Happy Easter and preparations...

Dear room 113 families,

I hope you've had a good week. Easter snuck up on me this year, but we had time to do some watercolour painting of paper eggs, using salt and glue to give them a crystalized effect. I love how the watercolours are soaked up by the salt and mix a bit. We also had some fun today making Easter cards and decorating fish for le "Poisson d'avril"! I can't resist a good egg-hunt, so we had fun searching for an egg with a little gift inside, and an Easter game booklet.

We have done a bit of gardening! We have planted peas and beans and you can see our little seed babies in the window outside our class. I was very impressed with the turn-taking during this activity. We are also jumping into some procedural writing, and used this opportunity to write out the materials and steps that we used and followed to plant our seeds.

In math, before we jump into my own plans, we are finishing up some stuff Mme Tatiana left for us - some of which was related to time. We made paper plate clocks to make this more visual and worked on telling time to the half hour, and associating the numbers on the clock to elapsed minutes (counting by 5).

I know there have been whispers of preparing for a return to virtual learning. We all hope very much that this doesn't happen, however, I know we need to be prepared as a positive case in any classroom could pop up unexpectedly. To this end, I've opened my Google Classroom and invited our students to it. Your student can also join with the class code: eomti73

Our Meet link is clearly posted in the header of Google Classroom, should we need to use it. Please make sure everything is working for you and let me know if you need any support. I will send invites to parents as well as soon as I get a minute.

This blog will always remain my main form of communication with you, but if it becomes necessary, I will start populating Google Classroom with links and information for students. Until we hear otherwise, I will continue to put my time and effort into our physical classroom.

In addition, I've quickly gone searching for materials I can send home. Each student has a ziplock bag with some reading material, workbooks and current class work. For the time being, I would appreciate if these bags can stay in backpacks and go back and forth each day. This way, we can use the materials at school, but also have them at the ready if we are told to stay home on short notice.

You will notice that the French workbooks are not the most current resource... However, we had them lying around and they serve the purpose of giving us some grade-appropriate texts that we can read and respond to together as a group. I like that they will save us reading off a screen, are in colour, avoids you or I having to print countless worksheets and include some interesting activities like cutting and pasting. Unfortunately I couldn't find enough of any one workbook for our entire class, or even all the grade 1s, but at least everyone has something. I will figure out how to work with the variety if need be, and it will also be useful for asynchronous time. 

Everyone loves a new workbook. Please discourage your student from using these workbooks over the weekend or just for fun. Please encourage them to save these materials for school time - we talked about how we want to be able to do activities together. The workbooks, obviously, will belong to your child and they can write directly in them when we use them. The other books belong to the school and will need to be returned. I appreciate your help keeping track of these resources. 

Thanks for all you do, and have a wonderful long weekend!

Tamara