Bonne Fête des Mères!

Happy Mother's Day to all of our lovely mamans! We hope you love the flower and the pot we decorated for you! We also wrote you a card, and you can be sure it was done with zero help from me (I was helping with the flowers).

This week we worked on measuring capacity by counting how many small cups of water it took to fill different containers. We also learned that food packages have markings on them that tell us the mass or capacity of the container and that this can help us when shopping to get the right amount of the ingredients we need.

In language, we have now moved on to the rough copy stage of our fairy tale writing. We are building our success criteria for how to write a detailed story - we know we need to put in more than what we included in our plan. On the first day that we started working on this all the writers were very focused and got quite a bit of writing done. I was very very impressed at how independent they were. Many were able to write their entire introduction, following the success criteria we outlined, without any encouragement or translation help and other others just needed a word here and there. So rewarding to see how far we've come!

For anyone who was not able to check out the art show Thursday evening, here is what our display looked like - just inside the front doors of the school. Looks great!

Maybe a future teacher??

Balloon Cars

Hi families,

We had 5 entries from Area 24 in the balloon car competition today. All of the cars looked fantastic. Clearly a lot of effort was put into this challenge! Congratulations to all!

 (Sorry I missed getting pictures of the other two... I didn't realize they had already started.)

In case you haven't heard, this Thursday evening, Dewson is holding an Art Show. Artwork from every single class will be on display in the gym and possibly the library and front hall of the school. I hear there will also be live music. I have submitted our Klee faces that we did earlier this year. I can't miss my own choir rehearsal again this Thursday, but I really encourage you to drop in if you can. Last time we had an art show, it was really beautifully done and it's impressive to see what Dewson students have created!

Don't forget that your field trip form & payment is due this Friday. Thanks to everyone who already sent it in.

Words of the Week

In our review of the ‘é’ sound, we have more examples of masculine and feminine. Many adjectives, including those that end in é, become feminine with the addition of a plain e. If you’re talking about a girl, the e in brackets is for you. If you’re talking about a boy, leave if off. Remember, it doesn’t matter what you are, it’s who (or what) you’re talking about that counts.

épaules, vélo, égal, été, cinéma, fée, je décore, j’écris, fâché(e), fatigué(e) 

Bonus sentence: Je suis allé(e)...

May Field Trip

Happy May!

Thanks for coming out to last night's concert. I am very proud of the whole class and hope you enjoyed our performance. If you haven't yet heard the story of "Café de la Paix", do ask your singer. It's a lovely story and they are very good at explaining it. We still have many fun things planned in the last two months of school and I am looking forward to getting into a new song!

The first fun thing, coming up quickly, is a trip to Roy Thomson Hall to hear the Toronto Symphony perform. This is quite a treat and not something I would do with any grade 1 class, but our class is so musical and so attentive during assemblies, I know I don't need to worry.
The trip is Friday May 15th in the morning. I've said 10:00am - 1:00pm on the form, but I think we may leave closer to 9:30 just to be safe. Please read over the details and return the signed form and payment by next Friday, May 8th. We will need 4 parents to accompany us. If you are interested/available, please indicate this on the permission form as well.

Yesterday we had our 8th theme day of this school year. It was all about cats and dogs in honour of Nikko (cats) and Clark (dogs). We began by filling in a cute comic strip to show what the cat and dog were thinking.

For science, we talked about animals and what they eat. We also took up our plant experiment. Three weeks later, it appears we have proven that plants need the sun to survive. Water is not enough. Poor guy. We hope he comes back to life if we keep him with his buddy in the window.

In math, we did a group challenge. We had 5 questions about my cats and dogs and groups worked together using various strategies for adding and counting. 

 In the afternoon we went outside to play a dog v. cat tag game and at the end of the day we read two funny books, one about a book that eats a dog, and one about a cat that probably isn't a cat after all. Ask your listeners about these books! They were quite passionate, especially about the cat not being a cat.

Have a great weekend!

PS - For anyone wishing to enter the balloon car competition, don't forget to bring your creation to school MONDAY along with $1 to enter the contest.