Words & Sounds

My apologies, I forgot the words of the week again yesterday. So forgetful!
They are:

dans, froid, enfants, si, de

This week we are working on the sound ç, which makes the 'sssss' sound. The little funny thing under the c is called la cédille, so we call the letter c-cédille. Without the cédille, a c in French can make either a hard or soft sound ('k', or 's'), but we can memorize that with a cédille, it always makes 'sssss'.

Some words that have c-cédille include: garçon, ça, français, balançoire and glaçon (ice cube).

Today we did our November dictée. Look for the rubric tomorrow. The expectations were very similar to last time, just with the addition of the sounds we've learned since then and a few words that we see all the time.

Growing & Shrinking Patterns to Show Off!

Happy Monday!

First of all, I'm very pleased that children have been remembering to exchange their borrow-a-books when they're ready. Thank you for your help from home. The kids have sometimes been choosing these books during their silent reading time and I can see that they've learned some new words. Today they all came to school talking about the cold weather in French - what a joy to hear them speaking French to each other a little bit!

This afternoon, the mathematicians are bringing home some math work from today. As you know, last week we were learning how to build, identify, and label a growing pattern or shrinking pattern. This is a fairly complex concept for grade 1, and something that will help us with skip-counting now, and which the kids will continue to work on in grades 2 and 3. I'm really thrilled at how well they've done with this tricky work.
Today they built and labelled their own growing and/or shrinking patterns. They had materials to build with, were able to work in partners, and they had our examples from last week in front of them for spelling and vocabulary, however they had little help from me. I wanted you to see how your child did on this independent work, and in some cases, I've given them a hint for how they could complete it to bring it to the next level. We discussed how level 3 was to build good patterns that follow a growing or shrinking rule, but to get to level 4, you actually needed to write out the rule the way we practiced last week. If you'd like to complete this with them at home, or challenge your child to make another pattern, please go ahead. There's no need to send the sheet back unless your child would like to show me how he/she has improved his/her work. Bien fait mes amis!
  Commence par 2 et ajoute 3 chaque fois.

In language for the next little while, we are going to be working on writing letters. We already wrote our first class letter to Mme Hardy, and she replied! We have talked about 5 different elements that we have to include to make a complete letter. Ask your child if they remember what they are, in the correct order. Later this week, students will get to try their hand at a letter of their own. Ask them who they plan on writing to first, and why!

Beautiful Artwork!

Salut!

I know I've already shown you this sound, but this week we are looking at the 2 other ways to make the sound "ay". This is by using -ez or -er on the end of a word. This is quite common, particularly -er, as it is the infinitive ending of many verbs (e.g., manger, marcher, parler, sauter, jouer). We also found -ez on the end of the word nez.

In math, we're working on our last types of patterns before our check-up: growing and shrinking patterns. These are difficult patterns to define, because the pattern is in what is added or taken away in the creation of the next term. For example, in the pattern 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, the rule is to start at 2 and add 2 each time. We have been practising identifying and writing the rule for this type of pattern, as well as following a rule to create a growing pattern. This is a much more complicated type of pattern than we worked on in the last 3 weeks, and would indicate that students have really mastered the skills in this unit. We will do a quick check-up on all our patterning skills next week.

Not one to put off my favourite holiday, we have begun decorating our class with some holiday art.

 

Our resident artist, who has created several beautiful murals on our whiteboard, explained to me the challenge of creating white, when the background is also white. Many Area 24 artists took what I learned and applied it to their paintings, filling their entire page, leaving white space where necessary (e.g., to make the snow visible). Our Principal commented on how beautiful the paintings are!