It was "store day" today! (le magasin) We finally got the chance to spend all of our hard-earned nickels. And some of us even became first-time home buyers, having earned enough cash to scoop up our properties and end our pesky weekly rent payments to Madame. Others of us chose to continue renting for now, in favour of spending more on tangible items we wanted in the moment. We may come to regret this decision later, but this is all part of practicing and living out real-life scenarios in a safe environment. After all, the best way to learn is through experience. And at least for now, we were all thrilled with our choices. In gearing up for "Black History Month" in February, we have been learning about all kinds of famous people of colour who have made a huge impact on our society, whether through political action, art, music, science... you name it! From Martin Luther King Jr, to Viola Davis on our Canadian $10 bill, we have spent almost every day focusing on a different black hero. We were reminded continously that our skin is "just the wrapping paper" and had fun comparing our colouring. We have also enjoyed bopping in our seats during work time to a varied playlist of the greats like Arethra Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, and Stevie Wonder... to Pharrell Williams, Beyoncé and Black Eyed Peas. (...as well as some famous black French singers!) And our team challenge this week was based on a famous black astronaut named Mae Armstrong. She was told that she would never achieve her dream of going into space and should become a nurse, instead. But she defied the odds. "If you can dream it, if you believe it and work hard for it, anything is possible." - from the book "Mae Among the Stars" In Mae's honour, we decided to make stomp rockets! Madame cooked up an interesting contraption with PVC piping and a 2-litre pop bottle, and we set to work. We made modifications along the way as we played with optimal designs. There was a whole lot of fun chaos in the classroom as we tested our models, but the best part was when we took it all outside. Those things could FLY! And Callum even figured out how to modify the design into a blow-rocket! Bravo, Callum! Amazing out-of-the-box thinking! We have been learning a new song! You may have heard some of us singing it around the house... the "Nations of the World," where we attempt to sing the names of almost all of the countries on Earth. How does this fit into the French curriculum? Madame says, "Don't ask... But we teach students first and the curriculum second." And Madame is trying to set us up to be killer trivia players in our later years, which is a critical skill for Tuesday nights at Foamer's, not to mention an awesome party trick. (And who says you don't learn anything in school?!) But in all seriousness, Madame has loved hearing us randomly break into song during play time. One of us will start singing the names of the countries, then another will join in, and soon the majority of the class is singing while building with blocks, sculpting putty, or delicately placing perler beads. We're not sure if we'll be able to learn the entire song before the end of the school year, but it will be a fun challenge just to see how far we get! Extra photos...
Our first ice skating trip was a great success! We had some more "guest presenters" come in on Tuesday! Fun fact... they're triplets! They are outstanding perler-bead creators and come up with designs all on their own. They showed us how they build each piece of their creations like a puzzle piece that they can then snap together and join with toothpicks. The toothpicks slip easily into the holes and allow joints to actually move. We were all fascinated by what they were able to make! But we also talked about how their creations took many hours to build and LOTS of patience... and even some tears. Most of the time, things didn't go exactly as they had planned, especially when they first started making more complex puzzle pieces. And then they would have to start all over again. But they kept trying and never gave up! Anyone can become good at anything with that attitude! Here are some pics from a couple of their amazing creations last year when they were in Madame's class. They didn't have these ones with them for their presentation, but Madame thought they were definitely worth sharing... They took some of their creations apart and took photos of the pieces so that we could try to recreate them. They even leant us some perler bead boards to use! Merci, Callen, Nathan et Skya! Another big event of the week was that we officially launched our classroom economy! Think a variation of Monopoly... but lived out in real time. We all have our own "houses" and have to pay rent to live in them (..."just like some of your moms and dads have to pay to live in your house!"). Our "homes" are recognizable places from around our Pitt Meadows community that we each got to pick and stick to our cubby boxes - the library, a sushi place, the Rec Centre, a dentist... We all have assigned jobs (which will rotate from week to week) and when we do our jobs well, we are rewarded with a nickel for our efforts. We can earn nickels in other ways, too - by having Madame catch us being helpful or extra kind, and by speaking in French without prompting. We collect our nickels in our personal money boxes and at the end of the week, we get to use our money to purchase something from the class store... to keep... like, forever! #mindsblown! We have been counting down the days until store day ("le magasin") ever since. ...and unfortunately it had to be cancelled due to snow days! But we will try again for next week. Here's the catch... we can't make any purchases until we have done two things first: 1. Paid rent on our home (a nickel paid into the house piggy bank) 2. Donated at least one nickel to charity (because it is just as important to learn about giving and being generous with what we have, as it is to learn about spending and saving). As a class, we really wanted to help animals so we voted to donate our money to the SPCA. In June, we will add up all of the coins that we have collected and then Madame will match our donation and we will send a cheque to them and have a little celebration! (Your children do not need to bring in any money from home for this venture. They are using the nickels provided in class. But if you would like to make an added donation, you're welcome to do so.) But circling back to our "homes", here's the thing... not everyone wants to rent their home for the rest of their life. Some of us would prefer to OWN our home and get rid of those pesky rent payments. So, if we save up 15X our rent ($0.75), we can PURCHASE our home and never have to pay a nickel to Madame again! We love this idea in theory, but it's much harder to fork over the $0.75 on store day when we would rather spend our hard-earned nickels on the frivolous items in front of us. Sidenote: This is an old photo of the store because Madame hasn't been at school to take a new picture. Items are not available anymore as pictured here, but have been replaced with new ones. Also, the organization of the boxes here is driving me batty. Incremental order from left to right makes way more sense! What was I thinking several years ago?! *Deep breaths, Madame. Deep breaths.* ![]() We can even continue to save our nickels and buy up other properties so that other people have to pay rent to US!! Cha-ching! We are catching on amazingly well to all of these adult concepts and some of us are already making big plans and dreams. We are also quickly learning how many nickels are in a dime, a quarter, a loonie, and a toonie as we excitedly count the coins in our banks. Soon we will get to start exchanging our nickels for larger coins as we begin to get the hang of counting and sorting.
We kicked off 2024 with a “bang”!… literally. Madame had balloons hung up and we got to pop them throughout the day, revealing surprise fun activities - watch a French show, play a game, and our favourite: have a dance party. We enjoyed watching the replay of the New Year’s countdown and fireworks show from France at the Arc de Triomphe, and were also amazed by a Guinness Book of World Records-breaking drone show - 15,000 drones reenacting the story of “The Nutcracker”. New Year's is a special holiday because it's the most widely celebrated in countries all around the world! We decided after much discussion about New Year's resolutions that it would be a good idea to make some resolutions of our own. Did you know that Monday is "Black Excellence Day?" This is a special day to celebrate Black history, and learn more about Black stories, art, and achievements leading up to Black History Month in February. We kicked off our learning by reading stories about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. We were shocked to hear that they were treated differently by people (and even by the government!) just because of the colour of their skin. But we loved the message from the book about Martin Luther King Jr - instead of fighting hate with hate, it is so much more powerful to fight hate with love. We talked about how our skin is really just "the wrapping paper" for the amazing person we are inside. (La peau ce n'est que l'emballage.) We have begun learning about money, money, money! Next week will be the big launch of our classroom economic system so to prepare, we took a deep dive into nickels. And clearly, we needed to practice counting by 5s if we're going to be counting nickels! There's a song for that... (Thank you, P!nk, for the inspiration!...and Madame's children for the execution.) ;-) And while pennies are virtually obsolete, they are ever so helpful from a mathematical perspective for understanding the building blocks. So we played a little game that had us trading our pennies for nickels, our nickels for dimes, and... for the few lucky ones who managed to "win" the game... our dimes for a loonie! (Sidenote: there is a French name for these various coins, but it's a mouthful: "une pièce de 5 sous", for example. So because we live in a predominantly English-speaking community and this is such a real world topic, we're focusing on the English terms instead... while speaking French, of course!) ;-) This week we had the first of what Madame is calling our "guest presenters"... former students of Madame's that have a great skill to share with us! It was Lincoln and Alex this time, who showed us how to make working bow and arrows with K'nex! Merci, grands amis! Extra photos... snooooow!
Merry Christmas!! It has been an action-packed 5 days leading up to the holidays! Every day, we have come with stories about our "elf on the shelf"'s antics, tales of our visits with Santa, and calculations/debates of precisely how many days are left until Christmas... "No, but you can't count today!"... "Yes, you have to count today because it's only the morning!" We really enjoyed getting our Christmas Spirit on with a sing-along with Mme Paschalis' Grade 1/2 class. Madame Van Sickle decided to embrace that Christmas spirit, too, by doing a science experiment with candy canes. Which one would change the most?...the one in cold water, hot water, vinegar, or oil? We made our hypotheses and then tested our theories. We set a timer for 5 minutes and then observed the changes. The hot water was the winner! Almost all of the colour had dissolved. Vinegar was next, followed by cold water, both of which had completely dissolved the candy canes by the end of the day. The oil did nothing!...nada!...zilch! We spent some time prepping our props for our Winter production this week, too! And in the end, we did such an amazing job on our performances! We should definitely be proud of ourselves! Below is a video of the production. It's posted as a protected link so that it can't be searched on YouTube - it's only accessible for people who have the link. Nana Kesler also spoiled us this week with individualized homemade ornaments and treats! She really is the BEST adopted grandmother ever!! And so talented, too! And even though we were a little late celebrating this holiday, we wanted to recognize "St. Lucia's Day" (traditionally celebrated on Dec. 13). It's a holiday that originates from Sweden, where our friend Lo's family is from! We listened to a story all about the traditions surrounding the day and then did our own little St. Lucia procession wearing the paper crowns that we made. Lo's mom even made us some traditional pepparkakor, a Swedish treat! It was so yummy! And since we're celebrating all the things, we couldn't leave out Mexican Christmas! ...especially since Liliana's dad is from Mexico! Originally, we were planning to make our own piñata for this event, but our homemade efforts met a tragic demise when the balloon inside the paper maché popped before it could all dry. But there's no problem that a little creativity (and the Dollar Store) can't fix! And while they were far from being traditional Mexican Christmas piñatas, we really didn't care about the appearance. We were far more concerned with the content. Extra photos...
We had so much fun on our big outing this week to the high school to make Christmas sweaters out of clay! It was a long walk there and back, but none of us complained even once. Champs! We loved working with the high schoolers and had so many creative ideas for our little projects! Meeting "Swim Shady"... ![]() It was an artsy week! We also worked on making ourselves into reindeer to decorate our classroom door. We learned all about Kwanzaa, too, and practiced drawing a "kinara" - one of the symbols of Kwanzaa. We loved dancing around to some African music throughout the week in honour of this celebration. Nana Kesler brought us some fun little items for making Christmas crafts and Madame left them out for us to use as our imaginations saw fit. Among the items were some sweet little jingle bells. Nana Kesler likely never envisioned those bells turning us into punk rockers. But it just goes to show that our imaginations can be sparked in many different ways and there is not one "correct" way to use an item. These bells inspired a whole lot of out-of-the-box crafting by us, boys! We read a book about how in Mexico, they celebrate Christmas for 9 days and have a party with a piñata. This idea sounded pretty great to us, so Madame let us get knee-deep (almost literally) in some paper maché. Just as fun as making the piñata was the clean-up process afterward! There were many gleeful expressions of: "This is more fun than the piñata!" Give the children sponges and a spray bottle and magical things happen... And the book fair was this week! So many fun things to see and buy and inspire us! Extra photos...
"Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel... I made it out of clay!" ...we all have this ear worm after learning about Hannukah this week! And if we were going to sing about dreidels made out of clay, we were going to MAKE dreidels out of clay. But we decided to use some pre-made dreidels for trying out the game with our big buddies. It was a hit! So much fun to be had with such a little toy. We were so inspired that we came up with a design all on our own for perler bead dreidels and some of us even started writing Hebrew letters all over other projects. Our dreidels served as a great springboard for learning all about the origins of Hannukah. We found Israel on a map and some of us remarked that we had heard the grown-ups talking about a war happening in that country right now. Madame was able to have a delicate (and very simplified) conversation with us about how just like sometimes we, as children, get into arguments, sometimes powerful people who lead countries/groups get into arguments, too, and they are not able to find good strategies for getting along. We are hoping that Israel and the Palestinians find peace very soon. An interesting fact about Hannukah is that it follows the Lunar calendar (it's based on the moon!) so the dates change every year. This ties in well with what we have been learning about the moon. All these crazy facts about space are so mind-blowing! Did you know??... the Earth is constantly spinning and does one full rotation every 24 hours, which is how we get our days! But while that spinning is happening, the Earth is also slowly rotating around the sun every 365 days, giving us our measurement for one year. But, wait!... there's more!... while all THAT is happening, Earth's moon is spinning around our planet every 29.5 days, giving us our months! And all of this...just...happens. Every day. Like while we're sitting here eating our fishy crackers and bear paws, we are actually spinning in space. *Minds blown* We had to act it all out, of course! Another crazy fact!... the moon doesn't actually give off its own light. It just reflects the sun's light! We had fun replicating this in different ways... with a mirror and flashlight, with a bouncy ball, etc. And since we're learning about the moon, why not have an outer-spaced themed STEM project? Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give your two aliens (les extra-terrestres) a safe and soft landing on the moon. Here are your materials! And, go! Some of us were so excited about our group project that we spontaneously came up with a cheer! :-) This was particularly a win because we started out having disagreements about design and whose turn it was to take charge, but we were able to figure out how to speak with each other respectfully and make compromises, and in the end we were so happy with our successful results! And we are happy to report that all aliens landed on the moon unscathed. We also spent some time in the forest this week again, discovering all kinds of different mushrooms, finding "fairy houses", building homesteads, and playing tag. We were having so much fun that even Madame didn't want to leave and luckily we got back to school 1 minute before the bell rang. Extra pics...
It's been a week of new experiences for many of us! On Wednesday, we did our first "forest walk". We began by gathering for a land acknowledgment in French, which we have memorized incredibly well! We remember that it is a privilege to run and play freely on land that used to belong to the Katzie people. Madame also went all "Fred Penner" and brought her ukulélé for us to sing "Dans la forêt", an adapted version of "Down by the Bay" that has us singing about all kinds of strange things we may see in the forest! Some of us enjoyed trying out the ukulélé ourselves afterward. And it was time for some old-school play!... making sling-shots out of sticks, building forts with branches and other items we gathered, rolling over logs and discovering worms and bugs... We even discovered what we dubbed "ancient sticks"... smooth sticks that had lines etched into them, almost like someone had drawn on them with a carving tool. We also got to try roller-blading on Thursday! This was a new experience for many of us and we were very grateful for the support (literally!) from our big buddies. Some of us made amazing progress in the short 45 minutes that we were rolling around the gym. And it's a new month! And not just any new month... it's December! Woohoo!! (Bring on the chocolate advent calendars!) Seeing as it's the darkest month of the year, Madame decided that it's time we started tracking the moon's cycles. We love the moon light that Madame put up by our class rainbow, which can display the basic shape of the moon as it is currently. Every day for the month of December, we will record the moon's shape on our tracking sheet. Extra photos...
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...
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