Bienvenue 2014!

Welcome back everyone, I hope you had awesome vacations!
The kids have been telling me, in French and in their writing, what they did over the holidays.

If your reader borrowed classroom books for the break, please help them find and pack each and every one so that we can get them back to class for our daily reading time. This includes the white books as well, we are continuing with our borrow-a-book program so please remind your student to exchange his/her books regularly. Also, most children brought their indoor or gym shoes home for the break. Please ensure that these are back at school tomorrow so that we can all participate safely in gym. Thanks!

Tonight several items are coming home:
1. Milk form due WEDNESDAY if you want milk next week.
2. Words of the week: on, papa, chien, tous, ils, ont (That's 6, I know - I think we're ready to increase the challenge!) 
3. The letter your student wrote in December. I had previously sent a copy so that you could read it before Christmas. Now I'm sending the real thing. It has a rubric on the back so you can see what the expectations were, and how your child is doing. The rubric is very much like the sounding-out rubric that you see monthly, however since we were working on the structure of a letter, that becomes a very important part of it as well. There is no need to return this, but I suggest keeping it with your other rubrics so that you can continue to check for things you want to help with at home.
4. Our day/night activity project from our last science unit.

This week we are starting several new units.
In French, we will be starting to learn about procedures, when we use them, and how to write one. This will be really fun, and you can easily expand upon this at home by reading and following instructions (e.g., when playing a game or trying out a new recipe).

In math, we are starting a data management unit on graphing. It's my favourite math unit, and should be great fun for the kids too. They will get to build and draw lots of graphs and will even get to create their own survey, collect data, and make their own graph to show off their results! Today we got started by building a graph of our vacation activities. Each child placed his/her own bar on the graph to represent something that he/she did.

We are continuing with Science, but changing our unit. We will now be investigating structures. What structures do we have in our community? What makes a structure strong? What kids of materials are used in different structures? Today we did our first experiment building shelves using different building materials. The scientists had to make a prediction of what material they thought would be the strongest, then build a bookshelf with their group. We tested the shelves using our books, and then the scientists noted which materials held all the books successfully.

See you all soon,
Tamara