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!