Joyeux Noël!

Well, I made it home! Anyone watching me carry all your gifts home with me would have had a good laugh. Actually, the pile of gifts in the corner was so big that I couldn't reach the phone without freefalling toward the wall. Our phone helper had to leap into the centre of everything!! I am truly overwhelmed by your generosity. Chistmas is not about the gifts, I know, but I take it this means you like me as a teacher, and that means a lot. Thank you for all the amazing supplies for our classroom, the money to buy books and the many treats for me. I'm not sure how you knew what my favourite things are, but you somehow chose everything that I like and nothing that I don't. It will take me a while, but I will eat and drink every single thing and love every minute of it! Thank you also for the many donations to Sick Kids. From our conversation yesterday, it appears that many of our lives have been touched by this hospital. For my part, I hope the children like the books I chose. I did my best to select a book for everyone at their appropriate level so that they can actually try to read it. 

We had a very festive day yesterday beginning with the carol sing-a-long in the gym.

After recess, we did some festive symmetry art by painting half a picture and then folding to create the other half. Some of our ideas of symmetrical winter things included snowmen, Christmas trees, presents and houses.

After lunch we had the Reindeer vs. the Snowmen for the Holiday Olympics. The teams completed 5 silly challenges (yes, including indoor skiing) to earn stars, and in the end the Snowmen won by 1 star. Everyone worked on being a good sport and both teams received cookies for their participation. Ask your reindeer or snowman what the 5 activities were!

After last recess we opened presents and had one last story before the massive packing job. I stressed the idea of taking extra books and I saw that our yellow drawer was pretty well empty, so I hope everyone has what they need to keep reading over the holiday. Please try to make sure all our books come back on January 5th so that we can keep sharing.

I wish you a very restful and family-filled break.

Happy everything!

Tamara

Compliments!

Chers amis et parents,

I would like to pass on a compliment I received about our class yesterday! Mme Arakeylan (Mme Ana), finishes the day with our students once a week, on day 3. On two separate occasions, she has taken the time to tell me what a pleasure it is to work with the students in Aire 24. She says that our students are well-behaved, helpful, eager and enthusiastic. They really make her day! I am so proud, and wanted to share this lovely compliment with you!

Some quick notes about this week:

- If your child had their eyes/ears checked yesterday, you are receiving a form with the results and any necessary next steps. Look for this today.

- Tomorrow students will be bringing home their season that they built with their group. You received the group evaluation a short time ago.

- Friday morning, Dewson is hosting it's annual Christmas carol sing-a-long. There is usually some space for parents to join in. If you're interested, it will start at 9:20 in the gym. 

- I will be reminding students to take everything home that they might need during the break, including indoor shoes. If you really need those shoes at home and are worried your child might leave them in our bin, you can always email me and I'll make sure they get packed.

- Students are most welcome to take extra levelled books (or classroom books) home over the break. I'll remind them when we're packing, but if you can send them to school with a mission (# of books you'd like), it will be even better. We just need to make sure that all the books come back promptly in the new year so that we can continue sharing them.

- Please keep up your reading routines over the holiday. It's shocking how quickly we forget without regular practice. It might also be a good time to review past sounds and words of the week. You can invent different games with the words to keep it interesting (e.g., write each word or sound on two cards, lay them face down and play a game of Memory, or ask your child to make flashcards with pictures of their words and test YOU - they love being the teacher). Finally, if you are thinking of arranging playdates with schoolmates, challenge the children to speak in French to each other. If they do, write me a note and I'll reward them with jetons upon their return!

This week we have continued to work on sorting 2-D shapes according to various attributes, including number of sides, straight or curvy sides, square corners, parts going in or out and symmetry. Today, all students had a turn being the teacher and creating their own Venn diagram with 2 sorting rules. I was quite amazed to see that every group of teachers came up with sorting rules that worked together and found shapes that met the criteria! Some mathematicians are so into geometry that they are experimenting with shapes and Venn diagrams at free time. Can you guess the sorting rules?

Here are some of the pictures we made using shapes at our math centres:

In science, we've been talking about activities that happen during the day and at night. We've also had some very interesting discussions about the Sun, and how the Earth moves around it. It would be worth bringing this up again at home as our conversation probably could have gone on for hours!

In French, we created our success criteria for letter writing. We know that a good letter begins with the date and the name of the person we are writing to. We are beginning the body of our letters with a nice message, followed by whatever else we want to say or ask. At the end we have a nice goodbye and our names. Today we finished up working with a partner to write a letter to an adult in our school following the success criteria - maybe we'll get replies! After the holidays, we'll have a chance to write individual letters to a special person who may live far away. 

Words of the Week

The ‘en’ sound is very similar to ‘on’, and there are several ways to make it. This week we will focus on finding words with “en” and “em”. Again, ask your child to help you with this one, but to me, it sounds like what we say when we don’t understand something - “huh?”.

In the last few weeks we’ve learned a lot of vowel combinations that are so common in French and help us so much with our sounding out in reading and writing. We will be continuing with this in the new year. When reading a book with your child, it is helpful to go for a treasure hunt before you start reading. Ask your reader to circle all of the “en” and “em”s he/she can find within words in the book. This way, when you get there, you already know what that part of the word will sound like.

You can turn this into a good review of old sounds as well. E.g., “Find me a letter that makes the sound ‘s’. Find me two letters that work together to make ‘o’. Now find me the sound ‘oi’.” This is what we do with our morning message every day.

Anything you can do to make working with sounds fun is a great idea!

en, vent, dent, décembre, content

Bonus words: cent, novembre

Holiday Stuff

Hi everyone,

I can't believe the winter break is only a week away. Time flies!
You've probably noticed that I'm trying to send home some of the projects that we completed this term - the big stuff anyway. You should now have received your student's social studies inquiry project with accompanying rubric, their "Citrouilleville" story with rubric, and the structure they built with Donnely, complete with title. I hope you enjoy talking about these projects at home. Maybe your author can read "Citrouilleville" to you, as they did for the class! You'll notice the rubric for "Citrouilleville" is different than the rubrics you see for our monthly dictée. During this creative writing project, I was not concerned with how amazing the writers' sounding out was. I was encouraging them to come with their own creative ideas for writing and to take their time presenting their story neatly with helpful illustrations. This is an important part of writing as well!

Today we had our 4th theme day of the school year. We celebrated Colt and Finch who love Pokéman! We all created our own Pokéman character with a super-power in the morning. Since Pokéman involves a card game, we learned how to play Uno and we played with our table groups.

In the afternoon, we did some Pokéman math. I was surprised to find that many students already knew about symmetry and had used the Mira tool before. We used the Miras to complete a symmetrical picture of a Pokéman character. Some students weren't crazy about giving him two tails, but it was good to discuss how it wouldn't be symmetrical if we left off the tail on the side we were adding. Everyone figured out how to use the Mira successfully to complete the complicated picture. They brought it home today as well!

Since we are working on geometry in math, we started an art project this week that involves shapes. Ask your student who the artist is that we are trying to imitate, and about the steps we are taking to complete this awesome project! We looked at a couple books of artwork that incorporate shapes and the students were very curious about who the artists were and what the title of each piece was. We'll have to put this project on hold until the new year, but they are already looking great!

I know that students often like to bring a gift for their teacher before Christmas. This is very generous and completely unnecessary. I may be too late with this message, but if you would like to get me a gift but haven't already, you may like consider getting something that our whole class can use. Art supplies, markers, paper towels and French books are great gifts that our class will benefit from, and that I frequently spend money on. Again, there is no need to get me/us anything!
As with Halloween, we will have a special afternoon on the last day of school, but please don't send food to share. The students will all receive a gift from me.

And lastly, a little bit of shameless self-promotion. I sing in the choir at Church of the Redeemer, and happily have the chance to perform some pretty solid music there during their Bach Vespers services. We have one coming up this Sunday evening and will be performing Bach's Magnificat complete with orchestra and soloists (including me!). If you're into classical music, or if your child is just super curious what Mlle Mitchell does when she's not at school, this might be something you'd enjoy - I think it will be a really good one. The church is just across from the ROM and the service starts at 7pm, should be over around 8. No tickets or payment required, just an offering during the service (it'll be mostly music, not much talking). End self-promotion.

Have a great weekend!

December social update

Hi parents,

Today the social skills rubric for December is coming home. We did a group juggling activity, and then had time to practice individual juggling. We worked together well to remember who we were tossing to and we got up to a pretty good speed with 3 bean bags. During the activities, we were focusing on saying nice things (I heard so many encouraging words!), sharing and persevering. We hope to be able to continue sharing and saying nice things to each other more often during all activities! Look for the self and teacher-evaluation tonight!

Words of the Week

If the ‘on’ sound is ever forgotten, show your student a picture of a candy and it’ll come right back! Then you can say “C’est bon!” (Good stuff!)

This is another sound that doesn’t exist in English. The easiest thing is probably to ask your child to teach it to you. Ask them how to say “no” or “candy” in French. To describe it in English, say the word “on” with your lips closed almost all the way, and don’t close to the ‘n’. You’ll feel it in the back of your throat. This sound can also be written as ‘om’.

bonbon, mon, ton, non, nom

Bonus words: bon, son

This afternoon we worked at math centres again, but now we are moving on to geometry. Our centres all had to do with sorting or drawing with shapes. Yesterday and today, the mathematicians have been encouraged to organize shapes into like categories. Yesterday, for instance, one group organized their shapes according to the number of corners. Today, at Mlle's centre, we used a Venn diagram to figure out 2 sorting rules. Ask your mathematician what the rules were for the red circle and the blue circle and what shapes go in the middle where the circles overlap. We will work on 2-D shapes for just a short time, the next 2 weeks, and we will return to geometry for 3-D shapes later in the year.

Perhaps I should also explain why we're not in the Primary Concert this Thursday evening. (If I've explained already, I apologize for the repetition... I can't remember). Because of the number of primary students, each class is invited to participate in primary choir for one term. This allows Mr. Greene to fit everyone in the music room for rehearsals, and it allows families to fit in the gym for concerts... kind of! The classes that have been participating in choir this term have their concert this Thursday evening at 7pm. Our class will be participating in choir next term and we will be involved in a concert sometime in the spring. Of course, I hope that all my students will want to participate (because in that case I get to go sing too!), but it is not mandatory. At that time, our class will prepare a special presentation and we will all be part of the concert regardless of whether we choose to sing in choir. For now, we are still invited to support our friends and siblings who are in the December concert. The concert is this Thursday evening in the gym.

Have a great week!

Friday stuff

Hello Area 24,

Thank you and Bravo tout le monde for completing your science homework on time! We had almost a 100% return rate. Good job on responsibility and organization!

I also want to remind you that Dewson is switching over to an automated safe arrival system. A note came home about this Friday. Basically, it means you will receive a call every time your student is late getting to school (after 9:00 am and 12:45 pm) and if we don't know the reason for an absence. To avoid these calls, please do your best to be at school by 8:55 when the first bell rings, and send me or the office an email or note if your child will be away. If we know about it in advance, we can stop the call from going out. Thanks!

Our next writing project will be letter writing. Soon we will analyse a letter to discover the components that make a good one. Today, we started by writing a letter as a class to le Père Noël. We started with a nice opening sentence, then asked a question, then politely asked for some blocks for our class, then closed with a thank you and our names. The letter will be mailed later today!

Friday was an exciting day and I have some pictures to share! In the morning we had a visit from Mme Mitchell, who helped Club Violet with their reading, and all of us with our art project! Our second round of French centres went very smoothly, and we got to hear another story written by the members of Club Rouge, who were at the writing centre.

Our art project was a beautiful menorah made from tissue paper, so it looks like stained-glass. Thank you to Mr. D'Antonio for doing all the intricate cutting for us ahead of time. We read and shared what we know about Hanukkah a bit before we started, so ask your artist why the menorah has 9 candles. 

In the afternoon, Donnely came back so that we could present and reflect on our beautiful sculptures. 

Nature Centre Pictures!

We had a fantastic morning at the Nature Centre today. I just can't believe how much we learned, and of course the kids had tons of fun!


A big thank you to our parent volunteers who were so very attentive and helpful, and to all the parents who offered their time but weren't able to join us this time.

A HUGE Bravo to ALL the students for being good sports, participating and following the nature centre and safety rules. It was a very successful trip!
Bravo tout le monde!

Things to ask about:
- Who is Houdini the Red-eared Slider?
- What animals live in High Park?
- What are Mighty Migrators?
- What are Hibernators?
- What are Tough Guys?
- Do chipmunks sleep all winter, or take cat-naps?
- What do Sumac berries and Hemlock needles taste like?
- What is the English word for a squirrel nest? Why do squirrels make so many nests?
- What was the game with the birds? Is it natural for there to be more hawks or more blue jays?
- What animals did you see today?

Here are some pictures to enjoy! Also, check out the December Dewson Newsletter (on the Dewson Blog), three of our students contributed an article!

The following is a thank you card we received from my grandpa after he read the postcards some of us wrote on Remembrance Day. I think it's very touching.

Don't forget that Friday is a PA day and our Science research is due back Monday. Have a nice long weekend!

Information for tomorrow!

The following information came home today:

Dear Parents,

Tomorrow is our first field trip! Please keep the following in mind when packing for tomorrow.

• Please be on time for school.
• Area 32 students should come to Area 24 with their lunches immediately following attendance.
• We will eat lunch at school when we return. All students will leave their lunches in Area 24.
• I will bring a school snack with us for the Nature Centre. Students may wish to bring a water bottle. Parent chaperones will carry the bottles for their group so that we don’t need to bring bags with us.
• Please dress for the weather. The forecast is showing a lovely, albeit a bit chilly, day. Running shoes or boots, a winter jacket, scarf, gloves and a hat would be appropriate. Snow pants aren’t a bad idea. Better safe than sorry.
• Do not send money, electronics, or other valuables.

I’d also appreciate you taking the time to review the following safety rules with your child. These are things we discussed today and will review tomorrow. Thanks!

ü  Stay with your partner and parent chaperone at all times.

ü  When getting off the streetcar, go immediately to the sidewalk and line up with your partner.

ü  Be respectful of nature – do not disturb living things.

ü  Follow instructions from Nature Guides and parent chaperones right away.

ü  Have fun!

See you tomorrow!

Mlle Mitchell

Words of the Week

This is one of my personal favourites. I think ‘oi’ is a fun sound to say. In English, it sounds just like ‘wa’, as in “water”. At first, children sometimes use the letter a when trying to write this sound. That’s just fine, they are similar. From now on, we’ll help them listen a little closer and remind them that there’s an even better way to write that sound. Our sound poster in class has a picture of a bird and the word oiseau. If you’re doing rule posters at your house, looking at this one is an immediate reminder of what the sound looks like.

moi, toi, froid, voiture, oiseau

Bonus words: roi, loi

Les Devoirs

Happy December! Wow, term 1 is flying by!

We tried our language centres for the first time this morning. Every Club de Lecture was at a different centre for 30 minutes and did a really good job staying focused on their activity. At the Jeux de dictée centre, Club Rouge made two crossword puzzles and quizzed each other with flashcards. At the Centre d'écoute, Club Vert listened to a story and then drew about what it made them think of. At the Centre d'écriture, Club Violet write a story about animals, independently finding books that they knew could help them spell words. They later read it aloud to the class. At the Lecture Partagée centre, Club Bleu sat in partners knee to knee, elbow to elbow, and read books together. Finally, at Lecture Guidée avec Mlle, Club Jaune worked on reviewing and combining sounds using magnet letters. Thanks to Mme Fox for running this centre today!

Later, in math, we did another round of centres focused on growing and shrinking patterns as well as balancing both sides of an equation. Having worked on growing and shrinking patterns (croissantes et décroissantes) last week, it is nice to see many students confidently showing an understanding of how to invent or follow a growing or shrinking rule. For example, one question today was if Darcy starts out with $20 at the beginning of the week and spends $2 on a carton of milk each day, how much money will he have left at the end of the 7 days? We haven't taken this up yet, but try it at home!

In science, we discussed what people do to prepare for winter at home. We had some incredible ideas including using a fireplace, getting out winter clothes, covering up cracks around windows and even switching to snow tires!! All students are bringing home their red Science duotang today so that they can do a little at-home research. They want to find out what parts of their home help protect them from wind, rain, snow, animals, the sun etc. I've marked the page where they can write and draw what they discover. We talked about being responsible for bringing this duotang back with the homework completed by next Monday. This should give everyone lots of time - it shouldn't take more than 20-30 minutes tops. Thanks for your help!

I've also sent home a copy of the group evaluation your child completed after their big build-a-season project. I put a few notes about how the group did, and what each presenter said. Hopefully this gives you something to talk about while you wait for the project itself to come home after we've admired them a bit more.

Finally, the Scholastic order for December is coming home. As I wrote on the note, if you'd like to order books without your child knowing, you can send the order in a sealed envelope with my name, and maybe a note telling me that these are gifts. I'll let you know when your order arrives.

That's it for today!
Tamara

Theme Day!

Thank you to all the moms and dads who volunteered to come to High Park with us next Wednesday. Can you believe 11 parents offered to help?? Wow, it's a new record! While it would be so nice to have 1 parent for every 2 children, it's just not possible in the Nature Centre space, and it's not what we paid for!
I sent home notes to those parents who I could not bring this time, but I do hope you can come next time and volunteer in our class soon. Please email me your availability. There is always something to do!
Thanks!
I will send home a paper reminder about our field trip on Tuesday. Be sure to check the note for last minute reminders.

Yesterday and today we had our 3rd theme day all about brothers. We were celebrating Markus and Lee who both chose their little brothers as their favourite thing on the first day of school! We started out by practising our partner reading, just the way brothers and sisters read together. Then, we worked on thinking of specific kinds of words (e.g., actions, places, adjectives) to fit into a mad lib about a brother. They were really funny!



This afternoon, we finished up our theme day by making growing patterns about brothers, doing a brothers v. sisters obstacle course, and reading a couple stories about brothers and sisters and things getting stuck in trees. Ask your listener how Léo tries to get his ball down from the tree and how Léa tries to get Léo down when he's stuck!

























































We also squeezed in our presentations for our completed seasons that we built (they look great), our november dictée (rubric to come Monday or Tuesday) and our final art workshop with Donnely. Our wooden sculptures are all painted and look fantastic. Donnely hopes to come back once more just so that we can admire each others' work once it's dry. Despite our aprons, some students did get paint on their clothes (me too!). We did try to sponge it out before it dried, but it will need special treatment if you want it to look like new again. I think most students remembered to wear old clothes, so hopefully it's no big deal.

Happy weekend,
Tamara