Sing with me now... "School's out for the...[Spring Break]"! Ok, not Alice Cooper's original song. But let's not get hung up on details. Happy Spring Break to all of you! Spring was definitely in the air this week with some more glorious sunshine! We enjoyed time outside with our Big Buddies again, we built "campfires" and forts and searched for bugs at Hoffman Park, and we finally got outside to play again with our friends from other K/1 classes! With everything that's been going on in the world lately, we decided that it was really important that we wash our hands well. Thank you to Heather Rhodes for introducing Madame to a sneaky hand-washing strategy. Madame stamped our hands every morning and the goal was to make sure that the stamp was gone by the end of the day. Hand sanitizer alone wouldn't cut it. We needed to actually WASH our hands to get the stamp off. Anyone whose stamp was gone (or almost gone) by the end of the day received some extra nickels for their hygienic efforts. In Math, we've been having fun lately with a video that Madame introduced to us about "subitizing" - identifying the number of things in a set quickly, without counting them one by one. For example, when you look at dice, do you have to count how many dots are on each side or do you just know by looking at the set? (The video below is in English, but students call out the numbered sets in French. Some of us are getting really quick at identifying our sets! It's great reinforcement of our random French numbers, as well.) We've also been playing some fun subitizing and addition games to reinforce our skills! And on the theme of subitizing, Madame introduced us to a new system for tracking our French-speaking efforts. The gumball pages that we were using before just weren't cutting it for her anymore since they were causing a lot of disruption during class time. They have been replaced with a mathematical tool called "rekenreks", which are a variation on the traditional abacus. Every time we speak in French, Madame can just reach behind her during a lesson and move a bead to the left on our rekenrek. Each bead to the left earns us a nickel. At the end of the day, we should be able to look at our personal set of beads and, without counting, tell Madame how many beads are in the set. Madame will then pay us out for the nickels. We had a lot of beads moving already today! We were also very enthusiastic about the new "magasin" set-up that Madame introduced this week. No more flimsy cardboard boxes! We are fully pro around here now! Setting the prices at 25 cents, 50 cents, 75 cents and $1 is no accident, either. Madame is intentionally trying to prepare us for the Grade 2 mathematical concept of the numerical "benchmarks" of 25, 50 and 100. Ok, ok, ok... enough of the boring curriculum talk. Let's move on to some shout-outs! The first shout-out goes to Meya who was caught being kind without expecting anything in return. Another student dropped some food on the ground and Meya grabbed the broom without being asked and swept up the mess. C'est gentil, Meya! The next shout-out goes to Max who is such an eager participant in... well, everything! His enthusiasm for learning and his curiosity about the world around him are definitely contagious! And last but not least, a special birthday shout-out to these two cool kids who won't get to have a musical serenade in the morning line-up because their birthdays are happening over Spring Break! Bonne fête, nos amis!
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