Happy New Year & Welcome back!

Dear parents,

It's good to be back at school. I want to thank all of you for supporting your children over the last 2 weeks of virtual learning, plus a couple snow days. I know it takes a lot of effort on your part and you have your own work to do. I think we did very well, and I appreciate all your help with technology, gathering materials, and encouraging your student to stick with me!

I know there are some concerns about returning to school with the high numbers right now and new policies about reporting. My understanding is that we will still be informed if there is a case in our class. Should you need or choose to keep your child home when our class is still at school, please let me know and I will post what we are doing on Google Classroom. Earlier this week, students received updated health screening instructions. Please read over these carefully. Yesterday we received our rapid test kits. These are for use if your child is exhibiting symptoms and you want to rule out Covid. I do this at least once a month for my son when he gets yet another runny nose (read: first year daycare problems).

It's winter! The snow is amazing, though getting a little hard now. Since we are working on our instructions for how to build a snowman, the timing couldn't have been better. I gave the class the challenge of building a huge snowman for DPA on Wednesday. It took all our strength and teamwork to roll those huge balls and stack them. Someone even produced a carrot from their lunch for the nose! 

With snow, of course, come the snowsuits. The time devoted to recess breaks has almost tripled, but I want the kids to get some fresh air and play time, so I'm happy to devote instructional time to getting dressed. We have made a deal. I will give them plenty of time to get ready before so that we can enjoy every recess minute outside. In exchange, they must help us get back to class quickly by stopping what they are doing right when the bell rings to get lined up. We have also reviewed some Dewson recess rules and expectations:

• snow stays on the ground (no throwing snow or snowball fights during school time)
• hands and feet to ourselves (even if someone else does it first)
• find a teacher if you can't solve a problem yourself - there are ALWAYS multiple supervisors within view, wearing bright orange vests. They cannot be missed!

If you can take a minute before school to remind students about these recess expectations, that would surely help us remember when we find ourselves in a situation.

Before the break, we wrapped up social studies by presenting our projects on what we want to be when we grow up. These are on display in our classroom and will come home soon. We are now back to science and working on a unit about structures and materials. During online learning, we learned that objects and structures serve a purpose, for example, a desk gives us a surface to work on. We also began investigating different materials. Some are flexible, some are strong. Some absorb water, others repel water. We did a couple great experiments from home to test materials. One involved building the 3 houses for the 3 little pigs. I saw houses of straw, paper and cards, then we used wooden blocks for the second, and Lego or connecting shapes for the third. We tested these either by blowing, or rolling a ball at them. We learned that the material, the connector, and the design influenced which house was the strongest. Such a fun afternoon! Another day, we gathered some materials and dunked them in water to see if they were waterproof. It was so fun to see some students following along at the sink or the bathtub!

Currently, in French, of course we are learning to write instructions. We need a title, a list of materials we will need, steps and then it's nice to end with an extra piece of advice. We came up with our snowman instructions together and are working on completing these. Later, we will try to write instructions more independently - stay tuned, as we may need your help!

We have continued with words of the week, though the way the days are right now, we will get our new words on Wednesdays until the next PA day. Here are the words from the last two weeks:

If the ‘on’ sound is ever forgotten, show your student a picture of a candy and it’ll come right back!

This is another sound that doesn’t exist in English. The easiest thing is probably to ask your child to teach it to you. Ask them how to say “no” or “candy” in French. To describe it in English, say the word “on” with your lips closed almost all the way, and don’t close to the ‘n’. You’ll feel it in the back of your throat. This sound can also be written as ‘om’.

bonbon, mon, ton, non, nom

Bonus words: bon, son

The ‘en’ sound is very similar to ‘on’, and there are several ways to make it. This week we will focus on words with “en” and “em”. Again, ask your child to help you with this one, but to me, it sounds like what we say when we don’t understand something - “huh?”. 

When reading a book with your child, it is helpful to go for a treasure hunt before you start reading. Ask your reader to circle all of the “en” and “em”s he/she can find within words in the book. This way, when you get there, you already know what that part of the word will sound like. 

You can turn this into a good review of old sounds as well. E.g., “Find me a letter that makes the sound ‘s’. Find me two letters that work together to make ‘o’. Now find me the sound ‘oi’.” This is what we do with our morning message every day.

Anything you can do to make working with sounds fun is a great idea!

en, vent, dent, décembre, content

Bonus words: cent, novembre

In math, we've been working on some geometry. At home, we reviewed our 2D shapes and did some shape drawings and matching. We also learned about symmetry and learned to find the axe de symétrie in symmetrical shapes. We are currently learning to name some 3D shapes and describe their characteristics. We have learned cube, cylindre, cône, sphère, pyramide and prisme. Of course, prisms and pyramids can be named more specifically according to their base, and we have seen examples of this, but what I hope students will remember for now is that pyramids have mostly triangular sides and a sommet at the top. Prisms have mostly rectangular sides and a matching top and bottom. At home, we had tried to build a cube, from a net. We gave that another try at school, but I had a few other shapes to build as well, for those that wanted a new challenge!

Thanks for sending in all those boxes, we had plenty! We used all our recycling to build creative sculptures. I encouraged students to use at least one cylinder, sphere, a cube or cone if possible, and a variety of prisms. We are adding labels for 5 of the 3D shapes we used, and we will paint and present it next week. We really enjoyed building these!

I'm looking forward to our next few art projects now that we're at school. At home, we didn't need anything special to create our version of a cubist portrait by Paul Klee. We looked at some examples and learned that in this style, it often seems that things are taken apart and put back together in a different way. We used mismatched shapes for most of the face, and coloured everything with bright colours that didn't need to make sense. They looked great! At school, we used the cube or 3D shape that we built to make a die with a type of line on each side. We rolled this a bunch of times to dictate what kind of hair to add to a face, making a crazy hair person!

Santa gifted our class some Lego and a class set of pencil sharpeners (very exciting)! I'd like to give our class some free building/playing time in coming weeks so that we can explore the materials and games we have in our classroom, that we haven't really used yet. It's particularly relevant now as some of our building materials are perfect for making 3D shapes or building structures. I've put us into small building groups and we will rotate the materials so that we can try something different each time.

Mr. Lee sent along some pictures of his afternoon with our class this week. He said it was chilly, but they still had lots of fun!

Take good care, Tamara