Joyeux Noël! The much-anticipated final day of school before Winter Break has arrived and we are all just *slightly* excited. We had a blast at our concerts and were very proud of all of our hard work! A big "merci" to all of the friends that gave us special Christmas gifts! We were very spoiled! And our Big Buddies even baked us Christmas cookies on Wednesday and dropped off pancakes and sausages for us this morning as a surprise! The rest of this week was definitely not a "write-off" for us. Our big event was our field trip to the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre on Tuesday where we learned so many things! We talked about the sun - how it's a star made up of a ball of gases, and how our Earth and the other planets rotate around it. We learned about why the spinning of the earth causes light during the day and darkness during the night, about how the tilt of the Earth causes seasonal changes and what those changes mean for First Nations groups, particularly in the way that they fish and the types of salmon that they catch. Madame may have shed a small tear of pride when one student raised her hand and explained to our presenter that we had already learned about salmon and that when First Nations people eat salmon, they bring the bones back to the river to say hay čxʷ q̓ə ("thank you") for the fish. The presenter had never heard that word and he learned something new that day! (Ooooh, this makes Madame so happy!) ;-) We also learned about nocturnal vs. diurnal animals, and got to lay back in cool chairs to watch a movie on the giant ceiling screen of the Planetarium to hear all about constellations, planets, and how our Earth fits in to all of that big space beyond! But what was our favourite part of the trip? If you asked many of us, our answer would be "running around pretending that the aliens in the waiting area ['cosmic courtyard'] were going to get us!" Or "riding in the car!" It's the little things... Photo credits for some of the above: Heather Rhodes and Maria Perretta Science also did a mash-up with Christmas this week in our classroom. We did an experiment using candy canes and tried to predict which one would dissolve the fastest - the candy cane in hot water, the one in cold water, the one in vinegar, or the one in oil. We drew out our hypotheses, many of which were more interesting than Madame would have predicted: "I think that the candy cane in cold water is going to turn blue because cold things make ice and ice makes things blue." ...not exactly on the mark, but Madame loves the outside-of-the-box thinking! In the end, we found that the candy cane in hot water dissolved the fastest and we were all surprised to see how it not only made the candy cane thinner, it also removed the colour. Madame used oreo-flavoured candy canes so we loved how the hot water jar ended up smelling like hot chocolate! Some other highlights from the week: playing with our Big Buddies and learning how to do cup stacking with Mr. Severud. We also got really creative with some of our Christmas crafting this week and had a lot of fun doing a sing-along in the gym with a whole bunch of classes on Friday afternoon. Merry Christmas et Bonne Année!
Rain, rain go away...come again another day! Actually, if you could stay away for a while, that would be great. Thanks. Signed, all teachers everywhere ;-) Despite having been confined to the indoors during both recesses yesterday, we still went on our afternoon walk to Hoffman Park in the pouring rain. We learned a new word of the day: "trempé(e)" (drenched). Most of us had a fabulous time at the beginning of our outing, walking through giant puddles, playing tag and hide-and-go-seek, and even pretending to build "campfires" with umbrellas. But by the time we got back to school, we were all dripping wet and very cold! It wasn't all rain this week, though! Monday was a beautiful, sunny day and we managed to get to Spirit Square with Mme Towne's class to take advantage of the snow that was left over from the event on Friday evening. Photo credits for last two photos: Mme Towne We also got our "festive" on this week with some fun Christmas creating activities. Our Big Buddies prepared a special Christmas Tree craft for us using popsicle sticks, and we also got to decorate a paper tree that will be placed in the gym for our Christmas concert. One of the secretaries even gave us a bunch of fun Christmas puffy stickers and Christmas stamps, so we had a great time on Friday afternoon doing some non-stop crafting. Tuesday was another fun day for us with disco rollerblading! Many of us were grateful to have our Big Buddies there to help us stay upright! And in academic news, we began our Science unit this week on light, learning how to distinguish between natural light and artificial light. We had a fun time when Madame introduced the concept by letting us play around with flashlights, shining them in the dark through coloured paper, prisms, on mirrors, etc. We enjoyed combining different colours of paper to see if we could create new colours, and watching how the light bounced off the mirrors and came back on us. We even discovered that the ball pit balls glow when we put lights up to them! In Math, while we have been regularly practicing addition with our "wall math" and "number of the day" routines, we have now begun our official unit on adding. We are beginning by learning about numbers that we can add together to make 10. Our favourite adding activity this week was the money game. Madame had us work in pairs and gave us all a ten-frame made out of an egg carton. We had to take turns with our partner shaking and spilling our little 1 and 2 counters to add the corresponding number of pennies into the ten frame. As soon as we filled the frame, we raised our hand and Madame would hand us a dime. Then we started the process all over again. The group with the most dimes by the end of the activity was the winner! We were pretty pumped this week, too, to discover all of the fabric in the craft area. We are now begging Madame to bring in real needles and thread to teach us how to sew. Madame has lots of plastic needles for sewing through felt, but they don't work very well through regular fabric. Some of us got creative and used a hole punch to make holes in the fabric, then weave yarn through to make capes and skirts. Apparently Madame will have to go shopping this weekend for some needles!
We had a bit of a strange week with parent conferences wiping out a day and a half and Madame away for one of the remaining days. But we still managed to squeeze in some valuable learning time. We have been working on preparing a play to perform for all of our mamans et papas some time in the New Year. We don't have a set date yet because Madame wants to make sure that we're completely ready before we perform. But Madame promises to give you all plenty of notice before the big day. The play is called "La Poule Maboule" and is an interpretation of the classic story of the chicken who thinks that the sky is falling. We are all memorizing the entire play so it is taking us quite a while to build up to it, but we are enjoying the process and we love it when we get a turn to play one of the roles. The Grade 1s have also been continuing to read with our Big Buddies in the mornings. Many of us have moved beyond practicing our alphabet sounds now and are working on sounding out syllables, reading our coloured flashcards, and becoming experts on some levelled reading books. We have so much love for our Big Buddies and never want them to leave! Madame is pretty sure the feeling is mutual for the Big Buddies. ;-) We're getting into a pretty good rhythm with our literacy stations and, for the most part, are getting to work right away on what needs to be done. Some of us (even some of our Ks!) are beginning to soar through our reading word lists! We love honking Madame's strange-looking horn to get everyone's attention when we complete a level, and then having the whole class sing us a "Bravo!" song. For those of us who haven't yet made it past the first level, Madame tells us not to worry. We will be having lots more in-class practice time in the New Year with our words and we WILL start to grasp them! To borrow an analogy: "Popcorn is prepared in the same pot, under the same heat, in the same oil, but they don't pop at the same time. Don't compare yourself to others. Your turn to pop is coming!" Madame says that the most important thing for us at this age is that we are ENJOYING our learning process and that we hold tight to the wonder and excitement of discovering the world around us. If our grown-ups push TOO hard, we may lose that wonder. And losing that wonder would be a far greater tragedy than being a little slower to grasp reading concepts. We love... ...writing our words with smelly felts. ...building our words with Bananagram letters. ...writing our words into Play-Doh or forming each letter with the Play-Doh. ...typing words on keyboards, tracing them in salt trays, and more! We also really enjoy our quiet reading times and learning how to use our words in the context of a sentence.
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