Bonjour mai!

Dear families,

Happy May! The kids were excited to look at our May calendar - we have some exciting events coming up! I will make a list for you:

- This Thursday is our final workshop with X-Movement. The second one, last week, was really fun. I'm impressed with the participation and respect for the guest instructors shown by everyone in my class.

- This Friday, the 6th, there is a primary talent show. I know less than the kids do about how this is working, but I know we have some performers, so I'm excited to see it!

- Next Wednesday, May 11th, we have a very exciting BIG field trip to the Science Centre! This was booked on fairly short notice by the primary team and all 8 primary classes are going! A blue note with details came home Tuesday. We do need help, but space for volunteers is limited, so do send back the blue slip if you are interested, and I'll let you know if I need you. Please check your email for the permission form, which was sent electronically by the office. We can't go without this! Also, we are going by bus, and it is about a 40 minute ride each way. If your student is at risk of becoming carsick, please let me know and I'll make sure they sit at the front.

- At some point later in the month - hoping for May 17, we will go on a little walking outing to check out places in our community for another social studies project. No limit on how many parents can help on this one! I'll send home a note closer to the time.

- On Friday, May 20th, we will participate in the Dewson Dance-a-thon (the organizers must have known it's my birthday)! This is such a fun event, and an important fundraiser for our school. Students have brought home information on how to fundraise for this event. Please feel no pressure, every student will get to dance, but even small donations are appreciated. Envelopes are due back on the 20th.

- On Wednesday, May 25th, we will have our rescheduled walking trip to Dufferin Grove Park with the teacher from Forest Valley. No additional permission is needed for that.

- In addition to all that, of course this Sunday is Mother's day. We hope you love your bracelet - the kids were so excited to make them for you! Happy Mother's day to all the mothers and mother figures out there!

- In my previous two posts, I shamelessly advertised a show being put on by my little singing group, The Redeemers. Unfortunately, the venue double-booked, so our performance is cancelled for now. Apologies to anyone who had planned to come.

Last week, we did some sand art. We worked on ocean scenes (because, sand) and the kids did such a careful job getting the colours just where they wanted them. They followed my detailed instructions so carefully so that we didn't waste sand, or end up on a very colourful beach!

In math, we have done one final number sense problem for now, which students did on their own, and then self-evaluated using a simplified rubric. The strategies we learned in this unit, and the way we learned to show our work, will continue to help us in every math strand. We have already moved on to a quick unit on location, movement, and coding. We are reviewing French terminology, for example, à gauche, à droite. We are doing a few mystery activities involving following instructions to put things in the right locations, and we will also play a neat crocodile game to practice our directions with our bodies (ask about this next week!). I think our students are most excited about trying some coding activities on the laptops. There are 2 sites linked in Google Classroom that we will try in-class. Students are welcome to dig deeper into these at home!

The mapping component of our social studies unit works very well with what we are learning in math. We completed our city maps, and students referred to a checklist to make sure they included everything necessary to aim for level 4. 

In language, we have continued to work on writing poems. Last week we learned about cinquain or diamante poems, which focus on adjectives again. Students helped me write one, and then tried their own about a family member, a place, an animal, or even a food they like. This week, we are tackling Haiku poems, which are usually based on nature. We are learning to count syllables in words so that we can follow the 5-7-5 formula. This skill will also help us catch more sounds when sounding out.

You know that we learn lots of oral poems in our class - we try to do some every morning. We have continued to add to our poem menu all year and know about 30 little poems and songs now! One of our recent additions is "Un petit lapin brun" - it's so cute, please ask your student if they can recite it for you!

In addition, I sometimes skip the book and tell an oral story at the end of the day. Students are used to me having a story 'in my head' and can follow along quite well without pictures. Recently, I told a really funny one called "Le lit de grand-mère". It's repetitive, which makes it easier to remember. Even having only heard it once, I bet your student could retell it to you!

I have been really incredibly terrible at posting our words of the week, even though we have been consistent about working on them at school. Since I last posted them, we have learned a few new French sounds... (I am posting a lot that we have reviewed at school - don't feel you need to review ALL of these words and phrases at once - it is just good information to have if you are learning along with your child and helping them with reading).

In November, I mentioned that there were other ways to make the sound ‘é’. They are ‘-er’ and ‘-ez’, but only when they fall at the end of a word, not within. You may want to play a sneaky game of -er v. -re. It is not uncommon, at this stage, to confuse the order of letters that form a sound, but ‘er’ and ‘re’ are two completely different sounds. Challenge your writer to find the mistakes in the words you’ve written (end some words with ‘re’ instead of ‘er’)! 

déjeuner, février, chez, aller, manger, vous avez, visiter

Bonus words: vous allez, jouer

Next - that crazy E again! We’ve learned about the accent aigu (é), now we have all the others. 

è = E-accent grave

ê = E-accent circonflexe

ë = E-tréma

Any of these accents help the e make exactly the same sound as the French ‘es’ sound. Think of “les” or, in English, “best”. “-et” makes the same sound when it’s at the end of a word.

When it comes to all these accents, it can be tricky to remember which one goes which way. I like to act them out. I see the accent aigu as a plane taking off, or a salute. The accent grave looks like a plane landing. The accent circonflexe is like a little hat! Encourage your child to show you which accent the word needs by acting it out with their body!

mère, père, tête, juillet, la chèvre, après, violet, forêt

Bonus words: chère, frère

Here are 2 more ways to make the ‘es’ sound. ‘ai’ and ‘ais’ make the very same sound. Included in this list are some I (Je) statements. Encourage your child to write 5 sentences beginning with each one. E.g., 1. J’aime le lait. 2. J’aime les chiens. 

j’aime, lait, l’air, je vais, je fais, je sais, maison, mais

Bonus words: il fait, partenaire

And our final sound rule for this year! Rather than focusing on a sound that some letters create, we are focusing on a sound that is not created. Two months ago, we learned about the sound ‘en’. However, when an action word ends with ‘-ent’, the nt is SILENT! This will occur all the time in the 3rd person plural of most verbs. Pronouncing the ‘-ent’ is one of the most common reading errors made by French immersion students, even in the junior grades. This is a hard rule to explain, and I haven’t gone into conjugating with our grade 1s. I’m explaining that we need to think about whether the word is an action (something we do) and if so, we ignore the ‘nt’. To my delight, we are starting to get it!

Quick review: Les    parents   travaillent.

(not an action word - normal ☝)                (☝ action - ignore)

les oiseaux chantent, les grenouilles sautent, les enfants parlent, les chiens courent, les chats dorment, les amis jouent, les parents travaillent, les feuilles tombent, les avions volent

Bonus words: ils peuvent, elles aiment

Now that we’re experts in tons of French sounds, we’re reviewing all our sounds within slightly more complex words. Each week, challenge your expert to figure out which sound is found in all the words on the list. Suggest that they circle all the ‘a’s in green, ‘e’s in blue, ‘i’s in purple (for instance). Here are the a, e, i and o words we've worked on so far...

pas, mars, avec, mal, calme, la balle, le canard, avril, le rat

je peux, je veux, j’ai peur, les cheveux, genou, mercredi, jeudi, jeu, cheval, *elle*

souris, gentil, fille, triste, tigre, lundi, mardi, vendredi, samedi, dimanche

gâteau, trop, le zoo, gros, grosse, tôt, gomme, je dors, pomme, colle

une rue, numéro, j’ai vu, bureau, une tortue, une fusée, une tulipe, j’ai bu, j’ai lu, turquoise

Happy Earth Day!

Dear families,

I hope you got my messages on Google Classroom last week. Unfortunately our day trip to Dufferin Grove was cancelled at the last minute as the teacher was ill. It will be rescheduled - I'll let you know when I hear. I also sent home some algebra that the kids were really into so that they could keep working on it, and you could see it. I used letters as variables and then made questions with them. If your students enjoy this, it's really easy to make your own questions. For example,

A=1, B=5, C=10

A + A = ?

C - B = ?

C + A - B = ?

Last week I finished up meeting with everyone to do a math check-up, and we continued with our math game centres. I added a few games that involved writing addition questions in our math journals using either playing cards, regular dice, or 12-sided dice to pick the numbers. Several students filled pages with questions and answers - very impressive, and good practicing!

We have gotten back into Social Studies for our second unit. This time we are focusing on the local community. We will be investigating important places in our community, and also developing some mapping skills. We began by brainstorming some places in our neighbourhood that we visit regularly. Students mentioned school, the grocery store, daycares, parcs, community centres, their homes, their friends' homes, and lots more. 

We have started into our first big project, which is to design our own city. I've provided some buildings to cut and paste, but students get to decide how to arrange their city and connect everything with roads. We have been talking about where things tend to be located, for example, you often find schools near houses, but the zoo is usually outside of town. We have also been noticing the symbols that are on certain buildings, for instance we know that medical buildings often have a cross or an H. We are pretty excited about this city designing project - still lots more work to do on this!

In language, we are beginning a unit on poetry. We will learn to write a few different kinds of poems, beginning with acrostic. Using a list of adjectives, students have already written a poem using their name, and many have begun one using a sibling's name.

You might have heard that we had an X-Movement workshop last Thursday. The instructors from X-Movement are always so engaging. We did some stretching and breathing exercises, danced along doing some very fun movements, and ended with a game of freeze dance. I think the kids were surprised how much fun they had, which is good, because we have two more workshops! These will be the next two Thursdays, and we really need to remember our indoor shoes on these days especially.

We finished off last week with Earth day. Here we are in our green, blue, brown, floral, camouflage and animal outfits! 

The kids were keen to keep as many lights off as we reasonably could (and still work), and we did a lovely Earth drawing on twice recycled paper, to prove (as we have again and again this year) that you can make cool stuff by reusing what would otherwise be thrown away.

Here are the prints from a couple weeks ago. They came home Friday.

Photo retakes are May 3rd. I haven't had any information so I suspect this is all done online now and that you have already received the first set of pictures. If you would like me to make sure your child goes for retakes, just let me know.

Joyeuses Pâques!

Dear families,

We had fun celebrating Easter yesterday by dyeing eggs! I really hope they all made it home in one piece (they are hard-boiled, but not for eating). I also had fun making a little Easter egg/toy hunt for the kids. They were so excited!

Everyone looked so nice for picture day on Tuesday. Unfortunately, a class picture was not included, so Mme Potor kindly took our picture outside. I have linked it on Google Classroom. 

This week, I started meeting with each student individually to review some of what we have been working on in math. While I do this, other students are playing a variety of math games I've created. There are too many to explain, but they include assembling a popsicle stick puzzle by matching addition/subtraction questions up with their answer on the next stick, simple Sudoku games, Bingo, building math sentences with number blocks and matching easter egg halves which have a number and a picture. I will introduce even more little math games next week. The mathematicians went between centres and tried as many as they wished. Ask your student which math game they liked the best!

We've also had mini introductions to division (through sharing food equally) and algebra. I gave students a challenge where they had a bunch of (pretty tough) addition/subtraction problems to solve, but with letters rather than numbers. They first had to replace the letters with the corresponding numbers using the guide, and then try to solve the problem by tackling it piece by piece, and using counters. Despite my questions being a bit too advanced for grade 1, students focused very well on this for as long as we had to work on it. They understood the concept of the letters representing numbers, which is a great start! Many students did solve a few of the equations, and they contributed to helping us solve some together. I've always loved a good math puzzle!

We have finished up our energy unit by talking about conserving energy and helping the environment. We learned the word "renouvelable" and played a little fishing game to sort our energy sources into renewable and non-renewable. We've also sorted waste items into the bins they go in, compost, recycling or garbage. A good conversation to continue at home (I always learn a lot when I read through my yearly garbage collection calendar)!

We had a fun addition to our class this week. We haven't had carpets in grade 1-3 classrooms in 2 years and I've really missed having everyone gather together to read the message or listen to a story. We still don't have a carpet, but I've brought back my cushions and a blanket that we can gather on for reading individually or together. It's new and exciting right now, so we are still learning how to focus in this new space, but I really the feeling of holding a book up and knowing everyone can see it!

Our art project last week was printmaking! Students got to plan a drawing that they then carved into a styrofoam sheet. They used a roller to spread speedball ink on their stencil and pressed it onto a variety of papers. They worked perfectly! Students already brought their stencil home and can use it over and over again (though I warned that the paint has to be quite thick). They can make additional styrofoam stencils using the trays that meat and veggies are sold on, or styrofoam plates with the curved sides cut off. 

As you know, Tuesday the 19th (right after this long weekend) we have an instructor visiting from Forest Valley Outdoor Ed. Centre to lead us for the day. Since sending my note home, I've learned that we will be returning to school for regular lunch before heading back to the park for the afternoon, but that doesn't change how students should prepare for the day. Please ensure that they are prepared for the weather (layers are recommended) and have their water bottle!

We have another field trip in the works for May, so if you had hoped to volunteer, there will be another opportunity. In addition, it seems that parents are now able to enter the school building. Therefore, I would love to start having some helpers for activities now and then, or to help with some of the tasks that are easy but time-consuming. One thing I can think of right now is repairing some of our books that have loose pages. If you have time and don't mind this kind of work, please email me. No pressure!

Finally, I want to invite you to a special event happening on May 14th! You may know that in my other life, I am a musician. One of the things I do is sing in a little doo-wop group called 'The Redeemers'. Our last live gig was over 2 years ago at Hugh's Room. We are SO excited to be back for a show at the Gladstone Hotel's Melody Bar. There is no cover, I think you can book a table in advance, and we will sing from 7-9. I know it goes past bedtime, so no need to stay the whole time, but it should be a fun show for the whole fam. OK, please forgive that shameless bit of self-promotion!

Wishing you all a happy Easter, Passover, Ramadan and long weekend!

Tamara