There's been a buzz of excitement around the class this week as we have finally launched our classroom economy! Think Monopoly... but lived out in real time. We all have assigned jobs (which rotate from week to week) and when we do our jobs well, we are rewarded with a nickel for our efforts. We also have our own "houses" - pictures of recognizable places from around our community that we have stuck to our cubbies. We are expected to pay rent each week for the privilege of "living" there (..."just like moms and dads have to pay to live in your house!"). Not only do we earn money from our daily jobs, but from other bonus opportunities, as well. The biggest cash cow is getting caught speaking in French, but we can also earn money when Madame notices us quietly being kind/helpful, or by doing extra jobs around the classroom. 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") for what feels like forever! But here's the catch... we can't make any purchases until we have done two things first: 1. paid rent on our home 2. donated a nickel to charity (because it is just as important to learn about giving as it is to learn about spending and saving) As a class, we really wanted to help some "kids without moms and dads" so we decided to donate our money to a charity that helps foster children. Madame has heard great things about the SOS Children's Village so 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 10X our rent ($0.50), 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 $0.50 on store day when we would rather spend our hard-earned nickels on the frivolous items in front of us. 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! Many of us are already setting plans into motion. But we must all purchase our OWN properties first to give everyone in the class enough time and opportunity to buy their own "house" before it's scooped up by someone else. Often, Madame will assign a "banker" for the day whose job it will be to allow students to exchange their coins for different ones (i.e. 2 nickels for a dime, 2 dimes + 1 nickel for a quarter, etc.) We love trading our coins back and forth, often not even realizing that we're practicing key mathematical and life skills while playing. For those of us who are new to Madame's class, it may take a little while for us to catch on to some of the little nuances of the program, but it will be integrated into our daily classroom so Madame assures us that we will catch on quickly. It's kind of like reading the instructions of a new game versus actually playing it... it's so much easier to understand once you dive in and start. In completely unrelated news, Happy New Year! We rang in our own New Year's celebration on Monday with some balloon-popping fun... each balloon had a different surprise activity for us to complete, whether running around the school building, having a dance party, watching a French show, or playing a game... We also made our own New Year's "resolutions"... And we began designing pins that Madame will hand back to us when we achieve the personal goals that we set during our report card conferences. We've been following up on our trip to the Space Centre with talk about nocturnal vs. diurnal animals and we had the amazing opportunity this week to see a nocturnal animal up close - a real-live barn owl! (Some of these pictures have been taken from Mrs. Bateson). Extra photos...
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