Interviews!

Dear parents,

Tomorrow, Wednesday the 17th, you will receive your child's progress report card. I will be talking to our class about what this report means. I will emphasize that it's me sharing my thoughts about how we're doing with listening, participating, trying our best, following instructions etc. These learning skills are much more important to me than whether we have mastered any books because they keep us safe and happy at school, and I know help us learn the other stuff. I will also be explaining that report cards are for reading at home with our parents, not at school with our friends. Everyone is doing lots of things really well, and it never feels good to compare. I hope you enjoy reading the report over with your child. Please celebrate all the great things they have accomplished, and then pick just ONE learning skills goal that we can work even harder on going forward. We will be talking about goal setting early next week.

Wednesday is also a day 4 - library day, so please remind students to bring their book back!

Thursday evening and Friday morning, we are having interviews. Many of you have already selected a time slot through the online booking system. You should have received information about this from the office, so please book your time if you have not already. In addition, if you were hoping to meet or talk to our outdoor ed. teacher, Mr. Lee, please email me and I can see if he can join us.

I didn't want to feel rushed or get behind, so you'll see I have allowed 20 minutes, rather than the default 10, for each interview, but we will keep our chat to 15 minutes in case I need to run to the phone or struggle with zoom for the next interview! If we are doing a zoom, you will receive a link ahead of time.

Last Thursday we celebrated Remembrance Day. Mr. Edgar and Mme Gallo made special announcements and led us in a moment of reflection. Our class wore our handmade coquelicots and listened beautifully to everything. We listened to each other's stories, and I shared more of my grandpa's stories. Our class was very sensitive to the fact that it was my first Remembrance day since he passed and they were very comforting. I told them that he would have been very proud of them on this day.

Our next art project, which we've just finished, is a field of poppies, in the style of Monet. We looked at a book of his work and learned a bit about his style - how he liked to capture light and movement in his paintings - not draw outlines and colour them in perfectly. We tried to keep his style in mind, and we learned to make the far away poppies smaller to create perspective in our paintings. Ask your artist to explain the steps for making these beautiful paintings.

We've continued with our patterning in math, using different materials to try different things. With the pattern blocks we were able to create repeating patterns using 2 or even 3 attributes - colour, shape and even size. We have created people patterns, sound patterns, we have been looking for patterns around us in class and outside, and we are working on number patterns, including growing and shrinking patterns. Today, we learned how to explain the rule for a growing pattern. We need to say two things: where we begin, and what we have to do. For example, "Commence par 1 et ajoute 1 chaque fois." Perhaps if you give your mathematician these instructions slowly, they would be able to build you this growing pattern out of Lego!

In language, something exciting has happened. We have started sounding out! Now that we know SO many poems by heart, I challenged students to try writing one (or more) down in their journal without copying from the board. I modeled what this might look like - saying each word slowly and writing down each sound I hear, without worrying if it's exactly right. For example, "ronde" might come out as just "rod" or "ron", "deux" might come out as "de", "comme" might start with a 'k'. It's all great and I love that we are trying. Everyone persevered with this on our first try and did an amazing job! Bravo! Some students noticed that our word wall, and posters around the room, contain words that are in our poems and can help us with writing. We took some time to brainstorm even more words that we use a lot, or that we found hard to sound out, and added them to the wall for next time.

Our class story, "Le Petit Garçon et la Cacahuète" is almost done and is assembled enough that we were able to read it today! We LOVED seeing our own work put together in a book, and the kids congratulated each author after every page!

This week we are reviewing the final basic vowel sound, ‘u’. The sound doesn’t really exist in English. It is tighter and more nasal than what we know, you kind of need fish lips for this one. Think “few”. A cool trick you can try is to shape your lips for a nice round o, and then in that space, try to say “ee”. You will end up with the right sound. That said, the best way to learn this one is probably just to ask your child to say the word “lune” - show them a picture of the moon and they’ll probably know the word, and they’ll naturally say it correctly. They’ll enjoy being able to teach you something too! 

une, lune, tu, sur, mur

Bonus words: tutu, un*

Note: “un” does NOT contain the ‘u’ sound. It sounds a bit like the beginning of the word “under”, without closing to the ‘n’. It is the masculine version of “une”, and a word we use all day, every day..

Talk to you Thursday or Friday,

Tamara