Dance-a-thon!

 Dear families,

I hope you had a lovely long weekend, despite the storm. Many thank to the kids for the birthday wishes. They gave my just what I asked for - straight lines and clean desks! I gifted them their recipe book (at long last). They each wrote a recipe way back in January when we were working on procedural writing. They have been asking me regularly ever since when I will have the book ready, so it was fun to finally give it to them. I hope they enjoy trying out some of the very creative snack ideas! On Friday we also had our dance-a-thon, which was amazing, as expected. In addition to these pictures, I posted a couple videos on Google Classroom.

May has turned out to be a very fun and busy month for us. We've had two trips already, and two more this week and next. In addition, last week we had an African dance workshop, arranged by the Arts Committee. Our dancers participated well and were tired out by the end! I posted a short video clip on Google Classroom. Our final walking trip in May will be on the afternoon of Tuesday May 31. We have been invited to view a play at Dovercourt House, not far from Dewson. We will leave at 1:30 and be back for dismissal. I will send home a note this week. We will need a parent to come with us, and you should know that I'm not sure if there will be chairs for the adults, but it's only a 20 minute performance. Thanks to all of you for taking the time to help us with all our activities recently, and for sitting on the committees that organize all these special events!

Last Thursday we went on our community walk down College Street. While we walked, we had a list of places to find, like a community treasure hunt. Each student also had their photo taken with the special place they are doing their project on. Back in class, we have started using our photos to draw our buildings and build a large classroom map of our community!

We also completed some fun mapping work by designing and adding symbols to a map of our school to show where to find washrooms, classrooms, the gym, the office etc.

In language, we are still working on our poetry unit. Last week, I pulled out my little box of trinkets and encouraged students to choose an item them inspired them to write a poem. I taught them about making comparisons in poetry, and we read some examples in a poetry book, where sky-scrapers were compared to trees in a forest, or the Eiffel Tower to a large skirt. The writers did a great job trying this in their own writing, and also tried using alliteration in a poem on another day. Several students have enjoyed reading their poems aloud at the end of a work period. We will all get a chance to do this soon, once we've selected our favourite poem and prepared a good copy.

In math, we had some more fun playing our "Champs des Crocs" game, giving directions as we moved between squares taped out on the floor, and we did some coding brain-teasers. We have now begun a short unit on probability and have already learned 5 important terms to define the likelihood of something happening. Please ask your student to give you examples of things that would be certain, probable, possible, improbable and impossible. I am looking forward to playing lots of probability games with our helpers this Friday!

Last week we spent our art period making marbled paper. It's such a cool craft, using just shaving cream and paint swirled together to create the effect of marble on paper. Try it at home! This week, we used our marbled paper to cut out butterflies, flowers and lots more for spring collages.

These are our Canadian scenes from a couple weeks ago, laid out approximately where they are located in Canada!

In other exciting news, snack program is one more thing that has now resumed. The kids are now provided with a snack each day, usually consisting of fruit and another healthy snack, for example an orange and a muffin. It's great to see all these normal things coming back!

Take care and see you soon,

Tamara

Science Centre

Hello families,

We had a very exciting day at the Science Centre on Wednesday. We got to visit the exhibits, watch the IMAX movie Great Bear Rainforest and spend some time in the KidSpark hands-on area. My group bounced around to as many displays as possible, but there is so much more to see. I hope they tell you ALL about this exciting trip! BIG thank you to our parent volunteers for making the day go so smoothly, and Mme Potor for booking. All my pictures are at the bottom and apologies that they are mostly of my group. 

Last week, you may have noticed a very thin strip of bright pink paper in your student's pochette. This lists any overdue library books they have signed out. While we still have a few weeks left to sign out books, our librarian is starting to collect everything so that she can have a proper inventory. Please check if you have one of these tiny pink slips, and thank you for searching for those books.

Last week I also mentioned some coding sites linked to Google Classroom. We spent an afternoon trying them out at school, and students quickly became experts. In particular, Code.org is excellent for teaching beginning coding skills to kids. We did the Pre-Reader Express course, which is easy to navigate to, and you can set the language to French. The first level is a tutorial on how to drag, drop and connect blocks. Then, it gets into giving directions using a series of arrows. Each level gets a bit more difficult, with longer instructions, or the addition of a repeating block shortcut. Students are welcome to continue through these levels at home. Today, we worked on giving directions in a maze game using our bodies. I call the game "champs des crocs". Students have to navigate through a swamp with hidden crocodiles. As they advance, they explain where they are going using directional language (e.g., "à gauche"). If they step on a crocodile, we go on to the next person who has to start again. Everyone has to pay attention in order to use what we learn from each other (safe and unsafe squares).

In social studies, we are doing a few mapping projects this week, focusing on reading maps and noticing things like symbols and colours. 

While we are talking a lot about our local community, I thought it would be fun to do some art to celebrate our country. Students worked with watercolour to paint some detailed lanscapes from all over Canada. We talked about where each scene was from, and looked at photos of the real places. Students were excited to share if they had seen these places in real life. Ask your artist what Canadian landscape scene they painted, and what province or territory it is in.

Words of the Week

étoile, je vois, je dois, bois, j’ai soif, poisson, voilà, noir, au revoir, trois