Hopefully (please don't rain), this Friday is our Jump Rope for Heart event. Our school raised well over $6000 for this great cause and earned a crazy hair day. Students are welcome to come to school Friday with a crazy hairdo. Area 24 students will be outside with me for most of the day helping out and working through a list of independent projects (so much responsibility!). Please make sure that all students and come prepared for a day outside.
-hat
-sunscreen already applied
-refillable water bottle
-running shoes
-comfortable clothes for skipping!
Looking forward to it!
Yesterday was our second to last theme day of the year. This one was in honour of Simone and Soren who love snakes and turtles. We began with our regular reading, and lots of extra books on snakes and turtles. We then worked on our new writing-research-science projects. Students are working in partners to research what their animal eats, where it lives, what it looks like and other interesting things about it. They are presenting their information in an informative brochure. We are being careful to close our books after we've found the information we need so that we don't copy the words exactly from the book.
During our work period, we also focused on listening to our partners' ideas before beginning, solving problems nicely and taking the time to put in our best effort. The final social skills rubrics of the year came home yesterday.
During art, we applied our Van Gogh technique (using a fork to add the brush strokes reminiscent of his work) to paintings of reptiles and other animals. Then, before lunch, we did some skipping practice, including a snake game.
In the afternoon, we learned some terms related to probability: certain, impossible, probable, improbable and possible. After talking about them a bit, each group thought about things that would be impossible, possible and improbable for a snake or turtle. Ask your student to tell you about something that is possible, but not likely (improbable) or likely to happen (probable).
We also finished presenting our stories to each other. We are amazing readers now! We are going to keep our good copies at school to show off at our open-house, but I will send home the rough copy and plan soon along with a copy of the fairly detailed rubric. Most of the rubric applies to students' rough work, before I gave them corrections to make. What most of us are ready to work on now is adding periods to separate thoughts within larger sections (e.g., within the introduction). A good way to do this is to read our writing aloud and add a period every time we take a breath or stop our voice. Reading our writing aloud is super helpful because we often know what sounds right. During our reading aloud, several students added words here and there that they hadn't noticed were missing in their writing. If your writer does any story-writing over the summer, have them read it to you aloud and see if they can find places to add petits points!
Words of the Week
This week we are formally being introduced to
the present of the verb avoir (to
have). We use this verb every day and know what it should sound like. For
example, students know that “Nous a
du travail à faire” sounds weird, and that it should be “Nous avons...”. This week, work on spelling the verb correctly and
making up sentences that start with each person. You can substitute
proper names for il and elle. E.g., Elle a les cheveux bruns. Tamara
a les cheveux bruns.
j’ai, tu as, il a, elle a, on a,
nous avons,
vous avez, ils ont, elles ont