A Delightful First Week

Hello parents and guardians!

Welcome to my newly created blog for room 308 at Lord Lansdowne. I will gradually be building up the content available, adding useful links and photos. I'm excited to explore all the ways this platform can make the activities in our classroom transparent and accessible for all of you.

A word about privacy: I will never be mentioning the names, first or last, of any of my students. I would like to post photos including the students' faces to fully portray life in our classroom. Many of you have signed a media release form that allows this to happen. If you would prefer that your child's face not appear in blog photos, just let me know and I will gladly accommodate your request.

This past week we had a larger class (24), but now we have settled down to 20 students for the year. We focused on "favourite things" as a means to review vocabulary and get to know one another. The students drew their favourite things and labelled their drawings with words. Then we brainstormed categories of favourite things and tackled a couple of categories each day in our Writer's Workshop. For a given category (i.e. colours, animals, sports...) the students gave their preferences and I listed these on the board. Then students wrote the corresponding sentence, such as "Ma couleur préférée est rouge." (My favourite colour is red).  Students are also learning the routine of Writer's Workshop, which includes 10 minutes of writing in silence...a bit challenging, but we're getting there. We also did carpet "games" in which students each spoke the sentences they were writing, either taking turns around the circle or in pairs. We began learning a song called "J'adore les tomates" (I love tomatoes) and I read books aloud each day relating to favourite things and respecting differences. In our morning circle, we began discussing the agreements we will need to keep our classroom friendly, positive and orderly. We have begun making a book of our classroom agreements.

We reviewed the number names through games and a song (Les Nombres de 1 à 20) and reviewed the concepts of addition and subtraction. Then we had a couple of problem-solving sessions, in which the whole class tackled a word problem together. They were asked to draw a picture to represent the problem and give the math sentence that answers the question "Combien?" (How much?). When they were finished the students looked over each other's work and put stickies where they saw something of interest or wanted to ask a question. Then we discussed the solutions and various approaches using the stickies as entry points.

This week was largely just about establishing routines and expectations and creating a positive atmosphere in the classroom. I got to know the kids a bit and they began getting comfortable socially. We have a lovely group!