We enjoyed our first "nature walk" this week! Madame says that there's so much we can learn from using our imaginations in the outdoors - French vocabulary galore, lessons on safety, teamwork, resiliency, pushing our limits, and above all, an appreciation for the beauty that surrounds us and how to be good stewards of it. Some of us even had a lesson on poop identification when Addie clearly found some bear poop! We investigated and determined that it wasn't fresh so we didn't need to be overly concerned. Madame likes to bring her ukulele to the forest for her reinvented version of "Down by the Bay"... changed to "In the forest" in French (Dans la forêt). We had fun singing silly rhymes about bees with sunburns and flies wearing diapers. We all did a little French vocabulary scavenger hunt and looked for items along our walk. Interestingly, we had a lot of trouble finding water and realized that's because it's the driest October that Madame can ever remember. So we cheated and found water in our waterbottles. ;-) Limbo!! In French, we continue to work through our individual reading programs. We all have our own book bags with our unique levelled material inside them. So when our big buddies come to read with us in the mornings, we can grab our bags and head into the hallway with them to practice what we've been working on. Whenever we feel like we've become experts at our material, we sit down and read it through with Madame and if she thinks we're ready, she lets us honk a bike horn to get everyone's attention. Then we all stop what we're doing and sing a special celebratory song, which is often followed by spontaneous hugs or high-fives. Our reading levels are never posted anywhere in the classroom and Madame reminds us often that we are "running our own race"... it's all about doing our best with what we have and continuing to push through, even when it's hard. We've been learning some Fall vocabulary and practiced our sentence-writing this week with some of our words. We are getting more confident at using our starter words, and are working hard at putting periods at the end of our sentences, capital letters at the beginning, and spaces between words. We began a directed draw of a pumpkin (une citrouille) this week but instead of just colouring it orange like a typical pumpkin, Madame taught us about how to use lines and shapes in art to make creative designs. In each section of our pumpkins, we drew our own unique designs with lines and shapes. We have just begun learning about primary and secondary colours and will get to use our expanded colour theory knowledge next week to finish off our pumpkin art. For this week's Friday team challenge, Madame gave us the task of using only primary colours to try to create a rainbow of colours. As it turns out, purple is very hard to create well. But we all did an amazing job on this challenge and every team was awarded full points! In Math, we became more familiar with the 100s chart on Tuesday with a special Thanksgiving turkey surprise. Most of us enjoyed this search and find activity, which also helped us to review our reading and colour vocabulary, but others admitted that it was really tricky! Many of us are still flipping our numbers (we see "21" as "12", for example) and others just aren't yet quite familiar with the patterns in the hundreds chart. But Madame says not to worry...we will do more activities like this throughout the year and by June, we should be feeling much more comfortable with how it all works. We also did some unplanned Math this week when a group of boys built a couple of big structures out of plastic straws. Madame had us count the squares on one side of a structure and make addition equations with them, but then we also had a little informal introduction to multiplication. Madame assured us that we don't need to be learning multiplication until at least Grade 3 so if it's confusing or tricky, we don't need to stress about it. But some of us caught on really well to the concept! Extra photos...
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