates winter, culture, and tradition with all kinds of fun activities. The "Bonhomme Carnaval", a snowman, is the official representative of the Carnaval so if you've noticed white powder all over the ground just outside of our classroom, that's from when we made our own "bonhommes" out of fake snow. We watched a video about the amazing ice sculptures that are also made every year for le Carnaval and we tried our hand at making our own sculptures out of sugar cubes. This was as much a cultural lesson as it was a learning experience on how to work together as a team to create a plan, communicate our intentions, and resolve conflict. We learned about the art of compromise, with one group even sharing about how one of their members wanted to build a robot while the rest of the group wanted to build an igloo. They figured it out among themselves and built a robot INSIDE of an igloo so that everyone was happy! Proud teacher moment. And in our final celebratory activity, we had a giant snowball fight IN THE CLASSROOM. We don't know what Madame was thinking in allowing us to do this, and even she is questioning her sanity, but it was a lot of fun! The classic Carnaval tunes in the background really got us in the mood. After this week, most of us have been saying how we wished we LIVED in Quebec! In French, we continue to forge ahead with our digraph lessons with a focus this week on the sound "ou". We learned many vocabulary words with the sound "ou" in them, and had fun doing an outdoor relay race for "ou" items. And a big "merci" again to everyone who sent in photos of their children for our autobiography books. (Anyone who didn't have photos just drew a picture of their families, which worked great, as well!) We're having a lot of fun putting together our little scrapbooks, even trying some new techniques to make our photos pop up off the page. It is also providing us with some great sentence-writing opportunties. And some forest photos...
Long live the 80's! We were rockin' it today! Our classroom economy has gotten into full swing this week, with many of us realizing that we don't need to hoard our nickels... we can trade up for dimes, quarters and even loonies (for the wealthy among us)! Ever since September, we've been practicing breaking down large numbers into pennies and dimes. Now we are quickly making the connections with real money. With our Grade 1s, we have also been working on a new mental math strategy - "doubles plus 1"! Since we've become so adept at adding doubles quickly in our heads, this takes the strategy to new heights. "If I know that 4+4=8, then 4+5=9" ...voilà! No finger counting needed! In the mean time, our friends in Kindergarten have been continuing to work on their basic numeracy skills, and on practicing writing out their numbers. They also love trying to recognize doubles with us. In French class, we have reached a new chapter. We have officially made it through the entire alphabet...twice! We enjoy our class' alphabet rap so much that we often incorporate it into our pretend play during centre time. Without any prompting from Madame, we sit down and go through our letters and even our digraphs, pretending that one of our friends is the teacher and the rest of us are students. It always makes Madame smile when she sees that we are doing some serious learning through play. Since we have completed our alphabet review, we are now officially moving on to an in depth study of each of our Grade 1 digraphs (two letters together that make ONE sound: ch, on, au...) We're having fun doing representative drawings and sentences about our digraphs, and then being detectives searching for and writing down more examples of the digraph of the week. We have also been learning about "les adjectifs" (our "extra detail" words). Today we went outside and did a scavenger hunt for things that were "petit" (small), "doux" (soft), "vert" (green), etc. In the forest, we are practicing our fine motor skills by learning to tie knots. We're starting with just a basic overhand knot - the kind of knot we will need to know how to do when we tie our shoes. Those of us who caught on right away began practicing how to use the technique in different ways - to create a loop, or even beginning to do the "bunny ears" for shoe-tying. And of course, just as important as learning to TIE a knot is the skill of UN-tying a knot. This works so many great finger muscles and is such a great life skill! Another fun new tool that Madame introduced this week was VEGETABLE PEELERS! The sticks in the forest were finally dry enough that we were able to practice carving them. Vegetable peelers are a great stand-in for pocket knives for our little hands because they're not quite as dangerous. Nevertheless, they are most definitely sharp so we had to listen to Madame blather through some important knife safety guidelines before we were allowed to get our hands dirty. And, look! ...we figured out that we made a see-saw!...by accident, actually!
There's been a buzz of excitement around the class this week as we have finally launched our classroom economy! Think Monopoly... but lived out in real time. When Madame told us that we would all have our own "houses" and that we would have to pay rent on them (..."just like some of your moms and dads have to pay to live in your house!"), one poor student was in tears because she thought this meant that she would have to move out of her real home. Thankfully we got this clarified right away and we are all now very happy with our "living arrangements". Our "homes" are recognisable places from around our Pitt Meadows community that we each got to pick and stick to our cubby boxes. We all have assigned jobs (which rotate from week to week) and when we do our jobs well, we are rewarded with a nickel for our efforts. We can earn nickels in other ways, too - by having Madame catch us being helpful and by speaking in French. Madame keeps track of how often we make an effort to speak in French by moving our beads on the class rekenreks. At the end of the day, we are paid out in nickels for all of the beads we have moved. There has been so much French-speaking going on this week!... it's been glorious! We collect our nickels in our personal money boxes and at the end of the week, we get to use our money to purchase something from the class store... to keep... like, forever! #mindsblown! We have been counting down the days until store day ("le magasin") ever since. But here's the catch... we can't make any purchases until we have done two things first: 1. paid rent on our home 2. donated a nickel to charity (because it is just as important to learn about giving as it is to learn about spending and saving) As a class, we really wanted to help some "lonely kids" so we decided to donate our money to a charity that helps foster children. Madame has heard great things about the SOS Children's Village , so in June, we will add up all of the coins that we have collected and then Madame will match our donation and we will send a cheque to them and have a little celebration! (Your children do not need to bring in any money from home for this venture. They are using the nickels provided in class. But if you would like to make an added donation, you're welcome to do so.) But circling back to our "homes", here's the thing... not everyone wants to rent their home for the rest of their life. Some of us would prefer to OWN our home and get rid of those pesky rent payments. So, if we save up 5X our rent ($0.25), we can PURCHASE our home and never have to pay a nickel to Madame again! We love this idea in theory, but it's much harder to fork over the $0.25 on store day when we would rather spend our hard-earned nickels on the frivolous items in front of us. Nevertheless, some of us mustered our will power and are now official home-owners after just one week. (If only real life worked that fast!) We can even continue to save our nickels and buy up other properties so that other people have to pay rent to US!! Cha-ching! We are catching on amazingly well to all of these adult concepts. Of course, adding up all of our nickels requires an ability to count by 5s. We have been hitting that concept hard in Math this week and have learned a new song to help us. We took advantage of the gorgeous day on Wednesday to draw out some number lines to represent our learning. And in Science news, we've been learning all about solids, liquids and gases this week. We went on a scavenger hunt outside for each of the different states of matter, and learned that water can exist in all 3 states! We didn't delve too deep into molecular theory, but we touched on it just enough to understand how the molecules behave differently in solids, liquids and gases. We loved playing a game where we WERE the molecules and we moved around differently depending on whether Madame yelled out "solide", "liquide", or "gaz"! And on Friday, we had fun making ice towers! We learned that when we pour salt on the ice, it melts it just enough to be able to stick another ice cube on top! And some fun extra pictures... They grow up so fast... At Eagle Park...
Bonne année! Happy New Year! We kicked off our first week back from holidays with a New Year's celebration of our own. Madame had balloons at the front of the class and we got to pop one every couple of hours and do the activity listed on a slip of paper inside. From our surprise balloon activities, we enjoyed watching a French show, playing a game of French charades, doing a lap around the school building, and having a flashlight dance party. We also read a book about making goals for the year 2021 and brainstormed some goals that we might want to achieve. There were lots of great ideas, and we each wrote out 3 of those goals on slips of paper to create New Year's megaphones. (Our Kindergarteners just practiced writing the French phrase "Je veux..." and then drawing a picture of what they wanted to accomplish.) A highlight for us was watching the New Year's celebration at the "Château de Versailles" in France. We were enthralled with the fireworks and loved the piano performance, as well. Many of us expressed that we really wished we could have been there for REAL! Parents, if you watch this video at home, it comes with a warning... the performance right before the midnight countdown has some scantily clad women. (#awkwardteachermoment... I promise the kids only saw them for a second!), but the show from 3:00:00 onwards is phenomenal! Another favourite was watching a beautiful song called "On écrit sur les murs", which is all about writing words of hope and love to carry with us for the days to come...a great way to kick off a new year. We were inspired to write our own messages on the wall, but since existential concepts like "hope" are difficult for us to understand at this age, we focused on words that make us happy. If you can read French, some of the words on the wall may seem a bit random, but they are beautiful because they are completely student-generated. In French class this week, we have taken a big leap in our writing. Until now, we have mostly been copying words, but Madame is now asking Grade 1s to sound out some of the words on our own. While this is difficult for us, Madame reassures us that perfect spelling is not important. What she really wants to see is that we're connecting the sounds that we hear with letters that we're putting on the page. So whether we use "c", "q" or "k" to make the [k] sound is unimportant. All 3 of those letters can make the same sound so we are winning if we're using any one of them. This is called "inventive spelling" and is the gateway towards independent writing and standard spelling. Kindergarten students have moved from tracing words to copying them. They are given some choice about which words they put together so that they can be a bit inventive with their sentences. We tried something new for our outdoor adventure this week and went to the school garden. Madame has avoided it until now because it became largely overgrown during the months of neglect while we were doing remote learning last year, but it has since been cleaned up a little bit so it was time for us to check it out! We enjoyed getting very muddy (sorry, parents!) making mud pies, digging small "lakes", balancing on stilt buckets, creating ball runs, and swinging on the swing.
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