Hello Salle 213 families!
I hope you are well. It's starting to look and feel like fall outside, though the school is still warm, and the kids are having tons of fun playing in the leaves and in our current zone with the play structure. Ask them about our new structure game, "Shark Attack"! With the cold mornings and warm afternoons inside, it's good to have layers of clothing that we can remove or add on - please make sure names are on everything! It's not too early to start sending a hat and gloves, as we do try to spend some extra time outside even on non-gym days.
In our class, we have gotten in the routine of checking our visual schedule every morning, so the kids know what we will be doing for the day, and they ask when they see something out of the ordinary. Yesterday, they wondered why we had story time in the morning and again in the afternoon. This was because in the morning, they began presenting their short stories to the class! We took some time to practice with a partner, and then we started with some brave presenters. Whoever is reading gets to sit in my chair (I am beside to help) and of course earns a jeton for reading in French. We talked about using an excited voice when we read our stories aloud, as it will keep our audience interested. We also talked about being good listeners when we are in the audience. I'm so proud of our class for being up to the challenge of presenting to the class! Please ask your student how accomplishing this made them feel!
With announcements now being student-led over zoom, we have changed our morning routine to include silent reading while we wait for the zoom to start. We've been talking about strategies that help us read books, so during this time, everyone is trying so hard to find words they can read in their books - lots of le, la, ma, un, une and sometimes I encourage students to find other words of the week in there. It's great that they are using the strategy of looking for high-frequency words. I'm also encouraging them to look for words that repeat, as many of our leveled books have repetition. Please check back soon for tons of information on our home reading routine, which will begin, likely, next week!
Words of the Week
We have more i words this week, and in addition, a few y’s, which make the same sound. “Y” doesn’t look like it should be a word, but it actually is, though the rules around using it can get complicated. Your student will see it often used, and use it, in the common phrase “il y a”. Note: In the word “famille”, the final ‘lle’ are not really heard. They add a bit of a “ye” sound I guess, but for your practice purposes, it would be better to not pronounce them at all, then to add a regular L sound. :)
y, bicyclette, fini, petit, famille
Bonus words: stylo, pizza
In math, we are finishing up our Number unit with some estimating and skip-counting fun. Yesterday we had 7 centres to rotate through in small groups. At each centre, there was a different collection of material to count (for example, marbles, coins, shapes). Each group was encouraged to estimate, and then count their collection by 2, 5 or 10 by first making groups out of the material. Each group worked very well together to group and count the material and then tidy it up before rotating. We did SO much counting! We're getting pretty good! We did notice that when we grouped items by 10, it was faster to count than going by 1s or 2s. This is a good reason to keep practicing! We are also doing some simple addition using money and learning the value of our coins and bills. If you have a collection of coins at home, this is a material for practicing skip-counting!
In Science, we are wrapping up our Seasonal Changes unit with some sun experiments. Last week, we used two heat lamps as our "suns" and shined them on a white and black t-shirt, placed over thermometers. I won't give it away, but one of them heated up more than the other in the same amount of time. Ask your scientist which one, and what we can learn from this! We also put a little sun collage in the windows for a week and predicted what will happen when we remove our sun circle from our dark blue paper. We haven't had a chance to look at our results yet, but we will try to draw some conclusions from this as well (possibly related to our skin...). We are also talking about different cycles; the days of the week, months of the year, and the 4 seasons. We have a couple songs that help us keep things in order. Ask to hear our days of the week song!
In art, we did another project using the primary colours - this time a collage. You can see that many students were inspired by my example (I did a house), but they got much more detailed and creative than me. They look great!
Next Friday, we will celebrate Halloween at school. Students may dress up, if they wish, but keep in mind that it is a gym morning, so it may be best to bring a costume only for the afternoon (and also that we still need to be masked). In addition, our school has decided not to have any food or treat sharing this year, but we will have fun and students will all receive a little Halloween favour from me.
Finally, I wanted to share that students have started requesting to listen to specific French songs at lunch. In particular, songs by Kids United. If you haven't heard of this group, do check them out on YouTube. They have lots of great French songs that we enjoy singing along to!
Please check back next week for reading info,
Take care, Tamara