We have added a new chant to our morning routine, which we say three times while slapping our legs in time. Roughly translated it goes like this: I can speak French, I want to speak French, I will speak French! Yes, I'm brainwashing your children, but for a good cause. I'm insisting now that they speak to me in French, and we have a spot on the board where I add the names of kids who I hear speaking French informally (beyond speaking on the carpet or talking to me). The names of these kids are stacked on top of each other, and our goal is to get a taller stack each week.

Last week we talked about the sound "ou" and our sight words all had this digraph. The kids practiced writing some common sight words onto whiteboards in a circle on the carpet. This way everyone got immediate feedback about any incorrect spelling.

Together we wrote and illustrated the steps involved in getting ready to go outside. This was procedural writing in the form of a cartoon. Each child then wrote and drew themselves getting ready. With snowpants and boots and hats and mittens, it has been a big challenge for us all to learn the steps involved and carry them out several times each day. The class actually improved a lot after writing it all out!

Another writing project was the translation of the information from home about each student's animal. I asked the kids to do their best to translate the words, and then I finished the translation for them. Then I plugged those words into a script template in which two animals meet, and tell each other about themselves (what they like to eat, where they live, something interesting about themselves...). This was the script that went home last weekend, with the audio recording, for kids to practice.

The song we are singing these days names the months of the year. Find it here for practice at home :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_u2SigckNQ. We have also been singing "Alouette, gentil Alouette" to review body part names. And we continue to recite our nursery rhymes.

We celebrated the 80th day of school in our usual fashion, with lots of counting and grouping of concrete objects. We continued to work on telling time. I made a clock face on the carpet, and asked students to place the numbers for the hours, starting with 3, 6, 9 and 12 and then filling in the others.

Then we added the minutes, numbers which don't appear on most clocks but which the kids need to learn. We began by adding 30, then talked about where 5 would go. There was a lot of puzzling as we continued to add minutes beside hours on the clock face. Finally we added the big hand and the little hand. Then we read different times on the clock and then moved the hands to show different times on the clock. We worked with this clock another day to think about elapsed time, answering questions like: if I start watching TV at 7 pm and I watch for 1 hour, what time do I finish? We also practiced counting by 5 again, since the minutes on the clock make jumps of 5.

Report cards will go home on Monday February 8th. If you would like to have a parent/teacher conference, please email me so we can make arrangements. Thanks!

We had a fun and productive first week back at school. The first day back the kids told each other (in pairs) about their holidays, first in English and then in French. Then they wrote about their holidays and illustrated their writing. The class also wrote a true story together offered by one of the students. In our free writing time most students continued to write fictional stories, and some took up the idea of writing stories from their lives. We reviewed all the gestures for spoken sounds that we learned before the holidays. We also reviewed all the sight words covered so far by playing "sight word bingo." We went back to chanting nursery rhymes that we were learning in the fall and we added a couple of new ones.

I introduced a new puppet character to accompany our read-alouds: Imogène Qui Imagine (Imogene who imagines). This sprightly character loves to close her eyes and make mental images of the stories she is reading. We read a book about the trouble with excluding others. In the book, a birthday invitation list on sparkly, pink paper is brandished repeatedly. Imogene closed her eyes and imagined out loud that sparkly, pink list and, adorably, several of the kids called out (with eyes shut tight) "I see it! I can see it too!" This is a reading strategy that will serve them well as the habit becomes engrained.

In math we are learning about measuring time. The kids measured the passage of time with some activities in pairs. One partner would sing the alphabet song while the other did an activity (5 jumping jacks, or a pirouette...). They recorded which letter of the alphabet they got to at the end of each activity. From this, they could compare which activities took more time and which took less time. The discussion of this gave everyone practice with the vocabulary for the passage of time. Then we talked about what time of day we do different things (When does school start? When do we have lunch?...) Students surveyed their classmates to find out when they woke up and when they went to bed. We made a bar graph to show how many students go to bed at which bedtimes. We learned more time vocabulary (watch, clock, big hand, little hand, second hand, minutes, hours, what time is it?) through some read-alouds on the subject. Then the students practised in pairs telling time to the hour and half hour with little clocks with moveable hands.

We resumed our study of living beings. The students looked through a pile of library books on different animals, and each student chose an animal to focus on. I told them to chose an animal of interest to them, because they would be researching that animal, making a puppet of it, and performing a puppet show with it. The kids drew their animal of choice a couple of times, and then cut out the drawing and traced the outline onto felt twice. They added details to the front piece, and both pieces were glued together with stuffing between and glued to a stick. Sadly, I was too busy with the glue gun to get any pictures of the kids making their puppets, but I did catch some of them playing with their puppets during "heure de jeux" at the end of the day on Friday!

I also put up the fantastic labeled body paintings that the kids did before the holidays - they liven up the classroom and the halls!