Oops! In the busyness of going back after the holidays, I forgot to write a blog entry last week! Here we are, 2 weeks in after the holidays, and we're all starting to readjust to routines. Since we're all getting a little more efficient at cleaning up after ourselves, Mme Van Sickle was able to introduce a few new centres - painting, fake snow, and an electric keyboard. These have been very popular and it has been great to see the kids stretching their creative muscles artistically and musically. We have also now launched our dictée program, with students learning to read and write 10 key words/phrases every 2 weeks. We have been practicing our words every day through various games and activities and the students' confidence has really been building with the words. The students have also really been stretching themselves lately to try speaking in French. While most of them are getting to be great French listeners, up until now their responses and interactions have been predominantly in English. However, we have begun playing more targeted oral language games and have also introduced a gum ball reward system for every time somebody speaks in French. When Mme Van Sickle hears them utter a French phrase, they get to use a coloured Bingo dabber to fill in a gum ball in their machines. When the machines are filled, they will get to choose a sticker and will get some bonus classroom money. It has been so exciting to hear all of them begin to step out of their comfort zones and repeat phrases they've heard in class or even attempt to put new phrases together that they've never heard before. ...and speaking of classroom money, we have now begun our classroom economy. At the moment it is based completely on nickels. We learned about what the nickel looks like, why the Queen is on the back of our nickels, and how much each nickel is worth. In Math class we are using them to count by 5s, and learning how to identify where various multiples of nickels would fall on a number line. The kids have been learning to play a game in which they take a nickel, locate it on the number line, and then add a number to that to find a total. An exciting part of introducing our classroom economy was choosing our "homes". Our cubby baskets are serving as our homes and each one represents a place in Pitt Meadows of our choice. We learned that we will have to pay rent each week to keep our things in our homes and, surprisingly, we are all very excited about this! We also decided as a class that we would like our charitable donation money to go towards Children's Hospital. This week we were so happy to have some nice weather so we went outside to play and explore a couple of times. On Tuesday we went to Spirit Square with our Big Buddies for a nature scavenger hunt. After practicing with them, we were scavenger hunt experts and were able to do one on our own the next day when we walked to Hoffman Park. We also had plenty of time left over in the park to build forts and pretend campfires.
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