I would like to pass on a compliment I received about our class yesterday! Mme Arakeylan (Mme Ana), finishes the day with our students once a week, on day 3. On two separate occasions, she has taken the time to tell me what a pleasure it is to work with the students in Aire 24. She says that our students are well-behaved, helpful, eager and enthusiastic. They really make her day! I am so proud, and wanted to share this lovely compliment with you!
Some quick notes about this week:
- If your child had their eyes/ears checked yesterday, you are receiving a form with the results and any necessary next steps. Look for this today.
- Tomorrow students will be bringing home their season that they built with their group. You received the group evaluation a short time ago.
- Friday morning, Dewson is hosting it's annual Christmas carol sing-a-long. There is usually some space for parents to join in. If you're interested, it will start at 9:20 in the gym.
- I will be reminding students to take everything home that they might need during the break, including indoor shoes. If you really need those shoes at home and are worried your child might leave them in our bin, you can always email me and I'll make sure they get packed.
- Students are most welcome to take extra levelled books (or classroom books) home over the break. I'll remind them when we're packing, but if you can send them to school with a mission (# of books you'd like), it will be even better. We just need to make sure that all the books come back promptly in the new year so that we can continue sharing them.
- Please keep up your reading routines over the holiday. It's shocking how quickly we forget without regular practice. It might also be a good time to review past sounds and words of the week. You can invent different games with the words to keep it interesting (e.g., write each word or sound on two cards, lay them face down and play a game of Memory, or ask your child to make flashcards with pictures of their words and test YOU - they love being the teacher). Finally, if you are thinking of arranging playdates with schoolmates, challenge the children to speak in French to each other. If they do, write me a note and I'll reward them with jetons upon their return!
This week we have continued to work on sorting 2-D shapes according to various attributes, including number of sides, straight or curvy sides, square corners, parts going in or out and symmetry. Today, all students had a turn being the teacher and creating their own Venn diagram with 2 sorting rules. I was quite amazed to see that every group of teachers came up with sorting rules that worked together and found shapes that met the criteria! Some mathematicians are so into geometry that they are experimenting with shapes and Venn diagrams at free time. Can you guess the sorting rules?
Here are some of the pictures we made using shapes at our math centres:
This week we have continued to work on sorting 2-D shapes according to various attributes, including number of sides, straight or curvy sides, square corners, parts going in or out and symmetry. Today, all students had a turn being the teacher and creating their own Venn diagram with 2 sorting rules. I was quite amazed to see that every group of teachers came up with sorting rules that worked together and found shapes that met the criteria! Some mathematicians are so into geometry that they are experimenting with shapes and Venn diagrams at free time. Can you guess the sorting rules?
Here are some of the pictures we made using shapes at our math centres:
In science, we've been talking about activities that happen during the day and at night. We've also had some very interesting discussions about the Sun, and how the Earth moves around it. It would be worth bringing this up again at home as our conversation probably could have gone on for hours!
In French, we created our success criteria for letter writing. We know that a good letter begins with the date and the name of the person we are writing to. We are beginning the body of our letters with a nice message, followed by whatever else we want to say or ask. At the end we have a nice goodbye and our names. Today we finished up working with a partner to write a letter to an adult in our school following the success criteria - maybe we'll get replies! After the holidays, we'll have a chance to write individual letters to a special person who may live far away.
The ‘en’ sound is
very similar to ‘on’, and there are
several ways to make it. This week we will focus on finding words with “en” and
“em”. Again, ask your child to help you with this one, but to me, it sounds
like what we say when we don’t understand something - “huh?”.
In the last few weeks we’ve learned a lot of vowel
combinations that are so common in French and help us so much with our sounding
out in reading and writing. We will be continuing with this in the new year.
When reading a book with your child, it is helpful to go for a treasure hunt
before you start reading. Ask your reader to circle all of the “en” and “em”s
he/she can find within words in the book. This way, when you get there, you
already know what that part of the word will sound like.
You can turn this into a good review of old sounds as well.
E.g., “Find me a letter that makes the sound ‘s’. Find me two letters that work together to make ‘o’. Now find me the sound ‘oi’.” This is what we do with our
morning message every day.
Anything you can do to make working with sounds fun is a
great idea!
en, vent, dent, décembre, content
Bonus words: cent, novembre