Today was National Truth and Reconciliation Day and we honoured it all week with orange shirts and Indigenous stories and themes. We have been starting our days with a land acknowledgment in French, recognizing that where we live and go to school in Pitt Meadows is actually on Katzie land that was taken from them. We have been learning gestures to go along with this acknowledgment to help us remember the tricky vocabulary. We are getting quite good at following along with Madame now! Most of the time Madame reads stories to us in French, but sometimes when there are special days like this, the content is too difficult for us in a new language so we revert to English and then can discuss details in French. We learned the significance of the colour orange with the book "Phyllis' Orange Shirt". We also read, among others, "Trudy's Rock Story", all about a girl from the Gitxsan Nation who remembers the teachings of her grandmother and goes in search of a rock with which to share her feelings when she is upset. We decided to do the same and went in search of our own rocks! In fact, sharing our feelings was part of our Math graphing activity this week. We had all kinds of elaborations on the question: "Comment ça va?" We also had our first school-wide assembly of the year this week where we sang "O Canada" in English and French, and got to learn more about Indigenous legends and history. To further honour Truth and Reconciliation Day, the whole school also took part in a "Bricks of Belonging" project, wherein each student created an orange brick for our wall to signify that every child matters. Our class' little stack of bricks was combined into the whole school's mural. In academic news, Madame is trying to turn all of us into linguists. Madame's first degree is in linguistics so she loves piecing apart words and has introduced us to something called "word mapping". All of us who are now reading rainbow coloured flashcards were meant to take our individual word lists and map out each of the sounds within the words. Do you need 2 letters to make that one sound?...put both letters in one box! Do you need 3 letters to make that one sound?...put all of them in the same box! And if there's a silent letter, leave it out of the sound box entirely. We write hearts under sounds that we haven't yet learned. This was a challenging exercise, for sure, but most of us caught on quickly and Madame insists that it will be hugely beneficial in helping us to recognize those same sounds within new words. Those of us not quite reading words yet got to play some letter sound review games. Our friends with the word lists joined in the fun, too, as they completed their tasks. Some of the games are designed in such a way that students of all different levels can still compete with one another. We met our Big Buddy class this week! We had fun doing a bunch of activities with them in the library, just to get to know them, and then next time we will actually be paired with a big buddy of our own. This buddy class will now begin reading with us most mornings, pulling us out one-on-one to work on our individual word lists and phonetic books. "Cops for Cancer" paid us a visit this week, too. It was a long wait for them to arrive, but we were so excited when we did finally catch a glimpse of them! And bonus... they gave us all stickers! Thank you to everyone who donated to this cause! Extra pics...
Did you know that yesterday was the first official day of Fall (or autumne, in French)? We decided to take our lessons outside for awhile and went on a hunt for things that represented Fall to us - leaves of all colours, acorns, sticks, etc... so many great French vocabulary words. And as is often a tradition in primary classes, we took our picture next to a tree so that we can see how it changes over the 4 seasons. In Math, we have been learning about making graphs once per week. This week the question was: "How was your weekend?" We gave Madame some adjectives for the graph (sad, fun, boring, weird) and then put our sticky note in the category that best matched how we felt. We have also been reviewing our numbers to 20, and have been practicing how to make 10 in various ways. One of our favourites was learning a card game that can be played alone or with friends. It provides us with such great practice at recognizing the various combinations of numbers that can be put together to make 10 and has the added bonus of being really fun, too! In French, we have been reviewing our letter sounds while also practicing blending two sounds together. Many of us are experts already at pulling one sound into the next! We've been using Madame's fancy "boîte à mystères" (mystery box) to pull out items that start with our letter of the day, and one day we even tried putting as many of those words together into sentences as we could. As an added challenge on Friday, Madame said some French words out loud and we used bracelet pop-its to push down one bubble for each sound that we heard in the word. Then we tried to write those sounds on our pages. And for our big Friday STEM challenge, Madame had us try making marble runs out of Play-Doh. She also provided us with some chopsticks, a little rolling pin and scissors as materials. This challenge proved to be very tricky! It took us a long time to figure out how to communicate effectively with one another and combine our ideas into something that actually worked. The "corbeaux" (crows) came out ahead in the end, not only because their marble run worked (mostly) ;-) but also because Madame gave them bonus points for speaking kindly to one another the entire time, compromising, and working together so effectively. Bravo! The other groups also came up with some amazingly creative ideas and most of theirs worked, too! Most of us are also getting very good at our group chants! In other news, we had our library orientation this week! We are loving the new remodel and we were so excited to pick out books to take home.
Welcome to Grades 1/2! The first day with us all together was a little bit nerve-wracking for some of us and Madame decided to acknowledge it by reading a book with us called "First Day Jitters". We talked about the different emotions we may be feeling after having been placed in our new classes and we gave Madame some suggestions of words to write on the whiteboard. Then we wrote our name on a sticky note and placed it by the word that described our feelings: "nervous", "excited", "sad", "happy". Some us were sad because we missed our mom, or because we wished another friend was with us, and some of us had contrasting feelings and put our sticky notes in between two categories. We talked about how all of these feelings are okay and normal on the first day! ...and THEN... we got to drink some "jitter juice". Just like the bubbly Sprite, our stomachs might feel kind of bubbly, but kind of magical, too, like the sprinkles inside. We also enjoyed a fun game of "Rock, Paper, Scissor" tag to get to know some new friends. Madame just finished reading the entire Harry Potter series with her daughter so she was inspired to divide our class into 4 "house" groups. Unlike Harry Potter, however, these groups are based on local animals and the First Nations' interpretation of their meaning. We have... - Bears: powerful and strong, but humble - Frogs: adaptable and successful - Beavers: work well in groups and value everyone's talents - Crows: intelligent and creative Now in the Harry Potter books, there was a sorting hat that chose which house students belonged to. We obviously don't have a magical hat so we used the next best thing... a cheese hat. Because the French love cheese. And Madame loves the Green Bay Packers (or she is required to by marriage, anyway)...and they love cheese. So clearly, cheese was the obvious choice for a magical decision-making hat. Each of us donned the cheese hat and then spun a digital spinner that determined our house placement. Madame taught us chants to go with our houses and we practiced them in our groups and then began performing them with actions. We are still working on the chants and the actions, but Madame says that's okay because they're tricky and it's something that we will work on throughout the year. She cited some boring reasons like the fact that it builds our French vocabulary, helps us think positively about ourselves, and blah, blah, blah... that's where we tuned out. We coloured some First Nations' art that corresponded with our houses and then Madame turned our art into our very own buttons! Today we worked in our house groups to make boats out of tinfoil and various other materials. The goal was to see whose boat could hold the most nickels before sinking. We drew out our plans ahead of time and then set to work. There were so many creative designs, but the winning boat held a whopping 51 nickels!! Our groups were all awarded 5 points for trying, but the "ours" group got a big 10 points on the board! We've also been reviewing our Math skills this week with a "Math About Me" page. There are so many ways that numbers are incorporated into our lives! Something we've started doing this week is "Show-and-Tell". The special bag will be going home with us periodically throughout the year and we can bring in any special item we want to present. Madame modelled the two different ways of presenting for Grade 1s and 2s and brought in one of her marathon medals as her show-and-tell item. We asked her: "Did you win??" And she told us that the great thing about a marathon is that hardly anyone expects to win, but everyone gets a medal just for not giving up, even when it's hard. That is something she wants us all to keep in mind as we are learning to read, write and put numbers together... It's not important what the kids around us are doing. The important thing is that even when it's hard and even if we want to give up, we keep on trying no matter what. Extra pics...
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