Wednesday was "Pink Shirt" day! We began with a primary Zoom assembly about kindness in which we practiced singing the Canadian National Anthem calmly and respectfully in French and in English. We got to watch some different classes perform poems about kindness and enjoyed seeing some video clips about how kindness can have such an impact on the people around us. We have continued to practice being kind in class by filling each other's "buckets" with kind deeds and words. Whenever someone fills our bucket, we tell Madame about it and that person gets to put a sticker on our very own paper bucket. Fitting in well with our focus on kindness has been a spotlight on Black History Month and how we shouldn't treat people differently just because of the colour of their skin. We've been learning about a lot of famous and influential black people throughout history. We were particularly fascinated by the story of Harriett Tubman and how she freed so many slaves! From Martin Luther King Jr, we learned to stand up for what is right. From Maya Angelou, we learned that we can do hard things! (We practiced yelling, "I can do hard things!" while flexing our muscles). We also talked about some of the biggest names in jazz music - Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis (who happen to be the reason Madame named her kids "Ella" and "Miles"!), as well as the very influential Canadian jazz singer, Eleanor Collins. As it turns out, Eleanor Collins is a distant relative of a student in our class! We enjoyed listening to some of Eleanor Collins' music on YouTube and learned that there are even some commemorative stamps made in her honour. And speaking of jazz, Madame has been pulling out her trumpet lately whenever we sing "Bonne Fête" to a student in our class. This week she let us each have a turn trying to blow into it! (...making sure to disinfect the mouthpiece after each use!) Getting a sound out of it was harder than we thought it would be, but there are a few of us who may be destined to become trumpet players! With "Family Day" this past Monday, we listened to Todd Parr's book about how there are lots of different ways to be a family, and families are special no matter what they look like. We had fun picking out sticks in Hoffman Park for a special family portrait project. We were quite excited on Thursday to get to spend some time with Mme Towne's class in the courtyard. Since none of us were in school pre-COVID, we don't remember a time when classes used to get together often like this to play. With restrictions easing and the beautiful weather on the way, we are hoping to interact with other classes more often so that we can get to know some more of our peers. Discovering sap... Extra pics...
It's official, we've been at school for 100 days! We enjoyed celebrating today by dressing up as 100-year-olds. And seriously, how cute are we??! To Madame's delight-filled surprise, we were given permission to do her favourite 100s day tradition - 100s trailmix. We made doubly sure that our hands were all clean and then Madame had us lay out little pieces of food across our own hundreds charts. Then we counted by 10s to 100 and got to consume the fruits of our labor. Another one of Madame's favourite traditions is to use an aging app to catch a glimpse of what we may look like as 100-year-olds. Then she has us predict what we will be doing at the ripe old age of 100. Often, the answers divide themselves into various categories of people... 1. the practical 2. the chatterbox 3. the dreamer 4. the realist 5. the hard worker It was also Valentine's Day this week! Even our sensory bin got in on the celebrating and we arrived on Monday to find it all decked out in pinks, reds and whites. We were so pleased with our Valentine's Day hauls! A huge "merci" to everyone! On the theme of love and kindness, we read a book all about how people walk around with invisible "buckets" (des seaux) above their heads. When others are kind, it fills our bucket, but when people do things to hurt our feelings or when we're having a bad day, our bucket tips over and drips out. We are practicing being "bucket fillers" by taking some time every day to fill someone's bucket with kind words. And the amazing thing is that when we do or say something kind, it not only fills someone's bucket but it fills our own too! We have also been practicing the lines to a French play a lot lately and we are getting really good at reciting them! We're almost ready to perform! Madame has even purchased costumes for the event. More to come on that... Extra pics... Administering the "COVID vaccine"...
It's Olympics time! We had fun looking up Beijing, China on Google Earth and discovering how far away it is from our school. We were shocked to hear that our whole, giant country of Canada only has 38 million people in it, while China has 1.4 BILLION people!! We wondered about what the Olympic rings mean and ended up having a great discussion about the symbols that we see all around us and how they all have some kind of meaning. In the case of the Olympic rings, we learned that they represent the 5 continents and how the athletes come together from around the world to compete. Gym class has been extra fun this week with an Olympics theme, and we were even inspired to create our very own guinea pig olympics! It all began with a plan... Using items from around the classroom, we came up with loads of ideas of obstacles or "events" to create for our guinea pigs. We presented our ideas to the class and then attempted to bring our visions to life. Most of us didn't stick too closely to our plan in the end, but we improvised with what we had and were generally excited about the results. And finally, after all our paint and glue had dried a couple of days later, we corralled off a large section of the classroom and set up our stations... and threw in a bunch of extra stuff, just for fun. There was only one thing left to do... add in the guinea pigs!... We can't say they were overly enthusiastic about many of our creations, and we never did manage to get them into the ball pit despite our very best efforts, but we still loved seeing them run around on the floor and Madame says we did an awesome job of sitting quietly and respectfully so as not to scare them. Here is our video montage of the experience... In French, we have begun a more in-depth focus on our digraphs (two letters together that make one sound). This week's focus was on the sound "on". We practiced reading words by sounding them out, one sound at a time, and then we brought those words to life with an outdoor relay race for the items depicted in the words. This not only helps embed the vocabulary and the sounds, but it also helps us learn French gaming words ("we won", "your turn", "try again", "good game"...). And an added bonus are the social skills of learning how to accept defeat and work as a team. And now that we are nearing the end of Term 2, we are beginning to practice writing out our first AND last names with a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters. Some of us have really long last names so Madame doesn't expect us to fill all the practice lines, but we are beginning to become familiar with how our full names look and are even choosing occasionally to do more work than expected! (We love using Madame's special markers on the wipe-able sleeves). Some of us are even excitedly telling Madame about how we are writing out our full names on other things outside of school "without even LOOKING!" :-) All of our counting in Math is leading us to practice addition of multiple numbers. Some of us are really catching on to the idea of dividing items into groups for more efficient counting, then adding those groups together. Extra photos...
Buckle up! It's February!... aka the month with the most holidays/special days to recognize... aka the shortest month of the year. FIRST... we had to finish off our "Carnaval" festivities. We learned that during this festive time in Quebec, there are usually several large snowball fights. And since hands-on learning is the best kind of learning, we did the obvious thing and had a snowball fight! Next holiday... Chinese New Year! We enjoyed learning about this 2-week celebration that involves amazing food, fun and our favourite - red pockets of money! We learned that the Chinese New Year celebration is actually tied to the first new moon in February, which is when the traditional lantern festival closes off the holiday. We have been tracking the moon and made special lanterns for the "Year of the Tiger" to bring home on the day of the new moon. All of this talk about the moon has had us learning more about this large object in our night sky. We found out that the moon orbits the earth every 29 days and that it doesn't actually give off any light of its own... it just reflects light from the sun onto the earth, like the way a mirror would bounce light onto an object. And the last special day of this week was Groundhog Day! We read the story of the "marmotte" and watched a live news feed about Wiarton Willie, our Canadian groundhog, to see if he saw his shadow. But Madame really feels we should get our money back for this groundhog ceremony because he didn't even come out of his box to see his shadow... a "groundhog whisperer" just knocked on his box and ASKED him if it would be an early spring. *insert eye roll* Thankfully, he apparently said "yes". Let's hope Wiarton and his whisperer are correct! Learning about Groundhog Day gave us the opportunity to talk about how shadows are formed and how they are blocked from view. We learned that when the sun shines directly on our groundhog friend, his shadow appears. But when a cloud blocks the sun's rays, the shadow disappears. Now we just need a sunny day to go examine our own shadows. If Wiarton Willie's prediction is correct, hopefully there will be sunny days coming soon! And in non-holiday news, we've been learning about our 5 senses. This week's focus was on the sense of touch, which gave us the chance to talk about various French adjectives - hard, soft, rough, smooth, pointy... We have begun learning how to include adjectives in our sentences and are starting to sound out words all on our own! Today was a big day for some of us who became first-time home buyers! For the whopping price of $0.50, some of us chose to forego extra treats and trinkets and use our hard-earned cash to purchase our homes instead. (Goodbye, weekly rent payments!) One student even bought a 2nd investment property already, as well! (Hello, residual income!) When we buy our home, Madame puts a little red dot sticker on our cubby bins. Green dots indicate that we have purchased an investment property. Extra pics...
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