Bonne année! Happy New Year! We kicked off our first week back from holidays with a New Year's celebration of our own. Madame had balloons at the front of the class and we got to pop one every couple of hours and do the activity listed on a slip of paper inside. From our surprise balloon activities, we enjoyed watching a French show, playing a game of French charades, doing a lap around the school building, and having a flashlight dance party. We also read a book about making goals for the year 2021 and brainstormed some goals that we might want to achieve. There were lots of great ideas, and we each wrote out 3 of those goals on slips of paper to create New Year's megaphones. (Our Kindergarteners just practiced writing the French phrase "Je veux..." and then drawing a picture of what they wanted to accomplish.) A highlight for us was watching the New Year's celebration at the "Château de Versailles" in France. We were enthralled with the fireworks and loved the piano performance, as well. Many of us expressed that we really wished we could have been there for REAL! Parents, if you watch this video at home, it comes with a warning... the performance right before the midnight countdown has some scantily clad women. (#awkwardteachermoment... I promise the kids only saw them for a second!), but the show from 3:00:00 onwards is phenomenal! Another favourite was watching a beautiful song called "On écrit sur les murs", which is all about writing words of hope and love to carry with us for the days to come...a great way to kick off a new year. We were inspired to write our own messages on the wall, but since existential concepts like "hope" are difficult for us to understand at this age, we focused on words that make us happy. If you can read French, some of the words on the wall may seem a bit random, but they are beautiful because they are completely student-generated. In French class this week, we have taken a big leap in our writing. Until now, we have mostly been copying words, but Madame is now asking Grade 1s to sound out some of the words on our own. While this is difficult for us, Madame reassures us that perfect spelling is not important. What she really wants to see is that we're connecting the sounds that we hear with letters that we're putting on the page. So whether we use "c", "q" or "k" to make the [k] sound is unimportant. All 3 of those letters can make the same sound so we are winning if we're using any one of them. This is called "inventive spelling" and is the gateway towards independent writing and standard spelling. Kindergarten students have moved from tracing words to copying them. They are given some choice about which words they put together so that they can be a bit inventive with their sentences. We tried something new for our outdoor adventure this week and went to the school garden. Madame has avoided it until now because it became largely overgrown during the months of neglect while we were doing remote learning last year, but it has since been cleaned up a little bit so it was time for us to check it out! We enjoyed getting very muddy (sorry, parents!) making mud pies, digging small "lakes", balancing on stilt buckets, creating ball runs, and swinging on the swing.
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