Dear parents,

There will be no words of the week this week since I'm home sick and wasn't able to leave them for the teacher. However, this week we will look at the rest of the verb 'avoir' (which we have focused on in the last few weeks of words) and do some practising in class. Please continue to review the words from the last week (J'ai, tu as, il a, elle a). 

Last week, students made good progress on their stories by starting to write their rough drafts. We discussed using the ideas that we put in our plan, but adding more detail to make it longer and more interesting. I've been blown away at the ideas and independent writing skills that I've been seeing. One of the hardest things about writing a story is sometimes expanding or stretching out ideas to make it a good read. See if you can get your writer to tell you about their beginning, middle (problem) and end (solution) of their story and ask questions that will help them think about details that a reader would want to know more about. For instance:

- what does that character look like?

- where do they live?

- how did they get from being enemies to being friends?

- how did the characters solve the problem?

- what happened after they solved the problem?

Here are some of the characters from our stories! 

With Mme Janvier, the class has started a dance unit, and I couldn't resist snapping a picture last week!

In Math this week we are starting our rather quick unit on 3-D figures. This is what we have been saving all those boxes for! We will be introduced to the difference between a pyramid and a prism, and we will learn to identify those and other 3-D shapes by their French name. We will use these shapes to do some building, so be sure to ask about this later in the week! If you have this type of old-school wooden building block, they are great for reviewing the names of 3-D figures (e.g., cube, cylindre, prisme a base triangulaire).

I've also found other cool examples of these shapes around my house (e.g., packages, stools, cushions). Take a look around with your geometry goggles on!

Finally, we will be doing a lot of reading about fire stations in preparation for our field trip which is coming up Thursday. Students don't need anything special, and volunteers should arrive at 12:45 so that we can leave around 1:00. Thanks!

Tamara