Happy April Fool's! Or as they say in France, "Poisson d'Avril!"... which yes, if you understand some basic French, you will realize that says "April fish". In France, the big April 1st tradition in elementary school is to stick paper fish to your friends' backs. Madame got to experience this tradition first-hand when she taught in France for a couple of years and it was very entertaining to see the normally very strict school culture "let go" a little and let the kids be silly. Madame definitely loves a good silly holiday, so here we are... The joke was clearly on her... Spring has sprung! The evidence has been all around us this week! And Madame sent us on an evidence-collecting mission with REAL cameras. We talked a lot about how to respect these expensive pieces of equipment and learned things like how to focus and how to get close up to our subject for the best photos. We had so much fun with this task that many of us chose to use the cameras all afternoon rather than going off to play. The next day, we took a look at our photos and analyzed what made the great ones stand out so much. What techniques did we use? We are looking forward to more photography lessons, but here are some of Madame's top picks of the photos that we, the students, took on our own! Some of them are pretty impressive! ...the world through children's eyes... Our world is so beautiful that we really want to work on keeping it that way. As we launch into April, we are gearing up for Earth Day by learning about some favourite "Earth Heroes". This week's spotlight was on Greta Thunberg. We couldn't believe that she's only 19 years old and has done so much to help the planet! We were inspired and talked about some things that we can do to make a difference for our world, beginning with using less water. We set up our own little water "cistern" in the school courtyard to collect rain water for watering plants, rather than using fresh water. We learned that we'll need to put a lid on it during sunny days so that the water doesn't evaporate and disappear! We've also been talking about electricity. We learned first about static electricity. We had a lot of fun creating static electricity by rubbing a balloon on our heads and were especially surprised to see how the electrically-charged balloon stuck to the wall! We also took off our shoes and tried shuffling around the room to create a "zap!" when we touched each other. We also talked about current electricity and all of the different places where we could find it in the classroom. But after learning that electricity comes from power plants that pollute the air, we brainstormed some ways that we could reduce our use of electricity: turning off lights/radio/TV when we're not in a room, unplugging some devices when we're not using them, etc. Another way to help the Earth is to plant trees, flowers and food. We each got to plant a kidney bean in a clear, plastic cup that we decorated. (Yes, plastic...it doesn't fit well with Earth month, but it allows us to see the roots of the plant as they grow... we will recycle it afterwards!) We're so excited to watch them grow! In classroom economy news, housing prices plummeted this week due to the limited returns on investment projected for the rest of this 2022 school year. This is good news for those interested in breaking into the market or for those just looking to add to their investment property portfolio. There was a rush to buy new homes and many of us are now enjoying a steady residual income stream. There were not enough properties (cubby baskets) to go around so Madame let us create some imaginary properties and name our renters. Most of us got a great laugh out of naming our siblings as the renters because we loved the thought of our siblings having to "pay" us rent each week. (To clarify, the imaginary rent payments will actually come from Madame so nobody should be insisting that their siblings empty their piggy banks for them!) ;-) Extra pics...
As Madame has been spending many hours editing "Poule Maboule" videos, cleaning up never-ending mounds of hay, and questioning all her life choices ;-) ...this blog post will veer from the traditional format and will be more of a photo drop of all of the cool things we did this week. It was a week of celebrating francophone culture with the whole school with our "semaine de francophonie". There were 5 awesome days of games, projects and activities, all related to our school's love of everything French! A huge "merci" goes to some of our esteemed French immersion teachers for planning it all, to the PAC for their contributions, and to the parents and high school students who came out to help! We have such an amazing community! In the midst of all the francophone awesomeness, we also squeezed in another theme day ("tacky tourist day") and we spent a bunch of time filming our plays. Edited videos will be coming soon! Happy Spring Break!! "Tintamarre"...an Acadian tradition of marching through the community making noise with improvised instruments and other noise makers... Avery's spa... Group hug to say "goodbye" to Avery, who is moving during Spring Break. :-(
Our class guinea pigs upgraded to a mansion this week! We were so excited when we arrived on Monday morning to find Madame had all the parts laid out for the new cage. Many of our great LEGO and Magnatile builders got to put their skills to real life use, eagerly looking through the directions to help Madame put it all together. Sienna even gifted them with a housewarming gift with their names on it. ;-) In Math, we have been practicing adding with doubles (2+2, 3+3, 4+4...) This is a mental math strategy because if we know how to add doubles, then doubles + 1 starts to become easy ("I know that 5 + 6 = 11, because 5 + 5 = 10 and then I just add 1 more!") To learn our doubles in French, Madame introduced us to a silly and dramatic song that she made with her kids, with a tune that some of the parents that grew up in the 90s will remember well. (You'll just have to excuse the scratchy singing. We definitely have nothing on the Backstreet Boys). We are also learning that equations can be written horizontally or vertically! We've been working hard at identifying French digraphs (2 letters that together make one sound). This week's focus was on "ch" and "au". We drew art inspired by the digraphs, did relay races, slapped the sounds with fly swatters, went on scavenger hunts for words containing those sounds, played reading games with dice, and created sentences based around the digraphs. We started upping our game with the fly swatter game by having Madame write an extra letter before the digraphs to make it a little trickier. We had to really listen extra hard for those 2-letter sounds and try to be the first to slap the correct one. Finding words hidden around the classroom... Our Ks are just expected to write one or two of the vocabulary words and draw a picture, but many of them are stretching themselves and beginning to write actual sentences! Bravo! Extra pics...
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