The balls are back! The bathtub in our classroom has traditionally been a ball pit, but when COVID hit Madame took out the balls out of an abundance of caution. However, since the balls are plastic and easily cleaned, she has been given the go-ahead to reintroduce them, provided that we stick to a minimal amount that can be sprayed daily with disinfectant, just like our other plastic toys. (Students must wash hands before entering, and can only go in with socks on their feet.) We have been very happy to embrace this "new" addition to our classroom! This week we experimented with taking our literacy centres outdoors. We all had a great attitude about it and enjoyed trying out some new things, like drawing out our letters and words with chalk, and playing games with an alphabet tarp. We've also continued to add some new game concepts to our indoor centres. A popular one this week was fishing. Students can change the words they're fishing for, depending on their reading level. They must be able to pronounce their word in order to keep the fish they've caught. Our ability to decode unfamiliar words is getting so much stronger! For our letter books, Grade 1s are required to read the words off the board and write them beneath the appropriate picture. At first, this caused some tears as we were convinced that we didn't know how to do it. But Madame helped us sound them out and promised us that we would soon be able to do it on our own. Sure enough, one of the Grade 1 girls said to Madame today, "You were right, Madame! This is getting so much easier!" Music to Madame's ears... In Math, we've been continuing our focus on recognising numbers to 20, as well as subitizing - the ability to instantly recognize "how many" in a small set. For example, when adults roll a dice, they are able to instantly recognize the number of dots that they roll without having to count them. This is an actual skill that needs to be developed. It helps students to gain a grasp of numbers and prepares them for more complex addition concepts. One of our favourite morning videos has become this song by Jack Hartmann. The song is in English, but the majority of the video just shows a variety of sets without words so we are able to practice calling out our numbers in French. We've also been directly working on addition concepts this week through games and activities. We enjoyed "making 10" in various ways with unifix cubes. Kindergarteners played with different patterns for making 10, while Grade 1s took it a step further and wrote out their equations on a whiteboard. Some of our Ks decided to try out the Grade 1 equations, too! And "la forêt", of course! We can't leave that out! We braved the rain and had another great afternoon on Thursday running wild and free!...with a slight detour to take advantage of a fun sign in Spirit Square! An "evil fish"... Also, a big "merci" to everyone who has been sending in pictures of their squirrels in nests at home! We've even had a squirrel added to the Christmas Nativity. I'm not familiar with the mention of squirrels in the traditional Biblical narrative, but you just can't argue with a giant squirrel paying its respects to Baby Jesus.
We're now in review mode for our letter sounds...but, with a new vocabulary challenge! Each day, Madame comes with mystery items in her "boite de mystères" that begin with our letter of the day. We take turns pulling out an item and identifying it. ...and then we make a letter book all about those items that we found in the box. This is followed up with a journal entry about one of the items. Up until now, all of our journal entries have involved directly copying sentences from the board (Grade 1s) or tracing (Kindergarten). But we now get to start being creative by choosing which new vocabulary word WE want to use to fill in the blank of our sentence structure. This has resulted in some interesting discoveries, like the fact that some of our words are "boys" (masculin) and others are "girls" (feminin). We have to change up parts of our sentence just *slightly* depending on their gender. It's been a literacy-focused week as we are also learning how to do independent lit. stations. To manage all of our different ages and stages, our lit. stations are adaptable... each of us works on practicing the flashcard set that we are on currently with hands-on activities and games. We are settling into a groove with the various stations and Madame has been adding a new activity or game each day. We love that we get to choose our own activity at lit. centre time. One of the most popular stations at the moment is the smelly felts, so some of us may have come home with noses like this... Now that we are catching on to this new literacy system, our next challenge will be to take the lit. centre concept beyond the 4 walls of our classroom and attempt it outside! And speaking of outside, after seemingly endless rain, we got incredibly lucky with the weather on Thursday afternoon for our walk to the forest! We felt a couple of drips on our way there, and then a couple of drips on the way back, but other than that the weather was perfect! Some of us have been really interested in tree and pinecone identification. We're learning the differences between hemlock, red cedar and douglas fir. We also discovered some places where we could curl up inside the trees. We had some great ideas and wonders: "Maybe a squirrel lives in here!" "I wonder if there are bugs hiding in this hole!" We even dug for "dinosaur bones" as the tree roots morphed with our imaginations. Some other cool discoveries... leaves that are shaped like hearts, and rocks that are made up of lots of other tiny rocks! Back in class, we've been trying some directed drawing. Madame puts on a video from "Art Hub" on YouTube and then mutes the sound so that she can give us directions in French. Some of us have taken to this right away! Others, Madame has discovered, are perfectionists and we are learning to work through our frustrations. It has been a great exercise on following French directions, on hand-eye coordination, and on persevering when things are difficult.
TGIF! And happy Friday the 13th! But wait, isn't it Monday? This is definitely one of the strangest weeks to add to the books. But we also remember that the reason we had a day off on Wednesday was to commemorate Remembrance Day and all the reasons we enjoy peace in our country. Peace is love.Peace is loving others.Peace is reading.Peace is helping others.Peace is the soldiers who keep us free.Peace is watching the snow fall....these are just some of the many answers that the students gave to the question of "Qu'est-ce la paix?" (What is peace?) We enjoyed taking part in a school-wide Zoom assembly, with mini performances by several classes and a video all about the history of poppies. Madame was SO impressed with how seriously we took the event and how quiet and respectful we were the whole time. We all did a great job of standing for "O Canada", as well, and even singing along wherever we could. Parker and Allie from our class even had the chance to go to the cenotaph with a group of students from PME to lay their poppy rocks on the monument. Thank you to Mrs. Bateson, our wonderful secretary, for the photos below. All of the students are encouraged to find a special place around their neighbourhood to place their rocks to remind everyone who sees them of the peace that we have, and of how we shouldn't take that for granted. We have continued our study of squirrels (les écureuils) this week. We've been enjoying looking through books, asking all kinds of questions, and even making our own little books all about them. To reinforce what we learned about squirrels' predators, we played a game of tag that Madame called "Prédateurs". All of the students started out as "les écureuils" (squirrels), with just one in the middle as the "prédateur". The prédateur had to chase les écureuils from one side of the basketball court to the other and any students that were tagged became prédateurs, too! Les prédateurs got to choose which animal they were - a fox, wolf, coyote, hawk, marten... We were all very invested in this game! Sadly, most of our écureuils fell victim to les prédateurs, but... life, right?? We've also been trying our hand at building our own écureuils out of wood. We learned about the adjectives "lisse" (smooth) and "rugueux" (rough) as we sanded our blocks of wood. And we loved taking turns hammering in our legs and tails. (Protective eyewear was sanitised between each use.) The whole process was a little messy, but also a lot of fun and we were very pleased with the end result. And bonus... no fingers, toes or other limbs were harmed in the making of this project.
Fall colours are all around us! We had so much fun this week on our first walk to Hoffman Park (la forêt). We have been learning all about squirrels so we went armed with our binoculars (jumelles), searching for any signs of squirrels or their nests. Unfortunately we didn't see any. It's hard to say whether that's because we are likely a very intimidating group for unsuspecting squirrels, or because we were just so distracted by everything else in the forest that by the time we got there, we forgot to look. Madame brought lots of outdoor toys in our wagon in case we needed some "play inspiration", but as it turns out, giant sticks, bugs, and hollowed out logs are more than enough inspiration for us. We asked great questions about different kinds of pinecones (we are learning about the differences between Douglas Fir, Pine and Hemlock), and were curious about those funny-looking mushrooms growing on the logs. We practiced teamwork and collaboration, and stretched our imaginations in all kinds of ways! Hollowed-out stumps became "hot tubs", "2-floor houses", and "castles". And we practiced our French vocabulary with a forest sing-along of Madame's version of "Down by the Bay" - modified to "Dans la forêt". Thanks to Mrs. McMillan for accompanying us! And by the way, if you take a selfie on Madame's phone, she WILL post the selfie. ;-) As we gear up for Remembrance Day, we have also been working on making poppy rocks. Our plan is to lay a couple of them on the cenotaph in Spirit Square next Tuesday, along with many of the other students from our school. PME was even in the news for this! Our class read a book called "A Poppy is to Remember" and shared what we know about Remembrance Day. We learned about the significance of the poppy and about the fun way to say it in French: "un coquelicot". Madame outlined the poppies on the rocks for us, but we got to colour them however we wanted. Many of us tried adding some artistic details and shadowing. In Math, we've begun learning about addition. Madame brought in a funny scale to show us how the concept of equality works. When the numbers are balanced on each side of the scale, they are equal! We had so much fun calling out different numbers for Madame to try and seeing how those translated into equations on the whiteboard. Then Madame let us explore the scale, ourselves, along with doing some individual addition games. Today we learned about the art of First Nations' Pow Wow dancing via Zoom! A Pow Wow dancer named Shyama-Priya joined us on our big screen and showed us how we, too, can do Pow Wow dances! And look out for our Art Cards next week! We have been working very hard on them!
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