It's time to start learning about some artists! This week's feature was Rembrandt. ("Let's REMEMBER the name REMBRant"). We learned that he was from a country called the Netherlands ("hey, that's really close to England, where Teddy is from!") and that he loved to paint really realistic pictures of himself! We call these self-portraits. Rembrandt practiced his drawing skills over and over every day and became so good at drawing that his self-portraits almost looked like photos! Just like Rembrandt, we can get better at anything if we keep practicing it over and over, too! We started with some practice pages... ...and eventually progressed to making our own self-portraits! We used mirrors to examine our faces and help us try to copy our facial features onto the page. It was a great first try! All of our portraits were unique expressions of who we are. In French, the first couple of months had our focus mainly on letter SOUNDS so that we could get those building blocks of reading in place. Now that we have gone through the entire alphabet, we are reviewing those sounds and adding in letter NAMES with our alphabet rap. If you skip to about the 4 min mark, the rap repeats itself, but this time with a split screen showing the gestures we associate with each letter sound. If it's too fast, you can click on the little gear on the bottom right and slow down the speed. We are also continuing to learn more digraphs. This week's focus was on "oi" and "an/en". We figured out that we can take the digraphs we've been learning and put them together like puzzle pieces to create real French words! We have also been doing some games outside to help identify and entrench the digraphs. Today we put on quite the show for passers-by as we moved around the field to our different sounds, doing the actions for the sounds as we walked/ran. In Math, we've moved on to a new mental calculating strategy - adding doubles! A few years ago, Madame made a very cringe-worthy video with her kids to help us practice our doubles facts. (Where's the auto-tune when you need it?!) Madame says we'll hang out on this concept for awhile so we can work on memorizing our doubles facts. Extra photos... ![]() We've certainly enjoyed this glorious Fall week! With our big buddies, we went outside and did a scavenger hunt for all kinds of Fall items! We've been learning some new digraphs this week, and having fun doing it! Ask us about our "sound tag" game. Our reading is really starting to take off! We're recognizing more and more of the little building blocks within words and this is helping us to dissect words and put them back together. In Math, we've been focusing on the partners of 10 (1+9, 2+8, 3+7...), and using some fun games to help us memorize and internalize the concept. And we had a new team challenge this week!... Can you make a marble run out of nothing but play-doh and popsicle sticks? Before the challenge began, we rehearsed how we could replace some of our negative language:
Many of us who were hesitant to get involved in the first challenges have started actually voicing our opinions. And those that have emerged as leaders are learning how to listen to our friends without taking over the entire project. In the end, everyone got full points on the board for successfully working as a TEAM, and for making marble runs that actually worked! We discovered that the secret was in the incline. After the challenge was complete, we had a lot of fun playing with the giant balls of play-doh! And on the topic of amazing creations, we levelled up in our perler bead game this week. We're beginning to figure out how to make them 3D!! How cute are these?! Bravo, Teddy! Extra photos... ...for all those "take a picture, Madame!" moments...
This weekend, we remember... After a great Remembrance Day assembly on Friday, we walked out to the cenotaph and had our own moment of silence. With some coaching and discussion, we were able to do this incredibly well. We walked around it, looked at all the names, read the inscriptions, and reflected on what it all meant. We all decided that we are very grateful to live in a country where we live in peace every day. With some help from our big buddies, we made some beautiful poppy art, too. "A poppy is for peace." There's another cultural celebration this weekend - Diwali! This one hails from India and is a celebration of lights. We found India on Google Earth and compared it to where we live. "Wow, that's far away!" We were so happy to have Zahra from our class teach us more about this festival that her family celebrates. And some former students of Madame's let us borrow some of their beautiful Diwali outfits to put on display. We learned about little lamps called diyas that are often a symbol of Diwali. It was so fun to make our own diyas out of clay! But we learned that our diyas DON'T float like many of the real diyas. "Est-ce que ça flotte ou est-ce que ça coule?" Also on the theme of Diwali, we learned about rangoli art. And, while this beautiful art is normally made out of coloured sand or rice, Madame wants to maintain a good relationship with the custodian so we made ours out of pattern blocks. And a wonderful surprise this week!... Mia brought in her baby sister for show-and-tell. Madame says that her ovaries hurt after all those squishy baby snuggles and open-mouthed smiles. ("Stop it. You have 3 kids already. Remember the sleepless nights. Remeeeeeember...!!!") We were all filmed this week for a French Immersion promo video! It was quite an exciting experience having the cameras and film crew with us for about 30 minutes, and we all did an amazing job showing off our conversational French! Extra photos...
Happy Halloween! We kicked it off with a costume parade... It's the Mario Team! (...with Teddy and special guests: Mme Mustvedt as Mario, and Cole, Mme Van Sickle's son, as Bowser). We also enjoyed watching our big buddies and some other intermediate friends perform special Halloween dances in the gym. It was so exciting with the loud music and flashlights! Then there was pumpkin carving with Mme's special tools. (Don't worry, they're not real knives and won't cut our fingers!) For some of us, this was our first time carving a pumpkin! We took those pumpkin seeds that we extracted and did some estimating. How many seeds did we think were in the bowl?? Madame wrote down all of our answers. We had a huge variety of answers from 19 to 99 (which, mental note, we need to spend some more time on the concept of estimation). Final pumpkin seed count: 155. But that wasn't the end to our pumpkin seeds! It was time for a team challenge - who can create the most effective catapult out of nothing but popsicle sticks, spoons, and elastic bands? Once again, a huge underlying challenge was - can we contribute to the group? Can we speak kindly to our group members when we disagree? How can we compromise? Can we come up with one, unified project to present at the end? This definitely proved to be difficult in the days after Halloween when we were still recovering from a sugar comatose and lack of sleep. Emotions were running high. But we made it through and learned a lot about communication and leadership in the process. We were very proud of our final products! After we'd launched pumpkin seeds all over the classroom, what more could we do but cook them and eat them?! We LOVED the flavour with just a little margarine and garlic salt. There were a lot of exclamations of: "This is the best EVER!" Halloween always calls for Science experiments, too. We couldn't leave out Madame's favourite: "Which ice cubes will have the biggest reaction when mixed with juice?... normal frozen water, frozen Coke, or dry ice?" We made some hypotheses and took tallies of our opinions. In the end, there was no doubt that the dry ice won for biggest reaction! And we were all too happy to partake in the cold juice it created. We also had a special visit from Nana Kesler on the 31st, bringing special, personalized Halloween bags for us all. She also brought her husband with her this time and we were so excited to meet him, too! We swarmed him with questions: "Are YOU our adopted GRANDPA?!" He may still need time to consider this question... ;-) But the holidays didn't end with Halloween. We learned about the French holiday "Toussaint" (All Saint's Day) on November 1, and Día de los Muertos ("Day of the Dead") originating from Mexico, also celebrated from November 1 to 2. It seems the 31st to the 2nd is a time to celebrate the dead in cultures around the world! Extra photos...
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