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!