What have we been up to?

This week in math, we are moving on to a measurement unit that will cover things like months of the year, days of the week, telling time and measuring temperature. We have already started creating our own personal calendars with the right number of days in each month, and notes about important dates so that we can help ourselves be very organized.
It's always helpful to review counting skills, and we will continue coming back to this throughout the year. Last week we worked through some math centres where we had to estimate, then count by 2, 5 or 10 to figure out how many items were in the cup at each centre. I loved seeing students group the materials and then skip-count to find the total.

We also learned some cool tricks for remembering the tricky multiples of ten (quarante, cinquante, soixante, soixante-dix, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt-dix). Ask your counter if he/she remembers this!

Here's a good idea for practicing sounds and getting into reading. We have been working with short poems and finding the sounds we know within. For example, in this example, we circled all the 'a' sounds in green, the 'e' sounds in blue, and the 'i' sounds in purple. These sounds provide great jumping off points for reading words. In fact, today, many students were able to guess the word "bicyclette", just by isolating the 'bi' and 'cy' parts of the words. If you aren't keen on marking up your expensive books (I don't blame you), you can always do this just by going through the book in advance and sounding out the simplest words with your finger as a guide.

I hope you enjoy the various items coming home today. Our colour mixing art project, a Thanksgiving turkey decoration and a little souvenir from my trip. We pretended to be miners today and broke open a geode to see what it looked like inside. It was pretty cool. Then, each student received a special rock (that I attempted to identify) from Alberta.

I hope you have a lovely Thanksgiving weekend with your families. Here is what we are thankful for in Area 24:

See you Tuesday!

PS: Heads up! The school days will be shifting after this PA day. Day 4 library will now fall on Mondays. Dictée remains on Tuesday. Gym days (2 & 5) are now Tuesdays and Thursdays. A "school days" calendar can be found on the Dewson Blog if you're ever unsure.