French sounds = check!

Congratulations! We've made it through all the basic French sounds. Throughout term 2, we will continue to practice using the sounds we have learned to sound-out French words in our reading and writing. Of course, in the French language, there are always always exceptions, and there's no quick and easy way to learn them, it's just exposure and memory.
Our last sound poster covers one very common exception. Previously, we learned that 'en' made the "huh?" sound (just like its friends em, an, and am). However, in many cases, when '-ent' comes at the end of a word, it is SILENT! Be careful, this is not a hard and fast rule! For example, in the word "comment", the 'en' makes its normal sound, and the t is silent, as it often is. This rule applies in verbs, in the 3rd person plural (so usually introduced with "ils…", "elles…", "les filles…", you get the idea). In these cases, you might hear a quick 'e' sound at the end of the word, but that's it.
Now then, this is a tricky thing to explain to 6 year-olds! I haven't explained it as technically as I have for you here, but I do want them to be aware of this exception as it is one of the most common French reading mistakes, even in advanced readers. I have introduced this to the kids simply by asking them to think about whether the word is an action word.

Here are some examples of what I mean: ils marchent, elles dansent, les amis parlent, les enfants jouent

Our new words of the week are:

le gâteau, le bureau, rouge, grand, grande, 

la pomme, le jour, la balle

This week we are getting serious about skip-counting. We will be doing lots of activities to help us learn those tricky numbers over 50, and counting sets of objects by grouping them by 2, 5 and 10. Any practice you can do at home is wonderful - pennies, nickels and dimes are some of the best tools for this - you can have your mathematician count out groups of 10 pennies, exchange them for dimes and then count by 10 up to one dollar. This would be quite impressive actually! Ask your counter to share our tricks for memorizing the names of these numbers. E.g., How does quatre-vingts (80) get its name?

Here are the multiples of 10 in case your child isn't quite ready to teach you yet:

Here are some of my ideas for practising skip-counting, but feel free to invent your own amazing games!

• toss a ball back and forth and with each catch, say the next number
• if you have a jar of assorted change, have your child guess how many pennies are in there and then have him/her count to see how close he/she was (there can be a prize for successful counting!)
• put some smarties in a jar and do the same - if the guess is within 5 of the total, or if the skip-counter was excellent, they win the candy
• if you're at a park with lots of dogs, ask your skip-counter to first count the dogs, and then figure out how many dog ears there were in total, by counting by 2
• if you're buying many same items at the store (e.g., 20 mushrooms, 10 apples or 12 donuts) encourage your child to count them out, but challenge them to count by 2 to make the process faster
• have your child count by 5 to draw 15 or 20 pieces of lego from the bin and then build something using only those pieces
• try The Counting Game