It's been another short, but exciting week in our K/1 French Immersion adventures! We kicked it off with an ice skating field trip on Tuesday for the Grade 1s. The kids were troopers, trudging through the snow all the way to the ice rink and back. They (mostly) had great attitudes the whole time! :-) We can't wait for our next ice skating adventure. And meanwhile, while the Grade 1s were skating, the Kindergarten students enjoyed getting to know more of their peers by spending time in two of the other K classrooms making arts and crafts. Mme Van Sickle was given the thumbs-up of approval when she returned to the school. Apparently they all had a great time! We are getting more excited about science these days, as Mme Van Sickle is making an effort to do one science experiment per week. Today's experiment was a classic - Mentos and Coke. First we made hypotheses about what would happen when we put Mentos in water. Many of us thought it would be fizzy, but were surprised when it stayed flat and sunk to the bottom. Next, we made hypotheses about what would happen when we dropped the Mentos in Coke. Many of us guessed correctly that it would "explode", but as you can see from the picture, we were still very impressed by the chemical reaction when it actually occurred! A big thumbs-up for our correct hypotheses! We also had the privilege this week of watching the performance of the "Wizard of Oz" by the Lunchbox Theatre group. This is a club that is open to everyone in Grades 1 and up. They did a fabulous job and our very own Jonah was among the performers. After the show, Mme Van Sickle asked how many people thought they would join the club next year. Almost everybody raised their hands!
What a strange week it has been, with only two days of school! Last Friday was so clear and beautiful that we took our Math outside and practiced subtraction using playground pebbles. We also joined with the other K and K/1 classes for Outside Centres, getting nice and dirty in the sand pit, blowing bubbles, balancing on the muddy ground on stilts, building towers, etc. Today was our Valentine's Day celebration and the students enjoyed making paper-bag owls to store all of their Valentine's loot! For those that don't speak French, the two different sayings on the owl are: 1. Bisous mon hibou ("Kisses my owl") 2. Tu es chouette! ("You are nice/cool." A "chouette" is also a species of owl.) In Art, we have been spending the last several days working on a space-themed family tree. The students were asked to make a planet for Grandma and Grandpa, even if they're "in heaven", because Mommy and Daddy were each born from their own Mommy and Daddy. This gave us a chance to understand where families come from, and also to practice our family vocabulary. Our big buddies helped some of us with the writing and cutting. The students were challenged to do 3-star colouring - making sure to colour in the lines and trying not to leave any white space. This art will be displayed in the hallway for the next little while and will eventually come home to you. :-)
We kicked off our week with an exciting presentation from the "Maple Man" - a Québecois man who goes to different schools presenting about how maple syrup is made. The entire presentation was in French so it was a bit tricky to follow for our little guys at times, but for the most part they were very patient and attentive. They especially loved getting the chance to play with the traditional Québecois spoons, and taste candied maple syrup on a stick, made by pouring hot maple syrup onto snow. A movie clip of everyone playing with spoons. (I didn't want to upload it to YouTube so you'll have to download it if you want to view it): ![]()
We introduced a new set of dictée words this week and have been playing games and doing activities with them every day in class. One of the students' favourite games is a type of charades, trying to guess the word based on the teacher's gestures, then locate the word on the chart paper list. If they can do this, they win a nickel. And speaking of nickels, the students visited "le magasin" again today and most had way more nickels to spend than they did last week because they have upped their French-speaking game and have been doing lots of little things around the classroom to help Mme Van Sickle. Almost all of the students were able to use their nickels to count by 5s and figure out what kind of prizes they could buy at "le magasin" based on how much money they had. There were a lot of excited, happy faces!
We have really lucked out with the weather this week and were able to do our centre time outside at Spirit Square yesterday, had a beautiful walk to Hoffman Park today, and are hoping to be able to go outside for centres with the other K and K/1 (English) classes tomorrow afternoon...if there isn't too much snow! |
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