This post is going to start out a little differently... with some shout-outs! Because sometimes we deserve special recognition. First, a shout-out to Brandon who is always willing to help kids that are younger than him. He enjoys reading books to younger siblings during our Monday Family Reading times, and helping his younger peers with their sight word flashcards. You're awesome, Brandon! Next, we have Aiden who is the first person this year to successfully fill every slot of his money box. Aiden makes an effort to speak in French constantly to Madame and has figured out the profitability of these efforts. Woo-hoo! Aiden can now make change independently, using multiple combinations of nickels, dimes, quarters, loonies and toonies. And a shout-out to Blakely, who did an amazing job in yesterday's Lunchbox Theatre production of the Sound of Music. Her classmates were in awe of her afterwards and kept coming up to her to say how amazing she was. A star in the making! There are soooo many kids that deserve shout-outs for different reasons, so we will try to highlight different kids periodically. All of us deserve a shout-out for our participation in Pink Shirt Day on Wednesday where we continued our emphasis on being kind to one another. We talked about the history of Pink Shirt Day and role-played different scenarios of what we would do to help someone if we saw another person picking on them. ...maybe you hear someone tell a friend: "You can't come to my birthday party!" or "You can't play with us!" ...what do we do in those situations? We had lots of great ideas and loved taking turns acting out the scenarios at the front of the class. We also extended our kindness to our school that day by picking up litter around the school grounds. We also made friendship rocks with our Big Buddies. And to finish off our Pink Shirt Day, we made some collaborative friendship art. There were no rules - just a blank canvas. At first some of us worked together to start a rainbow, but then we got distracted by the idea of splatter painting and the rainbow was abandoned. We came up with many different ideas throughout the process, some of them abstract and others more concrete. Some of us used the entire canvas while others focused on just one area. Tuesday was 100s day, meaning we have officially been at school for 100 days! We have been keeping a careful count of the days, using pennies and dimes to tally our totals. On that day we finally got to exchange 10 dimes for a loonie! As we continue to tally our days at school, we've begun practicing how to turn a number like 102 into dollars and cents. So we figured out that 102 would look like this... (Teacher edit: TECHNICALLY the number written above is the English way of writing dollars and cents. In French we would write it as 1,02$. But as these concepts are beyond the scope of the Grade 1 curriculum, Madame wants to be sure that we currently write them in a way that students will recognize when they go to the grocery store. If they can begin to understand the mathematical concepts right now, it will be easy for their teachers in higher grades to help them switch the period for a comma and move the dollar sign around). Many of us really got into the spirit of 100s day and dressed up as 100-year-old people. It was quite amusing to see us doing our Jump Rope for Heart with moustaches and wrinkles. We also made 100s day "trail mix" by putting 10 rows of 10 snacks onto a hundreds chart. Then we counted them all and got to eat them! Yum! And in honour of 100s day, Madame has taught us to count by 10s all the way to 120, by singing and dancing to a rap battle-style song with the tune of "Hollaback Girl". It has quickly become a favoutite! We've only learned the main part of the song so far - not the intro - but you can take a listen here ("compter par 10") to what the whole song sounds like. (Warning: you may not want to listen to the real lyrics to "Hollaback Girl" at home with us kids. The beat is awesome. The lyrics not so much.) And speaking of music, we had a special assembly on Friday with a visit from a rock group called "Speed Control" that hails from the Yukon. The group played us famous Canadian rock songs like "Born to be Wild", "Summer of 69", "Taking care of Business" and tunes from the Barenaked Ladies. And we were INTO it! Madame watched from the sidelines as some of us literally took out our ponytails and began headbanging. Others whipped out the air guitar like seasoned pros and there were lots of rock hands happening. Never underestimate the power of music to reach our souls. Another exciting moment in the week was when Madeleine brought in her cat for show-and-tell. Every day during show-and-tell, we practice saying phrases in French like: "What's in your bag? Is it a person? Is it an animal? Is it a thing?"... Whenever the answer is "an animal", we ask if it's "living" or "non-living". For the first time, we got to hear the answer: "It's living!" :-)
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