Fairy Tale Writing

More of the same for words of the week. When we start with "Je", the action word often ends with 'e'. 

je nage, j'aime, je range, je me lave, je danse, 
je plante, je décore, je chasse, je vole, j'attrape

Recently, I suggested keeping a journal as daily writing practice. After March break, several students brought in their journals to share with me. Thank you! I have been very impressed with your by-yourself writing. If this is something you'd like to try with your writer, here is one example of what it could look like. Just one sentence per day, and sounded out (try to avoid online translators - dictionaries are a good tool).

Our new writing project at school is to write a fairy tale. We have read quite a few in our afternoon story time lately, and since we are also using fairy tales for our puppet shows, it seems natural to continue this theme in our writing. We have already begun working on our plans. Since most fairy tales have a hero and a villain, we are starting by brainstorming our two main characters. Each student is imagining what the characters look like, and planning their name and some characteristics. Here are some examples:

In math, I'm happy with our progress in number sense, and we are beginning another unit on measurement. We will continue to use our adding and subtracting skills in most units this year, particularly when we get to measuring Area in this next unit. I would like to communicate a bit more specifically how each mathematician is doing, in terms of communicating their thinking around adding and subtracting. Therefore, I have created a rubric - very simple - that I hope will give you an idea of how your mathematician is doing. Though this rubric is based on our most recent work in number sense, we are never done communicating about our mathematical thinking. If you'd like to help your mathematician move to the next level, try giving them the occasional problem to solve and encourage them to write out how they solve it. Even if they are able to do the math mentally, it's good to practice showing our thinking on paper, especially when there are several steps involved in solving a problem. Looking forward to EQAO in grade 3, this is exactly what will be required and it's a great skill to develop anyway. Look for this rubric (and our most recent dictée) later this week.

Tomorrow is our Scientist-in-School workshop. I'll definitely post about it afterwards and will try to give you some questions to ask so that you can get all the details. So far, in class, we have discussed what energy does, and different kinds of energy. Ask your scientist how cars get their energy, how flags move, how doors move, and why people need energy.

Monday evening was Eco-Night at Dewson. I saw a few of you there before I had to leave. I hope you saw our little display of prints and puppets. Both projects were made using recycled materials. Here are our first prints, made by carving a picture into styrofoam meat trays and then rolling paint on to the stencil. For our first set, we had the option of mixing 2 primary colours, so that it actually looks as if 3 colours were used.