Wow, amazing costumes!! Here's a picture of our class today:
We had a Halloween twist to all our normal activities today. In the morning, we wrote in our journals about what we were dressed up as. Then, I told the students a spooky story and they painted a picture of what they imagined during the story. More about this below... Later, I was invited to watch the Halloween dances they prepared with Mme Morgenstern. We did some mysterious Halloween math (algebra!!) and listened to another Halloween story. Each creature received some stickers, a fancy pencil with eraser and an extra special gift from Estelle to take home.
Since I'm a musician in my other life, I really enjoy telling musical stories when I can. I chose a scary one for Halloween (although I don't think I really scared anybody). The song is called Erlkönig (or, The Elf King, in English). It's a German song with music written by Schubert in 1815. The Erlkönig is an evil creature, or spirit, who haunts sick children. In this song, a father is riding on horseback to get his very sick son to the doctor, but the Erlkönig is haunting the child and the son is frightened by visions of the evil spirit. The Erlkönig tries to lure the child away with promises of games, songs and golden clothes, but eventually threatens to hurt him if the child will not come. By the end of the song, when they finally arrive at the doctor's, the boy has died in his father's arms.
Although the lyrics are in German, you don't need to speak German to get an idea of the story. When I told it to the children, I asked them to listen for several things in the music. In the piano, you hear a repeated triplet rhythm representing the galloping horse. This rhythm persists until the very end of the piece, when it slows and then stops as father and son arrive at their destination. Meanwhile, the male singer actually plays 4 roles, and you can hear how he changes his voice to play each character. The narrator introduces and concludes the story in a mid-range. As the sick boy the singer sounds panicked and the notes are in his high range. As the father, the singer is quite serious and sings in a very low range. As the Erlkönig the singer uses an almost sickeningly sweet voice and sings quietly. Interestingly, when the Erlkönig is singing, the music is in a major (happy-sounding) key because he is trying to trick the child.
Anyway, the students really listened carefully to me translating the story over the music, and were excited to listen to it a second time. Please ask them about it! You might need to prompt them by asking them to tell you what it's about, or how the voices are different. Here's the music, if you'd like to hear it for yourself, or if they'd like to tell it to you with the music as I did.
Today, students are bringing home their second monthly dictée rubric. As I explained, each month the expectations will increase a little, as we learn more sounds and work on writing. Most of the rubric is the same this time, with the exception of the addition of the new sounds we've learned this month (i, o/au/eau and ph for grade 2). The grade 2 rubric has had a few more updates. In the first month, I left it exactly the same as the grade 1 rubric and we did the same sentence. This month, they had a slight variation in the sentence, and I've shifted a few things over to reflect grade 2 expectations.
As always, please celebrate your child's accomplishments and then decide together on one writing goal for this month. I noticed that many students are not quite sure of the French 'i' sound (instead using 'e', like in English), so we will review that, as well as talking about exactly when we should use capital letters. Happily, almost everyone is already using lower-case letters for most of the sentence!
Words of the Week
I think grade 1's are getting bored of 'o', having perhaps learned all three ways two weeks ago when the grade 2s reviewed them. However, let's officially practice the last way to make ‘o’. This happens frequently, particularly at the ends of words.
Try writing a rhyming poem where each line ends with one of these ‘eau’ words!
Grade 1: l’eau, beau, bateau, chapeau, cadeau
Bonus words: ciseaux, couteau
Grade 2s are taking this opportunity to learn yet another challenging sound using consonants. 'Gn', in French, makes a funny "nye" sound. It's hard to explain - probably asking your student is the best idea, we went over it today and I'm confident they all got it. This will be a change from the two 'g' sounds we learned last week, and is different from the way 'gn' sounds in English.
Grade 2: grognon, araignée, montagne,
champignon, gagner
Don't forget, grade 2 homework is due FRIDAY!
