Dear families,
Thank you for your thoughtful messages after my grandfather's passing. He was almost 97, so while I am of course sad, I am mostly feeling gratitude for his incredibly long life, and that he got to spend time recently with Wales (whose first name is actually Donald, like his great-grandpa). It's nice to be back now focusing on our class!
First, I need to ask your help with another initiative (poems are almost ready and I can't wait!). Some lovely teachers at our school are putting together a school-wide art project in celebration of Pride month. We did some black and white artwork for this project and this work needs to be submitted directly to those teachers. There is a Google Form and instructions posted on Classroom. Please be sure to get a good quality image and submit this ASAP so that we can be sure everyone's art is included! Many thanks! On Wednesday we discussed the messages of acceptance and love behind Pride month and gave examples of all shapes and sizes of families that we may already know.
In addition to Pride, June is National Indigenous History month. Last week, after one of our own students brought it up, we had a repeat orange T-shirt day (there would have been one earlier in the year) and discussed what the word Indigenous means, what Residential Schools were, and what some of the issues were. We listened to Phyllis Webstad (the woman behind the orange shirt story) speak briefly and also listened to the book she wrote about her experience. We did some animal art (hopefully using the pastel and watercolour "resist" technique) in recognition of how important animals are to Indigenous culture, often the centre of stories passed down through generations.
Last week, we began trying out different types of poems. We used our ever-increasing bank of daily poems to create shape poems, where the words are written in the shape of the subject (e.g., a moon, for "La Lune"). We also tried writing colour poems, where we make basically a short and sweet list of items that match the chosen colour. This week, we used colours to begin working on acrostic poems (since it's a bit easier to think of nouns, rather than adjectives). However, we are moving on to learning a bit about what adjectives are, and the masculin and feminine French forms, so that we can write acrostic poems about people! We are still doing our best to sound out most words on our own. Very exciting! Please help your child submit their favourite poem this week!
I like to read a story each day, but sometimes I've gone off-book a bit and told oral stories. Twice now, I've asked students to help me re-tell an oral story called "Reine des Abeilles" by being the characters in the story and performing their dialogue. Maybe we will try this once more to encourage others to take a turn acting - we know this story very well now, please ask your student to tell it to you!
We got into some algebra last week and this leads us nicely into coding! We talked about how this is basically learning to explain how to get a desired outcome in computer language, small step by small step. We have started with puzzle-like activities that have us considering each movement on a grid and providing simple instructions. There are lots of great coding games and sites, and I'm sure many others that your kids already know of! My suggestions are linked in Google Classroom in the Math folder for the kids to play again if they like.
In Social Studies, hopefully you saw our "Projet sur un Pays" assignment that we've been working on. Most grade 1s are learning more about Canada, with me. Grade 2s each chose a different country from a list and have been working on gathering information about their country using some maps, info slides I prepared, and by watching some French videos on the Idello site I posted. Ask your student how to say "Hello" in the language of their country! I'd like for all grade 2s, and any grade 1s who wish, to present some of their findings on Thursday, so if they haven't completed their research yet, they should definitely stay to work with me during independent time!
As part of our Local Community investigation from a couple weeks ago, we did a big mapping project where we cut out lots of buildings and got to design our own city, with essential services, places to live and places to work and play - all connected by roads of course!
Take care,
Tamara