Today was National Truth and Reconciliation Day and we honoured it all week with orange shirts and Indigenous stories and themes. We have been starting our days with a land acknowledgment in French, recognizing that where we live and go to school in Pitt Meadows is actually on Katzie land that was taken from them. We have been learning gestures to go along with this acknowledgment to help us remember the tricky vocabulary. We are getting quite good at following along with Madame now! Most of the time Madame reads stories to us in French, but sometimes when there are special days like this, the content is too difficult for us in a new language so we revert to English and then can discuss details in French. We learned the significance of the colour orange with the book "Phyllis' Orange Shirt". We also read, among others, "Trudy's Rock Story", all about a girl from the Gitxsan Nation who remembers the teachings of her grandmother and goes in search of a rock with which to share her feelings when she is upset. We decided to do the same and went in search of our own rocks! In fact, sharing our feelings was part of our Math graphing activity this week. We had all kinds of elaborations on the question: "Comment ça va?" We also had our first school-wide assembly of the year this week where we sang "O Canada" in English and French, and got to learn more about Indigenous legends and history. To further honour Truth and Reconciliation Day, the whole school also took part in a "Bricks of Belonging" project, wherein each student created an orange brick for our wall to signify that every child matters. Our class' little stack of bricks was combined into the whole school's mural. In academic news, Madame is trying to turn all of us into linguists. Madame's first degree is in linguistics so she loves piecing apart words and has introduced us to something called "word mapping". All of us who are now reading rainbow coloured flashcards were meant to take our individual word lists and map out each of the sounds within the words. Do you need 2 letters to make that one sound?...put both letters in one box! Do you need 3 letters to make that one sound?...put all of them in the same box! And if there's a silent letter, leave it out of the sound box entirely. We write hearts under sounds that we haven't yet learned. This was a challenging exercise, for sure, but most of us caught on quickly and Madame insists that it will be hugely beneficial in helping us to recognize those same sounds within new words. Those of us not quite reading words yet got to play some letter sound review games. Our friends with the word lists joined in the fun, too, as they completed their tasks. Some of the games are designed in such a way that students of all different levels can still compete with one another. We met our Big Buddy class this week! We had fun doing a bunch of activities with them in the library, just to get to know them, and then next time we will actually be paired with a big buddy of our own. This buddy class will now begin reading with us most mornings, pulling us out one-on-one to work on our individual word lists and phonetic books. "Cops for Cancer" paid us a visit this week, too. It was a long wait for them to arrive, but we were so excited when we did finally catch a glimpse of them! And bonus... they gave us all stickers! Thank you to everyone who donated to this cause! Extra pics...
Comments are closed.
|
Archives
June 2024
Categories |