This post is going to start out a little differently... with some shout-outs! Because sometimes we deserve special recognition. First, a shout-out to Brandon who is always willing to help kids that are younger than him. He enjoys reading books to younger siblings during our Monday Family Reading times, and helping his younger peers with their sight word flashcards. You're awesome, Brandon! Next, we have Aiden who is the first person this year to successfully fill every slot of his money box. Aiden makes an effort to speak in French constantly to Madame and has figured out the profitability of these efforts. Woo-hoo! Aiden can now make change independently, using multiple combinations of nickels, dimes, quarters, loonies and toonies. And a shout-out to Blakely, who did an amazing job in yesterday's Lunchbox Theatre production of the Sound of Music. Her classmates were in awe of her afterwards and kept coming up to her to say how amazing she was. A star in the making! There are soooo many kids that deserve shout-outs for different reasons, so we will try to highlight different kids periodically. All of us deserve a shout-out for our participation in Pink Shirt Day on Wednesday where we continued our emphasis on being kind to one another. We talked about the history of Pink Shirt Day and role-played different scenarios of what we would do to help someone if we saw another person picking on them. ...maybe you hear someone tell a friend: "You can't come to my birthday party!" or "You can't play with us!" ...what do we do in those situations? We had lots of great ideas and loved taking turns acting out the scenarios at the front of the class. We also extended our kindness to our school that day by picking up litter around the school grounds. We also made friendship rocks with our Big Buddies. And to finish off our Pink Shirt Day, we made some collaborative friendship art. There were no rules - just a blank canvas. At first some of us worked together to start a rainbow, but then we got distracted by the idea of splatter painting and the rainbow was abandoned. We came up with many different ideas throughout the process, some of them abstract and others more concrete. Some of us used the entire canvas while others focused on just one area. Tuesday was 100s day, meaning we have officially been at school for 100 days! We have been keeping a careful count of the days, using pennies and dimes to tally our totals. On that day we finally got to exchange 10 dimes for a loonie! As we continue to tally our days at school, we've begun practicing how to turn a number like 102 into dollars and cents. So we figured out that 102 would look like this... (Teacher edit: TECHNICALLY the number written above is the English way of writing dollars and cents. In French we would write it as 1,02$. But as these concepts are beyond the scope of the Grade 1 curriculum, Madame wants to be sure that we currently write them in a way that students will recognize when they go to the grocery store. If they can begin to understand the mathematical concepts right now, it will be easy for their teachers in higher grades to help them switch the period for a comma and move the dollar sign around). Many of us really got into the spirit of 100s day and dressed up as 100-year-old people. It was quite amusing to see us doing our Jump Rope for Heart with moustaches and wrinkles. We also made 100s day "trail mix" by putting 10 rows of 10 snacks onto a hundreds chart. Then we counted them all and got to eat them! Yum! And in honour of 100s day, Madame has taught us to count by 10s all the way to 120, by singing and dancing to a rap battle-style song with the tune of "Hollaback Girl". It has quickly become a favoutite! We've only learned the main part of the song so far - not the intro - but you can take a listen here ("compter par 10") to what the whole song sounds like. (Warning: you may not want to listen to the real lyrics to "Hollaback Girl" at home with us kids. The beat is awesome. The lyrics not so much.) And speaking of music, we had a special assembly on Friday with a visit from a rock group called "Speed Control" that hails from the Yukon. The group played us famous Canadian rock songs like "Born to be Wild", "Summer of 69", "Taking care of Business" and tunes from the Barenaked Ladies. And we were INTO it! Madame watched from the sidelines as some of us literally took out our ponytails and began headbanging. Others whipped out the air guitar like seasoned pros and there were lots of rock hands happening. Never underestimate the power of music to reach our souls. Another exciting moment in the week was when Madeleine brought in her cat for show-and-tell. Every day during show-and-tell, we practice saying phrases in French like: "What's in your bag? Is it a person? Is it an animal? Is it a thing?"... Whenever the answer is "an animal", we ask if it's "living" or "non-living". For the first time, we got to hear the answer: "It's living!" :-)
"Here comes the sun, na-na-na-na!" We were so happy to be able to resume our walks to Hoffman Park this week, and especially with the amazing weather that we had! The students even took it upon themselves to collect the litter that we found along our path and throw it away. As Max said, "It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it!" We also took advantage of the sunny weather to make ice cream in a bag for Science class, with some shaking help from our Big Buddies. We talked about the different states of matter and how the cream turns from a liquid to a solid. We even drew out diagrams of what the atoms probably look like in the liquid cream versus the ice cream. And while molecular theory is not actually part of the Kindergarten or Grade 1 curriculum, Madame says that we are a very smart bunch and we can learn big kid concepts even though we're small. Mmmm.... Science is yummy! Today was "hat day!" The result was some awesome hat hair for some of us! We also donned our hats and sang our "4 Hugs a Day" and "Skinnamarinky dinky dink" songs at a school-wide kindness assembly today. Some of us were nervous about singing in front of such a large crowd but we did a good job and the kindness theme fit in so perfectly with our RAC theme from last week. In other news, our French oral skills are getting a lot stronger and many of us moved up several levels on our Canada map game-board this week, earning us a bunch of badges. We also have some new homeowners among us this week! At least 1/3 of the class now has realized that it's worth passing over some of the candy and toys from le magasin in order to save and purchase their class "home". The delayed gratification that will come from not having to pay rent every week has, for many, become worth the short-term sacrifice. Madame is pleased to see some of us beginning to strategize and think beyond the instant gratification of the present moment.
"You really can't do much in a 3-day week." Challenge accepted. Yes, we did the regular literacy and math blah-dee-blah stuff... ![]() ...but it was also RAC Week. And Valentine's Week. And basically let's-cram-everything-into-3-days-while-we-also-hype-the-kids-up-on-sugar week. It was awesome. No really, it was. We started our Real Acts of Caring Week by singing "Four Hugs a Day" in French at the Seniors' Centre, and then passing out carnations to the seniors. Blakely said afterwards, "I felt happy because I was making other people's day be a bit better and a bit happier." On Tuesday, we were "Kindness Superheroes" and delivered homemade cards to a bunch of the teachers and office staff. They were so thrilled by the students' thoughtfulness! Mrs. MacKinnon told them that "they made her day!" We also did some baking on Tuesday to get ready for our cookie delivery the next day. On Wednesday, we got to deliver our cookies! At first we tried to deliver them to the police, but they weren't available when we arrived. Instead, we walked over to City Hall and gave them to the workers there. Lucky for us, the policemen returned just as we were about to walk back to the school so we got to see them after all! They didn't get cookies from us since we had already given the cookies away, but they got lots of hugs and "thank you"s. They were quite taken with the kids and told Madame to let them know any time if she would like them to come visit our class. We may take them up on that offer! They even gave us some special stickers when we left. Madame also challenged us at recess today to be extra kind to someone. Some of us held the door open for someone, others invited someone to play who was all by themselves, and still others helped a friend who had fallen or gotten hurt. We shared our stories by saying, "Je suis gentil parce que..." and telling about what we did that was kind. Madame talked to us about how it's easy to be kind to people that we LIKE... it's much harder to be kind to people that we DON'T like. And she shared a secret...shhhh!...sometimes there are even GROWN-UPS who can be annoying or mean. So even Madame struggles with this sometimes. But we are truly kindness superheroes when we make the effort to be kind to people that are not easy for us to like. We all agreed that being kind feels really good - both for us and for the person that we are being kind to! Oh... and today was our Valentine's Day celebration! A big "merci" for all of the special treats and cards! Madame couldn't resist the opportunity to tie in some Science with our Valentine's Day festivities. We made Valentine's lava lamps using oil, water, alka seltzer tablets and heart-shaped glitter. Our goal was to see what worked the best - using more oil in our lamps or less. We had different hypotheses about this and it was a great opportunity for us to learn about fractions - 1/4, 1/2, and 2/3. We noticed that even though we added the oil first, once we mixed the water in with it, the water all sank to the bottom, creating two layers. Madame told us that this is because water is heavier than oil. The atoms in water are much closer together than they are in oil. We pretended to be atoms and ran closer together to demonstrate water and further apart to demonstrate oil. When atoms are closer together, the liquid is heavier so it sinks to the bottom. We loved watching how the glitter, colour, and liquids bubbled and mixed when we put the alka seltzer tablets in the jars. Those of us who hypothesized that MORE oil would work better were correct. We recorded our hypotheses, our observations and our results. Happy Valentine's Day and Happy Family Day Weekend!
We had our last ice skating field trip this week! Many of us actually managed to improve our skill levels quite a bit since the first session. There were some blisters on the walk home this time and some very tired kids, but we persevered and we all made it. :-) We are gearing up for RAC Week by making cards for various staff members around the school to thank them for all of their hard work. Big thanks to Rylee's family for donating all of the awesome Valentine's Day craft materials! Madame Van Sickle received some extra classroom funding and was able to use it to buy a super cool remote-controlled Gear Bot. There are so many different ways that you can build it but if the pieces aren't placed in just the right way, the Gear Bot won't move. We had a blast trying out all kinds of creations and combinations. Madame was also able to get some new Math resources with the funding. We loved the new Math games so much that many of us wanted to play with them during "choice" centres. We have really been up-ing our French-speaking game lately with the lure of receiving money for our efforts. (Sometimes there's just nothing like a little extrinsic motivation!!) ;-) ...Especially since we get to use this money to buy lots of fun things at "le magasin" at the end of each week. Many of us are beginning to piece together vocabulary that we have heard in various contexts to put together all kinds of original sentences that we haven't practiced in class. Whenever we say a non-rehearsed French phrase, we get to use a Bingo dabber to make a "gumball" on our gumball machine pages. Some of us have already begun to fill the entire page!
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