We had our kick-off to home reading this week in the library where Mme MacKinnon read all of us primary students a First Nations book called "P'esk'a and the first salmon ceremony". She talked about the importance of not only reading the words, but also reading the pictures. The legos in the picture below represent the impact that consistent home reading practice can have on our reading skills. Just like learning to play the piano, kick a soccer ball, perfect a dance routine, or score a goal in hockey, we can only get better at reading with consistent practice. The yellow brick represents one day of home reading. The last set of blue bricks represents 5 weeks of consistent home reading practice. The obvious contrast between the first yellow brick and the last blue tower were so staggering that it made the children gasp excitedly. Anyone can become "a reader" - we just need to practice! Next week, Mme Van Sickle will begin sending home "home reading" book bags, each filled with fun French stories for us to browse through! We were all very excited this week to finally meet with our Big Buddy class for the first time! We were each assigned to a buddy and they read with us and helped us with the final steps of coloring our pumpkin art. (They were told to HELP us - not do it for us!) ;-) We will be seeing a lot of our buddies this year as they are super pumped to help out in our classroom with daily reading pull-outs for the Grade 1s, and as daily lunch monitors in our class. Our pumpkin art ended up turning out really well! We began on Monday by tracing the pumpkin with liquid glue and letting that dry. Then we talked about blending different colours of oil pastels together to create shading, giving the pumpkin a 3D effect (or, in kid language, making the pumpkin look "more real"). The kids should be very proud of their work! It was an art-filled week as we also began working on a painting project to create "art cards". The students' artwork will be turned into cards that can be purchased and given out on birthdays. Some of us had some more "modern art" interpretations of how to paint a birthday cake, but we all had fun creating them! Here is a picture of some of the art nearing its final stage. (We still need to outline it with permanent marker and write our names on it). In Math this week, we finished up our unit on patterns. We will continue to review patterns throughout the year, but will no longer be focusing on them. We decided to end with a big "hurrah" and create patterns with Froot Loops to wear around our necks. Some of the patterns didn't even make it out the door for recess, but others lasted the entire day! (...now that's will power!) We each held a sign to indicate the type of pattern we had created on our necklace. One of the highlights of the week was when Madame introduced us to our new classroom listening station. Thanks to some generous donations, we now have 5 devices (iPhones and an iPad) to listen to audiobooks of varying degrees of difficulty. Each recording has a physical book to go with it so that we can follow along with the printed text. The easiest books are all based on the alphabet and the hardest books are at about a Grade 3 or 4 reading level. At this point, we are allowed to listen to any books we want, regardless of our reading ability. We are just developing a passion for French stories! Madame also introduced a new centre to our play time rotations - sand! Some of us got really creative with it! And finally, to kick off our Thanksgiving weekend, we talked about what Thanksgiving is, how it started, and what we all do to celebrate it. We passed a sunflower around the circle and took turns saying "Merci pour..." (thank you for...) followed by something for which we are grateful. Some of us even managed to do the whole sentence in French on our own! We also learned a new Thanksgiving song.
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