Happy Lunar New Year! We have been tracking the moon's cycle for several months and learned that the Chinese celebrate their new year based on this month's "new moon" - when the moon is completely dark to us on Earth because the back side of it is facing the sun. This year's Chinese zodiac animal is the dragon! We had so much fun making special accordion dragons with our big buddies. The time has come for us to be initiated to the never-ending world of verb conjugations. Any parents or grandparents who attended French Immersion know aaaaaaall about verb conjugations. But we are starting small!... with just the singular pronouns... We have been practicing these throughout the week in our journals, and we are starting to get pretty good at them! And speaking of French, we have a new "monitrice" named Marilou who has begun coming to visit us twice per week. She's fresh off the plane from Montreal and will be leading us in oral games/activities. Madame says it's pretty special because Madame, herself, had the same job as Marilou, only as an English "monitrice" when she was a young, spring chicken 20 years ago, living in France. We are excited about all of the things we will learn from Marilou! Our classroom economy system has been humming along, with an impressive increase in our French-speaking efforts thanks to the fact that we are now getting PAID to speak to Madame in French! Some of us have even started little side businesses... building or creating things and selling them to our classmates for classroom money. We also had more students become "home owners" this week, having saved enough to purchase their home outright and rid themselves of their weekly rent payments. And at least one student has started purchasing additional investment properties. ;-) We have gotten so good at counting our nickels that Madame decided we were ready to move on to dimes. And this requires counting by 10, and sorting our nickels into groups for exchange. There's also a song for that, as Madame brainwashes us to learn our skip-counting... (one of Madame's first attempts at video-making... the kids asked, "Why do you look so different?!") We turned the song into somewhat of a "rap battle" and ended up yelling our numbers at each other. For Christmas, Teddy gifted Madame some little flower pots so we decided to try growing some grass seeds in them. We've enjoyed checking its daily growth progress and today we even fed some to the guinea pigs! They were very happy with their homegrown treat! Now that our ice skating trips are finished, it's time to get back into our forest walk routine. A big "merci" to Nana Kesler for joining us again this week! Madame forgot her ukulélé so instead of singing our usual forest song, we practiced some knot tying. This was a challenge for a lot of us, but we kept trying even when it was hard and many of us made our first bow! And of course, we played. We made fascinating discoveries. We built forts. And we even learned to set up a tent. Extra photos...
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