Dear parents,
It was a pleasure to speak with all of you last week. Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedules and for being such a positive influence on your learners. It's been clear to me since day one that these students love to learn, and that's thanks to you being so involved and interested in what they are doing at school. It makes my job so easy, and I don't take that for granted. Merci!
The school "days" have changed with Friday's PA day, so day 4 now falls on Thursday. Please remind your reader to bring back their library book on Thursdays so that they may sign out a new one.
In language this week, we will continue with our independent sounding out of our class poems. We will continue adding to our poem "menu" all year, but we know at least 16 already and students have started leading them in front of the class, with very little help from me! As I may have explained before, when we are sounding out, we are trying to listen to each word in slow motion and get as many sounds as we can down onto paper - but we don't care if spelling is perfect. I want all of our writers to feel confident and successful, and anyway, there are plenty of sounds we have yet to learn!
Shortly, I will send home an old project - the story we wrote about a fun trip or visit. I thought you might also like to see the rubric that I used to help outline my goals for this project. I haven't taught the class to read a rubric yet, but we discussed these look-fors in class. When reading a rubric, level 3 means that students are meeting expectations - a very good place to be. Level 4 means exceeding (excellent work) and level 2 means approaching expectations (maybe the student needed some extra help with that skill). There is a level 1 as well, which means that a lot of support is needed. I didn't anticipate needing a level one for this project, so I didn't even put it on the rubric. Everyone in our class should be very proud of their work. It's been a while since we presented them, but you can try having your student read it to you, as they did in class!
With our class book about "Le Petit Garçon et la Cacahuète" assembled and on the bookshelf, we've moved on to retelling another oral story. This one is called "Loupscaroux". Hopefully your listener has told you about it - we've noticed it's quite similar to Little Red Riding Hood. Yesterday for art, we did an amazing job working together to cut the scenery and characters out of felt, adding tons of detail, and putting it together to create a whole storyboard, with pictures that can move around! We've already used it to retell the story, and we laughed when the petite fille kept falling down when she was holding her heavy flowers!
In Social Studies, we have talked about rules and responsibilities in our homes, our school and the community. We have also discussed big changes in our lives, and how we show respect through words and actions. Next, we will be talking about jobs that people have and how they help our community, plus a little project on what we want to be when we grow up.
Mots de la Semaine
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:
“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?)
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”.)
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
