We took some massive steps forward in our reading practice this week. We began literacy rotations! At the moment, Madame is training us on how to do each station ... listen to reading on the iPad and iPhones read to self with books that we select (even if we are just reading the pictures) word work, where we play with letters or build sentences using familiar words, and work on writing, where we copy out a “message du jour” and draw a picture of it. Once we have become confident in our stations and are able to get right down to work, Madame will start meeting with small reading groups at the same time. This process is a bit of a learning curve, but we are handling it really well! Even our Kindergarten friends have been doing a great job building sentences on their own with familiar words. An exciting literacy development for our Grade 1s this week was that our Big Buddies have now begun pulling them out during morning centres 3 days/week for reading practice. It’s a perfect pairing - we have 10 Grade 1 students and we usually will have 10 Grade 6/7 buddies that come, meaning that each Grade 1 student gets one-on-one, individualized tutoring. Every Grade 1 student has a designated folder for the Big Buddies to work through with them, beginning with alphabet sounds for those who need the review, working our way up through syllable practice, and then on to reading 1 syllable words, 2 syllable words…. and entire books! For our Grade 1 friends who are already reading at higher-than-grade-level, the Big Buddies have been pushing them into books that are slightly challenging for them, and then focusing their tutoring on one book only until the student becomes an expert at it and is ready to move on. They will also be challenging these Grade 1s by doing a daily review of more complex sight words. We are getting to know our Big Buddies quite well because they are also lunch monitors in our classroom every day, and even joined us for a Science lesson this week. Madame brought in some pumpkins and apples and our task was to work with our Big Buddies to compare them. Which is the tallest - the pumpkin or the apple? Which is the widest? Which is the heaviest? Which one will roll the fastest down a hill? We were quite excited about this last question and even took the pumpkins and apples out to Spirit Square to test our hypotheses. We were pretty evenly split on #teamapple and #teampumpkin. In the end, we discovered that the pumpkins roll the fastest because they are the biggest and heaviest. We had a special presenter come in this week to do an "optimism workshop". The workshop was in English and the presenter spoke to us about big words like "perseverance" and "resiliency". She told us some stories and gave illustrations to help us understand those big words. We each got to create a list of things that we CAN do, along with one thing that we can't do YET. In life, we are always learning and we can become good at anything if we're willing to practice it. We also had the opportunity to create "postcards" for our classmates, telling them some things that we really like about them. Reading the postcards that were made for us sure made us smile! We've been continuing to expand our musical horizons, as well. Some of us continue to practice the xylophone during centre time, and even write out music on our own so that we can remember how to play the songs we have learned. We're also loving the keyboard that Madame brought in. Max even told Madame today that she should come "catch this sick beat" that he was throwing down. (Future DJ, perhaps?!) It's fun to play with adding in drum beats, recording ourselves playing a song that we compose, and then playing it back. Bonus pics...
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