Poetry Café

Dear parents,

As you know, we've been learning about and trying our hand at writing different types of poems over the last few weeks. This week we are finishing up by experimenting with shape poems, and then we are going to select just one of the poems we've written over the last 3 weeks and prepare it for "publishing". This just means that we will make sure it's complete, make some corrections and then make a good copy of it. Our goal is to have our poems ready to present for Friday morning. If all goes well, we'll hold a little "Poetry Café" between 10:30 - 11:30 am during which each writer will come up to read their chosen poem aloud to our class and guests. I'll have to confirm a little closer to Friday whether we are ready to go ahead with this, but know that you are invited to be in our audience if you'd like.

Words of the Week

Grade 1: Review of ‘oi’ this week. See if your writer can invent some sentences using some of these words. For example, Je vois trois étoiles dans le ciel noir.

étoile, je vois, je dois, bois, j’ai soif, 

poisson, voilà, noir, au revoir, trois

Bonus words: boîte, miroir

Grade 2: This week the grade 2s are working on "onne". It sounds like the English word "one", but without the 'w' sound. Like the ending 'ette', 'onne' is generally a feminine ending. For example, "bonne" is the feminine form of "bon" (good) and "lionne" (lioness) is the feminine of "lion".

You've probably noticed that over the last few weeks we have focused on longer fragments of words - 4 letters together, rather than 1 or 2. These longer sounds aren't particularly difficult. Unlike 'oi', these letters generally make the sounds you think they're going to - the sounds they normally make in French. However, the idea is that since they are commonly found together, it will improve our fluidity in both reading and writing to have them locked and loaded in our memory bank. Soon we will move away from specific sounds and on to some words of the week with more of a grammar focus.

bonne, personne, couronne, 
donner, pardonnez-moi