Gift book!

So cool! Every year, Le Centre du livre jeunesse canadien gets together with TD Canada Trust to provide a book to all grade 1 students! This year's book is Le Chapeau de M. Zinger. I read it to the class today - it's very cute. Each student has received their very own copy to keep. Hope you love it!

We read another special book today as well. In English it's called "Have you filled a bucket today?". This book explains how every person carries with them an invisible bucket which is full when we feel happy and appreciated, and empty when we feel sad or lonely. We can fill each others' buckets with kind words or actions - it can be as simple as saying "Hi!" or "Will you play with me?". The cool thing is that being nice to others always makes us feel good too, so when we fill someone else's bucket, ours fills up as well. All the classes at Dewson are being encouraged to fill up our friends' invisible buckets. When a teacher catches someone doing something nice and filling someone's bucket, they will give the student a raindrop to add to their class' poster. When we get to 100 raindrops, we can show Mme Robinson and there will be a special surprise! Our class figured out that if everybody only does 1 kind thing every day, it will take only 5 days to put 100 raindrops in our class' bucket. Already (in the last 30 minutes of the day), there were so many acts of kindness, that I truly couldn't keep up! Ask your child if they've filled up anyone's bucket recently!

Almost all students have now had a chance to read their story (that they have been working on with Mlle Martinson) to the class. They've done a good job and will be receiving a rubric for this project soon. When you receive it, please celebrate your child's accomplishment and ask them what their goal is for their next writing project. Everyone will be working with us (me, Mlle Martinson and Mlle L) to choose one area from their rubric that they would like to work on improving. Maybe you'd like to support your child with their goal at home. Here are some storytellers...

I know it's not the holidays - yet - but I just love this time of year and have been thinking ahead to some festive art projects. There is a Hanukkah craft that always turns out beautifully but requires some pretty skillful cutting. If you are good with a pair of scissors and don't mind either coming in to snip away, or taking some templates home to chip away at, I'd be very grateful. We would need them for the first week of December. Please let me know!

Words of the Week

Here’s where you get to use your true English  ‘u’ sound. It’s much rounder than plain ‘u’ in French. When you see ‘ou’ in French, think “dude” or “food” in English.

Some ideas for mixing it up this week:

1.   “ou” means “or”. Ask your child lots of questions involving a choice using “ou” this week. E.g., “Est-ce que tu veux du lait ou du jus?” (Would you like milk or juice?)

2.   It is very common to have silent letters on the ends of French words, and this is something your child has already started to notice at school. Ask your expert to hunt for the silent letters in this, and previous, word lists. (It’s the p on “loup” and the s on “sous”.)

3.   Last week we had the word “sur” (=on top of) and this week we have “sous” (=under).  There’s a cute little song to the tune of London Bridge that begins with these two words. Ask your singer if he/she can sing it for you.

ou, sous, loup, rouge, bonjour
Bonus words: jour, pour