Math check-in

I think it's about time to check-in on our math, so today students are bringing home a math page to share with you. We used our skip-counting skills to do some repeated addition, and checked our counting by drawing a picture. We are coming along well with this, and will get into more addition and subtraction in the next couple weeks.
Have a look with your mathematician. Maybe you can help them fix some backwards numbers, or make any small corrections. You can even give him/her a bonus question for more practice or an extra challenge.

Un-gingerbread!

Our surprise activity after writing instructions for how to decorate a gingerbread man was to actually decorate a gingerbread man! Except it wasn't gingerbread - just bread, and we didn't use icing - just cream cheese and jam. Even though they were just every day snack ingredients, the kids were still excited that their bread was cut out like a gingerbread man and that they got to eat it after it was decorated. Ask your student how they decorated their "bonhomme en pain normal"!

I must also mention how impressed I was with the predictions our scientists made yesterday. Each scientist made a written prediction in their journal about whether they thought fruit would float or sink. They made some great connections, for example, if people can float, and we're big, then big fruits can probably float. Students generally thought that one of 3 things was important when making this prediction: weight, size, or air content. They did not all agree that heavy things would sink, or that big things would float, but what was important was that they justified their thinking very well. Later we did our experiment and found that an unpeeled orange (and the peel of an orange) floats, while a peeled orange sinks. The reason for this has something to do with air and the peel. Ask your scientist for more details of this experiment, and check out my previous post for a way to continue this experiment at home.

Bonus Gymnastics

Area 24 will be having an extra gymnastics period tomorrow (Wednesday), in addition to Thursday. Please remind them to wear their special outfits. Thanks!

Would you like to see what gymnastics looks like?? I snuck in today and took some pictures!

Looks like a ton of fun!

Science Experiments

Here are our words for this week:

la vache, le cheval, la chèvre, le chat, le cochon, 

un oiseau, la poule, le lapin, le canard

In French, almost everyone has now completed their instructions for how to decorate a gingerbread man, and has read them aloud to the class. In a few days, we will have the surprise that we have been looking forward to for so long, and next week I'll send the instructions home along with the rubric. Be sure to listen to your reader read you his/her instructions! 

We will wait until after March break to start our next big writing project, but in the meantime, I'd like to encourage the writers to begin writing their own journal entries - without the help of a sentence starter. We'll talk about things that we might write about, for instance, what we did on the weekend, our favourite game to play, something that we're looking forward to, how we are feeling or we can even make up a little story. You may be able to help from home by taking just a second to brainstorm an idea with your student on the way to school every morning, just in case that is our writing activity for the day (sometimes the children forget what happened the night before, or on the weekend).

I heard some good French skip-counting at our centres today! Students had clear cups of material to count, but they had to first estimate how much was in each cup, and then divide the material into groups of 2, 5 or 10 for easier skip-counting. Keep practising this at home (I listed some fun ideas in a previous post) as it will help a lot with the addition and subtraction that we are about to get into. Remember, when you're practising skip-counting or adding and subtracting, it's always helpful to have something countable on-hand. Coins, blocks, beads, toothpicks... it's all good.

Science! We have some cool experiments happening this week! Today we each received a list of materials that we will test tomorrow to see if they absorb water or not. We looked at each material today and noted our prediction of whether that material will soak up any water or not. Tomorrow, when we do the testing, the groups will also be challenged to come up with a way to measure which material absorbs the most liquid.

Later this week, we will also make predictions and test a list of materials to see which ones float. I hope you have fun discussing these experiments throughout the week. There are lots of ways that you can extend these concepts at home. Here are 2 quick examples:

1. Imagine you have a big spill in the kitchen. What material would clean it up the best? A sponge, a paper towel, a cloth or a Kleenex? Make a prediction and then test each material to see how much water it absorbs. OR  Don't believe the commercials, find out for yourself. Which brand of paper towel is most absorbent?

2. Why do some fruits float while others sink? Try this super cool experiment!

Finally, if you still have your brown report card envelope, I would really appreciate receiving it back by the end of the week so that I can reuse it in June. Thanks!

The puppets are alive!

Today's art workshop was very exciting because our puppets really started looking alive when decorated with bright and shiny paint.

Donnely told us a little bit about acrylic paint and how we can mix it (as we learned a few weeks ago) and layer it to create bright colours. We learned what a palette is and we used it to create new colours using the 5 or 6 that we were given.

Donnely encouraged us to do very detailed, focused painting and to get started by listening to out puppets and figuring out what they really want to be! We had some Santa-like creatures, some swamp creatures, dogs, bunnies, lizards and some other very fancy-looking puppets.

When most artists are finished, Donnely takes the time to sit down with the group and look at our work from past weeks so that we can all comment on and appreciate each others' work. It's a really nice opportunity to reflect on what we've accomplished.

Next Friday is our last workshop with Donnely and our puppets are going to get dressed!

Congratulations Aire 24!

Thank you to everyone who returned the teeny piece of paper for the French book fair draw. We had said that it would be really cool if we all returned it because then our class would have a great chance of winning, and we DID! One of our students has won $25 worth of French books to take home, and I was allowed to select the same value of books for our classroom library. Very exciting!

I think everyone was dressed properly for gymnastics class yesterday, and it looks like great fun. Please remember to wear your shorts and t-shirts again tomorrow (Thursday). In addition, I have suggested that students bring some extra socks for tomorrow since it could turn out to be a very wet day.

In science this week, we're continuing to investigate the properties of different materials. We got to check out the mysterious inside of our class piano to see what materials are involved, and a bit of how it works. This was very cool - ask your investigator what they saw!

Today we used our sense of touch to decide whether objects were rough or smooth. The children worked in groups of 3, with one person directing the experiment and the others closing their eyes to decide if what they were touching was rough or smooth. Everyone did a great job transitioning through the different centres and noting their findings. We have more experiments coming up about materials that can absorb liquids, and on materials that can float. Ask your scientist which materials were smooth and which were rough, and how rough wood or rocks can become smooth.

French sounds = check!

Congratulations! We've made it through all the basic French sounds. Throughout term 2, we will continue to practice using the sounds we have learned to sound-out French words in our reading and writing. Of course, in the French language, there are always always exceptions, and there's no quick and easy way to learn them, it's just exposure and memory.
Our last sound poster covers one very common exception. Previously, we learned that 'en' made the "huh?" sound (just like its friends em, an, and am). However, in many cases, when '-ent' comes at the end of a word, it is SILENT! Be careful, this is not a hard and fast rule! For example, in the word "comment", the 'en' makes its normal sound, and the t is silent, as it often is. This rule applies in verbs, in the 3rd person plural (so usually introduced with "ils…", "elles…", "les filles…", you get the idea). In these cases, you might hear a quick 'e' sound at the end of the word, but that's it.
Now then, this is a tricky thing to explain to 6 year-olds! I haven't explained it as technically as I have for you here, but I do want them to be aware of this exception as it is one of the most common French reading mistakes, even in advanced readers. I have introduced this to the kids simply by asking them to think about whether the word is an action word.

Here are some examples of what I mean: ils marchent, elles dansent, les amis parlent, les enfants jouent

Our new words of the week are:

le gâteau, le bureau, rouge, grand, grande, 

la pomme, le jour, la balle

This week we are getting serious about skip-counting. We will be doing lots of activities to help us learn those tricky numbers over 50, and counting sets of objects by grouping them by 2, 5 and 10. Any practice you can do at home is wonderful - pennies, nickels and dimes are some of the best tools for this - you can have your mathematician count out groups of 10 pennies, exchange them for dimes and then count by 10 up to one dollar. This would be quite impressive actually! Ask your counter to share our tricks for memorizing the names of these numbers. E.g., How does quatre-vingts (80) get its name?

Here are the multiples of 10 in case your child isn't quite ready to teach you yet:

Here are some of my ideas for practising skip-counting, but feel free to invent your own amazing games!

• toss a ball back and forth and with each catch, say the next number
• if you have a jar of assorted change, have your child guess how many pennies are in there and then have him/her count to see how close he/she was (there can be a prize for successful counting!)
• put some smarties in a jar and do the same - if the guess is within 5 of the total, or if the skip-counter was excellent, they win the candy
• if you're at a park with lots of dogs, ask your skip-counter to first count the dogs, and then figure out how many dog ears there were in total, by counting by 2
• if you're buying many same items at the store (e.g., 20 mushrooms, 10 apples or 12 donuts) encourage your child to count them out, but challenge them to count by 2 to make the process faster
• have your child count by 5 to draw 15 or 20 pieces of lego from the bin and then build something using only those pieces
• try The Counting Game

Puppet Update

Friday afternoon we continued our work with Donnely on the puppets we started last week. Using recycled egg cartons, paper towel rolls and tape, we added features to our puppets, for instance, ears, spikes, mouth and nose.

Once these were very secure, we gave the entire thing a good coat of papier maché being careful to smooth everything down.

Donnely was very happy with the artists' work yet again. At the end of the afternoon, she showed us a variety of puppets, including glove puppets, finger puppets (the kids were eager to show Donnely my homemade glove puppet that they discovered) and a marionette, including how it's made and how it moves.

I'm looking forward to next week when we get to paint, and the following week when I believe we will be dressing them. If I forget to mention this later, Donnely asked me to pass on that if ever there was a week to wear old art-safe clothing, next week would be it. The paint we will be using is not the easy-to-wash variety, so please send your artist in old clothes. Thanks!

Happy Valentine's & Family Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!

 

We had a big week, and I have lots of pictures to share! 

First of all, here are some of the diagrams we recently finished. Look at the close-ups and ask your student about the differences between a diagram me a bands and a pictogramme!

We also had another building session on our boots and completed them.

Here are the finished products:

A couple days later, we tested each boot to see if it could actually keep water out. 

Here is each group with their boot:

We are very near completing our instructions for how to decorate a gingerbread man, and we've started reading them aloud. It's very rewarding to hear the readers now, thinking back to their Citrouilleville stories that they read in November. We have come a long way! Here are a few that are already done:

On Wednesday, we did the goal-setting activity that I mentioned. In the net, each student wrote something that they're already doing well, this is like a goal they've already scored. In the soccer ball, they wrote what they'd like to try to improve in the next term. I have to say that I was impressed with how fitting each student's goal was. Many had the exact goal in mind for themselves, that I would have chosen for them. It was evident that you had taken the time to help them think about this the night before, so thank you! We'll keep these up in the hall for a while as a reminder of what we're aiming for. Ask your child what their goal is, and periodically check-in to see how they think they're doing!

Looking forward, an important note came home today about a gymnastics unit taking place over the next 2 weeks. Please note the special clothing requirements - students must wear shorts and a t-shirt in order to participate. This is because they need to have exposed bare skin in order to grip the climbing equipment. The note explains that students should wear their shorts and t-shirt under their clothes so that a minimum amount of time is spent changing. Please please please don't send their outfit in a bag, it will get crazy! 

Area 24 has gym every day 2 and 5, so (mark your calendars) we will need to wear gymnastics clothes on the following dates: Tuesday Feb. 18, Thursday Feb. 20, Tuesday Feb. 25 and Thursday Feb. 27.

Tuesday the 18th is our next school day!! Please help your athlete remember that they need their shorts and t-shirt the next time they come to school after this long weekend! (Also pizza forms are due.)

Have a lovely family day weekend,

Tamara