Hi singers!
Wednesday is our Arts Fest performance at Perth Public School. We have been rehearsing "On écrit sur les murs" with the other classes and I think we will do a great job. We will have an opportunity to perform our song at Dewson later this spring. Please look for information on that shortly after March break, and join us for that event, as it will be quite crowded at Perth this week.
Please remind your singer to come to school on Wednesday wearing black on the bottom and a solid colour on top. We'd like a variety of colours - any colour will do - but try to avoid pictures or writing. We're going for a unified look. Thanks!!
In addition to the words of the week (below), I've sent home a few other recent work samples that I hope you'll enjoy looking at and might give you an idea of how you'd like to continue supporting your child at home.
- February dictée - overall this was very successful! We will be reviewing the basic vowel sounds again in the coming weeks. If your child is not yet confident with 'o', 'a', 'e' (v. 'i') or the order of letters within a sound (e.g., 'ch/hc'), this is something you may want to work on a bit more at home.
- Independent written instructions - at many interviews, we discussed how we were in the middle of reviewing our partner rubrics to make improvements to our independent writing. This is the result of those efforts, so I thought you might want to see it. We are working hard on becoming independent writers, so finding ways to help ourselves (e.g., using our dictionaries, books, reviewing words of the week) will play an important role going forward!
- Grade 1 science/sign - we decided together who got to keep each part of the project. We decided to keep our rubric for this project in our school portfolios as an amazing example of teamwork. Please ask your scientist how they did on this project!
Words of the Week
We have arrived at our final grade 1 sound rule for this year! After the break, grade 1s will review old sounds again while grade 2s will go on to learn a few more complex sounds.
Rather than focusing on a sound that some letters create, we are focusing on a
sound that is not created. Two months
ago, we learned about the sound ‘en’.
However, when an action word ends with ‘-ent’, the nt is SILENT!
This will occur all the time in the 3rd person plural of most verbs.
Pronouncing the ‘-ent’ is one of the most common reading errors made by French
immersion students, even in the junior grades. This is a hard rule to explain,
and I haven’t gone into conjugating with our grade 1s. I’m explaining that we
need to think about whether the word is an action (something we do) and if so,
we ignore the ‘nt’. To my delight, we are starting to get it! Have
your reader go through their list and put an X over all the silent letters.
Quick review:
Les parents travaillent.
(not an action word - normal ☝) (☝ action - ignore)
Grade 1: les oiseaux chantent,
les grenouilles sautent,
les enfants parlent,
les chiens courent, les chats dorment,
les amis jouent,
les parents travaillent,
les feuilles tombent, les avions volent
Bonus words: ils peuvent, elles aiment
Grade 2: 5 of the above (I'll have to check tomorrow)