We're now in review mode for our letter sounds...but, with a new vocabulary challenge! Each day, Madame comes with mystery items in her "boite de mystères" that begin with our letter of the day. We take turns pulling out an item and identifying it. ...and then we make a letter book all about those items that we found in the box. This is followed up with a journal entry about one of the items. Up until now, all of our journal entries have involved directly copying sentences from the board (Grade 1s) or tracing (Kindergarten). But we now get to start being creative by choosing which new vocabulary word WE want to use to fill in the blank of our sentence structure. This has resulted in some interesting discoveries, like the fact that some of our words are "boys" (masculin) and others are "girls" (feminin). We have to change up parts of our sentence just *slightly* depending on their gender. It's been a literacy-focused week as we are also learning how to do independent lit. stations. To manage all of our different ages and stages, our lit. stations are adaptable... each of us works on practicing the flashcard set that we are on currently with hands-on activities and games. We are settling into a groove with the various stations and Madame has been adding a new activity or game each day. We love that we get to choose our own activity at lit. centre time. One of the most popular stations at the moment is the smelly felts, so some of us may have come home with noses like this... Now that we are catching on to this new literacy system, our next challenge will be to take the lit. centre concept beyond the 4 walls of our classroom and attempt it outside! And speaking of outside, after seemingly endless rain, we got incredibly lucky with the weather on Thursday afternoon for our walk to the forest! We felt a couple of drips on our way there, and then a couple of drips on the way back, but other than that the weather was perfect! Some of us have been really interested in tree and pinecone identification. We're learning the differences between hemlock, red cedar and douglas fir. We also discovered some places where we could curl up inside the trees. We had some great ideas and wonders: "Maybe a squirrel lives in here!" "I wonder if there are bugs hiding in this hole!" We even dug for "dinosaur bones" as the tree roots morphed with our imaginations. Some other cool discoveries... leaves that are shaped like hearts, and rocks that are made up of lots of other tiny rocks! Back in class, we've been trying some directed drawing. Madame puts on a video from "Art Hub" on YouTube and then mutes the sound so that she can give us directions in French. Some of us have taken to this right away! Others, Madame has discovered, are perfectionists and we are learning to work through our frustrations. It has been a great exercise on following French directions, on hand-eye coordination, and on persevering when things are difficult.
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