Monday, 17 March 2014

Welcome Back!

I hope everyone had a lovely break. As I spoke to another teacher this afternoon, I realized that Area 24 has a lot of neat stuff going on. We're going to continue our styrofoam printmaking projects, we will be working more and more on our puppet shows, we try to practice the piano at least once a week, and we are learning a super cool Rap dance (ask your dancer to show you his/her new moves!).

We're also getting right back to work with adding and subtracting, a new science unit on energy, and we will begin a big writing project on fairy tales.

Please ensure that all scripts and borrowed classroom books come back to school by Wednesday at the latest, and I'll try to remind everyone to keep exchanging their white books. If you haven't returned the $7 for the Scientist-in-School workshop, please try to do so by the end of this week. Thanks!

While we continue to review our French sounds daily, we are also going to turn our attention to verbs. We have spoken briefly about action words, and how there are specific rules that apply only to them (for instance, the silent -ent ending). Our words of the week this week focus on the ending of -er verbs in the first person (je). Knowing this rule will help us in our writing. We never really hear the e on the end of words when we speak quickly, so it's just a rule we have to remember. Here we go:

je mange, je regarde, je joue, je saute, je parle, je chante, je cherche, je donne, je marche, j'écoute

I haven't done a lesson on this yet, but it'll come this week. Using these verbs as sentence starters is a great way to practice. Have your child speak something, and then write it down (being careful to add the 'e'). For example, 
Je donne un cadeau à mon ami pour son anniversaire!

By the way, thank you to the students who showed me their vacation journals this week - great work!

Happy St. Patrick's day!