Experimenting...

Happy Monday!
First of all, when I picked up the children from library this morning, I noticed that many readers have 2 or more overdue books. They were not able to take out new books today, so please make sure they search the house and find any books that need to be returned. Thanks for the reminders!

We have begun our measurement unit. We reviewed the terms "long" and "court" and compared objects using the language "plus long", "plus court" and "le plus long" and "le plus court". The mathematicians were very clear that this task was way too easy, so we continued with some measuring activities using various objects as our units of measurement. For example, we measured our desks using a pencil, a paper clip and a toothpick. We confirmed that the smaller the unit of measurement, the more of them we need. We also compared a 30 cm ruler to a metre stick and predicted how many rulers would fit inside the metre. We also compared ourselves to a metre and remeasured our heights. We've grown since the beginning of grade 1!

 

To continue learning about lengths, we talked about distance. We estimated how far a toy car would roll down a ramp, and the number of footsteps needed to cross our field.  Of course, after estimating, we measured exactly, using the given unit of measurement. We're learning that it's good to make mistakes in our predictions, and not to erase them once we have the correct measurement!

In Science, we are going to build on what we learned in our workshop last week. We learned that the sun is the most important source of energy (as we would not have any others without it). We also learned that the sun gives it's energy to plants to help them grow and produce food for animals and humans. After everything we've learned, many of our scientists predict that a plant cannot survive without access sunlight, but not all of us are convinced. We're not taking anybody's word for it, and will judge for ourselves after an experiment. We currently have 2 healthy flowers. One is staying by the window for the next 3 weeks, the other one is staying in a dark cupboard. Both will be watered regularly. Ask your scientist what their prediction is for the cupboard plant. The results will be analyzed the week before Easter.

We also spent some science time outside looking for things that move. We took pictures of cars, birds, a plane, a bicycle, branches and a few other things. After I printed them, we organized them according to the source of energy they use. You can play the What makes it move? game almost anywhere, and it will be a great application of what we're learning at school!

In language, we are working away on our fairy tales. We're all at different stages of planning and starting our rough copy. We have learned that writers often make many many drafts of a book before they're done, so we are using our planning sheet to write our draft, and then we will make some revisions and write out a nice clean good copy with very careful illustrations. You can help with this big project by talking about it at home. Ask your writer who his/her two characters are and what they're like (nice, mean, old, funny, has magic powers, likes to steal things, human/animal or otherwise...). Ask where the story takes place. Ask what the big problem is going to be (all fairy tales have a problem in the middle) and how it will be solved at the end. It will be great if the writers think it over a bit, and come to school full of ideas!

Have a great week,

Tamara

Scientist-in-School Workshop

I hope your scientists told you all about our fantastic energy workshop! Our leader, Scientist Judy, was amazing and had prepared 5 different energy centers, UV bracelets for each child, and even a play that she put on with the kids' help! 

Of course, none of this would have been possible without our fantastic parent-teachers who each had to do a quick-study of one center so that they could teach it to the children. Thank you all SO much!

I'd love to explain each center just a little so that you can get your child talking about it over the weekend! Here goes...

Solar Panel Center
Scientist Judy used a lamp to activate solar-powered devices, such as a toy car, a light etc. (I'm told the solar-powered car can be purchased at Mastermind, if anyone is looking for a birthday gift.) One of the machines that was solar-powered was a spinning machine which was used to create artwork by spinning paint on a disk. We learned that solar panels require light energy from the sun to produce electricity.
How did Judy make the car move without touching it?
What is the most important source of energy?

Solar Energy Center
Students discussed the harmful effects of the sun and what we can do to protect ourselves. They learned about how the sun makes the wind and made a pinwheel which uses the wind in order to move.
How can we protect ourselves from UV rays? (I heard at least 4 different ideas)
What happened to your UV bead on your bracelet outside? Try this again, it will work 100 times!

Can you describe how the sun makes the wind? (think about hot and cold air)

Heat Energy Center
Students made predictions about which colour would absorb the most heat, and then measured the temperature as a bulb shone on a white shirt and a black shirt. Students also experimented with heating up air inside a bottle. By warming the bottle with their hands, and because hot air rises, they were able to create a bubble on top of the bottle. It shrank when the air was cooled by dipping the bottle in cold water. 
Which t-shirt absorbed the most heat, black or white? Was your prediction correct?
How did you make the bottle blow a bubble? Try this at home!

The link above is an activity similar to the one we did. We didn't squeeze the bottles. We simple rubbed our hands together and "hugged" the bottle to heat it up. 

Light Energy Center
Students discussed how the sun is the most important source of energy for the world, and how it helps us grow food, which in turn gives us energy. Students discussed where different objects (e.g., flashlights) get their energy (e.g., batteries) and whether those sources are renewable or non-renewable.
What does renewable and non-renewable mean?

Where does a night-light get energy? Is this a renewable source?

Energy Conservation Center
Students were given a little model house where they had to identify areas where energy was being wasted. They talked about why we should be trying to save energy, and doctored up the house with new pictures and various forms of insulation so that it would be a more efficient home. They played a game which encouraged them to think about alternatives to using an energy-dependent device (e.g., what could we do instead of vacuuming, or watching tv?).
How was energy wasted in the pretend house?
Why is it important to save energy?

I hope this makes for some very interesting conversations!

For fans of Mme Salmon!

CONTE ET RACONTE…contes de mon enfance…

Featuring Agnes Salmon en français! Stories and folktales for the young at heart. Un pot-pourri de contes et comptines.

Audience: Family. Geared to five-year-old Francophone children to grade 3 French immersion.

Where: St. Matthews United Church (located at St Clair West and Rushton) 729 St. Clair Avenue West

When: Saturday, March 29, 4 – 5 pm

Admission: Suggested donation $5 (funds donated to the RETT Syndrome Association)

For more details visit www.torontostorytellingfestival.ca

Fairy Tale Writing

More of the same for words of the week. When we start with "Je", the action word often ends with 'e'. 

je nage, j'aime, je range, je me lave, je danse, 
je plante, je décore, je chasse, je vole, j'attrape

Recently, I suggested keeping a journal as daily writing practice. After March break, several students brought in their journals to share with me. Thank you! I have been very impressed with your by-yourself writing. If this is something you'd like to try with your writer, here is one example of what it could look like. Just one sentence per day, and sounded out (try to avoid online translators - dictionaries are a good tool).

Our new writing project at school is to write a fairy tale. We have read quite a few in our afternoon story time lately, and since we are also using fairy tales for our puppet shows, it seems natural to continue this theme in our writing. We have already begun working on our plans. Since most fairy tales have a hero and a villain, we are starting by brainstorming our two main characters. Each student is imagining what the characters look like, and planning their name and some characteristics. Here are some examples:

In math, I'm happy with our progress in number sense, and we are beginning another unit on measurement. We will continue to use our adding and subtracting skills in most units this year, particularly when we get to measuring Area in this next unit. I would like to communicate a bit more specifically how each mathematician is doing, in terms of communicating their thinking around adding and subtracting. Therefore, I have created a rubric - very simple - that I hope will give you an idea of how your mathematician is doing. Though this rubric is based on our most recent work in number sense, we are never done communicating about our mathematical thinking. If you'd like to help your mathematician move to the next level, try giving them the occasional problem to solve and encourage them to write out how they solve it. Even if they are able to do the math mentally, it's good to practice showing our thinking on paper, especially when there are several steps involved in solving a problem. Looking forward to EQAO in grade 3, this is exactly what will be required and it's a great skill to develop anyway. Look for this rubric (and our most recent dictée) later this week.

Tomorrow is our Scientist-in-School workshop. I'll definitely post about it afterwards and will try to give you some questions to ask so that you can get all the details. So far, in class, we have discussed what energy does, and different kinds of energy. Ask your scientist how cars get their energy, how flags move, how doors move, and why people need energy.

Monday evening was Eco-Night at Dewson. I saw a few of you there before I had to leave. I hope you saw our little display of prints and puppets. Both projects were made using recycled materials. Here are our first prints, made by carving a picture into styrofoam meat trays and then rolling paint on to the stencil. For our first set, we had the option of mixing 2 primary colours, so that it actually looks as if 3 colours were used. 

Welcome Back!

I hope everyone had a lovely break. As I spoke to another teacher this afternoon, I realized that Area 24 has a lot of neat stuff going on. We're going to continue our styrofoam printmaking projects, we will be working more and more on our puppet shows, we try to practice the piano at least once a week, and we are learning a super cool Rap dance (ask your dancer to show you his/her new moves!).

We're also getting right back to work with adding and subtracting, a new science unit on energy, and we will begin a big writing project on fairy tales.

Please ensure that all scripts and borrowed classroom books come back to school by Wednesday at the latest, and I'll try to remind everyone to keep exchanging their white books. If you haven't returned the $7 for the Scientist-in-School workshop, please try to do so by the end of this week. Thanks!

While we continue to review our French sounds daily, we are also going to turn our attention to verbs. We have spoken briefly about action words, and how there are specific rules that apply only to them (for instance, the silent -ent ending). Our words of the week this week focus on the ending of -er verbs in the first person (je). Knowing this rule will help us in our writing. We never really hear the e on the end of words when we speak quickly, so it's just a rule we have to remember. Here we go:

je mange, je regarde, je joue, je saute, je parle, je chante, je cherche, je donne, je marche, j'écoute

I haven't done a lesson on this yet, but it'll come this week. Using these verbs as sentence starters is a great way to practice. Have your child speak something, and then write it down (being careful to add the 'e'). For example, 

Je donne un cadeau à mon ami pour son anniversaire!

By the way, thank you to the students who showed me their vacation journals this week - great work!

Happy St. Patrick's day!

Enjoy your break!

Hello families,

I sent the children home with full backpacks today. I hope everyone who needed their shoes packed them, and that you aren't missing too many outdoor clothes. We all checked the lost and found, and we made a solid effort to find owners for the left-over neck-warmers and gloves this afternoon. I must thank the students for their very helpful work getting the class tidied up so that we are leaving it ready for the caretakers, and ready to come back to. Everyone was committed to the job they had and fully deserve their Bravo!

I have sent home our beautiful hearts with the shadow effect, our 3-D season from way back, and a print that we just made today. This was our first attempt at print-making, and they all turned out SO well. We'll do another big one after the break. Thanks for all the styrofoam meat trays - this is what we used them for! Ask your artist how they planned their print, carved it into the styrofoam and then made the print! Later I'll send home the styrofoam stencils themselves and they can be reused. In the meantime, it's an easy project to do at home!

If you're looking for things to work on over the break, I have 4 good ideas. Take them or leave them:

1. I thought it would be super fun to do something with the amazing puppets we made with Donnely. I have adapted 3 well-known fairy tales to suit our characters, and each student has a role in one. Ideally each student will memorize his/her lines so that we can focus on the puppets and our acting later. I did something similar last year, so I know that we will be able to do it! When you see the script, the thought of your child being able to read and memorize all those words may seem next to impossible, but remember that they just got it today and have read through it only once, with a lot of help. Our reading buddies will do most of the work with us, so this is NOT expected to be done over the break, but I know some students are really excited to get started, so this is one thing you can do. Long car rides are great for this!
* Please remind your actor to take very good care of their script and bring it to school right away after the break!

2. READ READ READ! I encouraged everyone to take some books home today, but the library is a great resource as well. Please attempt to maintain the same reading routine that you have established, just like brushing your teeth. Taking a week off from working with French sounds would not be the best thing ever...
* Please remind your reader to return all of their borrowed books right after the break!

3. Keep a vacation journal! Remember when I said I was going to encourage the writers to come up with their own things to say? Well, good news, they've been doing it! And it hasn't been as hard as I was imagining. Maybe they can write something every evening about what they did. I'd love to see this after the break - even if it's not in French.

4. Finally, we will be continuing our adding and subtracting work after the break. I've been loving the strategies the mathematicians have been inventing, and it's been great to see others drawing on the strategies we've shared and using them successfully. Some of them are quite complex for grade 1 - there's absolutely nothing wrong with drawing a picture, using blocks or some kind of counter to help with addition and subtraction at this stage - in fact it's highly encouraged! Over the break, you could give your mathematician the occasional math problem and a blank piece of paper and let them go to town. For example, Today we are going to drive for 2 hours to get to the ski hill, then we'll drive 2 hours to get home. Tomorrow we will drive 3 hours to get to grandma's. How many hours will we spend in the car today and tomorrow?

Most importantly, have a fun and relaxing week!
See you soon,
Mlle Mitchell

Happy March

Our words of the week are:

septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre, 

janvier, février, mars, avril, mai

In this short week, we will continue to write personal journal entries. Maybe you can continue this over March break with a daily writing journal. Even if it's in English, it's still great writing and sounding-out practice!
We will be finishing up our unit on structures and materials by discussing what we do with materials when we're done with them, and how to be environmentally conscious. For example, if we grow out of clothes, what can we do with them aside from throw them in the garbage? We'll share lots of ideas, and it's something you can talk about at home as well. When I was asking where we put paper that we're finished with, I was looking for the answer "dans le recyclage", but I first got 2 answers about reusing it (erasing and starting over, and using the other side). I'm super fussy about not wasting paper, and I'm glad it's sinking in!

In math, we're moving away from the numbers 2, 5 and 10. We started our adding with them because we wanted to use our skip-counting as a strategy. Now, I'm giving the mathematicians problems with a variety of numbers under 20, and seeing what other strategies they come up with. Yesterday I observed several helpful strategies for solving math problems. We shared them with the whole group and named them after the inventor (although many others had similar, and just as useful strategies). Here are the strategies we have shared so far:
"Le Jackson"
Drawing what the question says is a great way to make sure you understand what the question is asking. Here are the groups of gold, silver and bronze medals that Canada won. Added up, that made 25.

"Le Flynn"
Grouping things by 2, 5 or 10 is a great strategy because then we can skip-count. Here are Canada's medals arranged into groups of 5 using the hash marks that we learned to use when we did our surveys.

"L' Abigail"
Counting up on a number line is a great way to make sure we don't skip any. This would be a good one to use for subtraction as well!

"Le Thal-Ew-vy" Proceed at own risk.
Several mathematicians had the idea to break numbers down into more manageable pieces. For example, 8 is a tricky number to add a lot of the time, but 5 is better, and goes together nicely with 25. That leaves us with just 3 to add on. No problem! Russia won 8 medals more than Canada, and that made...

"Le Miain" Warning: This is an advanced technique. Use with caution! 
Stacking numbers allows us to first add units, and then tens. We will not be tackling regrouping in grade 1, but it could be a fun one to try at home simply with multiples of 10 (e.g., 10 + 20).

Today was a bit of a different day because we got to use the Smart Board for all our activities. If you've never met a Smart Board, it is a very cool teaching tool. It is an interactive whiteboard, so I can use a projector to show files from my computer, but we can also use special pens and the touchscreen to edit writing, circle things and move things around, the way you would on an iPad. It's quite an elaborate set-up, so when I use it, I like to use it ALL day!
In French, we used it to correct the mistakes in my journal entry. Silly me, I had forgotten many capitals and periods and, though I did a good job sounding out, my students knew the correct spelling of the word "j'ai".

In math, we played some adding and subtracting games that I prepared, and that exist online. The kids really liked Café MATHadores, which is in the Math Links list to the right. Ask your mathematician to teach you how to play the games!

In Science, we looked at some pictures of interesting Toronto buildings that the kids had mentioned in our discussion last week. Ask your scientist how the Flatiron (en forme de fer à repasser) gets it's name and how you can tell a country church from a city church. What other buildings do the remember, and which one was the MOST interesting or unique?

Scientist visit soon!

Ever dream of being a science teacher? Good news, now you can be!!

Area 24 will be having a visit from the Scientist-in-School program in the afternoon of March 26th. A note came home today explaining what this is and the cost ($7/student). It's an amazing program and totally worth it.

I know this is still a few weeks away, but with March break in there, I don't want to risk not giving you enough notice if you would like to volunteer. I think we will need 4 or 5 parents to come help out and probably run a centre. The workshop will be focusing on energy, but you don't need to know anything specific in order to be a helper - our visiting scientist will explain everything you need to know.

If you are interested/available, you can let me know on the return slip of the note or you can email me. Thanks!

Last Art Workshop

Well, Friday afternoon was our last workshop with Donnely. I know we have all learned a lot in the last 6 weeks, and Donnely has given me some tips that will come in handy in our upcoming projects.

We began by finishing our texture collages, that we made in week 1, by drawing around our creature or city scene to add details or an environment. To do this we had 3 drawing utensils: graphite, conté and a blending stick. Graphite is familiar to us now, but conté was new. It's kind of like really compressed chalk or pastel. The blending stick is quite simply cardboard rolled into a pencil shape, but it works well to blend the graphite, softening and spreading it.

After this it was onto the main event, dressing our puppets. Donnely brought some "wigs" of colourful wool and tons of recycled fabric and ribbons in all different patterns. The designers were allowed to take lots of different items and were encouraged to create several outfits for their puppet. While hair-pieces and buttons were glued on, capes, dresses and shirts are attached using ribbon, so they can be interchanged depending on what our puppets get up to!

At the end of the workshop, we sat in a circle and everyone introduced their puppet - by name and by species! We will keep these characters at school so that we can use them for some fun drama activities, but of course all our amazing work will come home eventually. For now, please ask your designer all about his/her puppet - what it looks like, where it lives and what it likes to do.

Thanks again to Donnely for the incredible workshops, including all the set-up, take-down and materials!