Songs we love!

Happy Halloween! We have been in the spirit this week. Our class has some decorations, and we've been watching French Halloween episodes at lunch. The student announcers this week have even been getting us up to do some Halloween dances! The leaves are falling like rain in the school yard, and the kids are making piles and jumping right in! We have also learned yet another outdoor game called "Promenons-nous dans les bois", where we sing a song and play in the woods while a wolf slowly wakes up and gets ready. When the wolf says it's lunch time, it's like tag and (s)he has to catch someone to eat/be the next wolf. It's a great game for our recess zone under the trees by the little house. It's been a great 2 weeks, but I think we are in store for more concrete now...

One day at lunch, I asked students to collect some nice fallen leaves to bring in. We painted the backs of these and used them as stamps to create pictures. Some kept it abstract, while others tried to make a specific picture, or animal out of their leaves.

We have wrapped up our first Science unit with a fun fall scavenger hunt outside and we have begun our first Social Studies unit on Roles and Responsibilities. We are starting by talking about different rules that exist at school, at home and in our community.

Thanks to all of you for diving right into reading in French at home with your student. The kids have been so excited to tell me what they've done. We are practicing some of the books at school as well, and we've talked about how we have RAZ-kids to work on reading. Avatars are fun and stars are encouraging, but we would still be working on reading if we didn't have these things. Here are a few more tips for reading, especially when you need to repeat it many times:

• have your student circle all the 'i's in red, for example, using the pen tool
• ask your student to find the word(s) that repeat and underline them with the pen tool
• ask your student to highlight "le" in green, and "la" in purple (for example) using the highlighter tool
• have your student stamp a question mark by any word that they can't figure out. They can ask me to open the book at school, we can look for the question mark and I can help!
• your student can record themselves reading, and then listen to themselves (I can also listen!)

I also just want to acknowledge (because I'm sure you will notice soon), that I didn't put all of the titles on the purple list. Mainly, it didn't work with my formatting (haha), but also a couple of the books are a little more challenging than the others, more like level A books. Feel free to practice them anyway if you like - we read "On habille Fido" at school today and looked for a repeating word to help us - but also you may choose to focus on the books on the purple list and move on when those are solid.

This week we are reviewing the sound ‘o’. This letter makes the same sound as in English. Think “so” (with many exceptions). Again, for each new sound that we learn, I love the idea of using 3-D letters or flashcards to experiment with the vowel combined with different consonants. We won’t be looking at each consonant in depth the way we are vowels, so this is a great way to make sure your child has a good grasp of the whole alphabet. Don’t worry if your combos aren’t real words, we’re just working on combining sounds in this game!

orange, dos, octobre, soleil, mot

Bonus words: Noël, zéro

In math this past week, we've been playing with money. We've had a few, very popular, class stores, where students have been offered a selection of items to choose from, and they have been asked to "buy" 2-3 items. To do this, they must add up the cost of the items they select, and "pay" by using the school money to get exactly the right amount, and then draw their bills and coins on their paper. We have focused on simple dollar amounts under $20, and we did some group counting with cents as well. 

We will move on to some patterning work now, and revisit numbers and operations later. Before we do, I'm just going to have a quick meeting with each student to do some counting and review some of what we have covered so far. I'm doing the same with letters and reading strategies as well. Always good to check that what we are doing as a group is sinking in. Ask your reader if they have had their interview with Mme yet, and what book they chose to read ("La crème glacée" or "Salade de fruits").

Finally, I mentioned before that we were loving the Kids United songs, but this week we have been learning the words to "C'est l'Halloween" - that very popular song. This video, with lyrics, is great for singing along to. I've also been asked to share "C'est comme ça ici" - this song has beautiful lyrics about working together, but the kids just find the video hilarious. I've created a folder on Google Classroom where I've linked these, and more of our favourite songs!