I told the kids a story about "les chaudoudoux" (warm fuzzies). In the story, everyone has a bag of chaudoudoux to give and when a person receives a chaudoudou it makes them feel warm and soft all over. I asked the kids to think of kind words and actions that make us feel good, like receiving a chaudoudou. We wrote them into a list. Now at the end of each day, we take a moment to tell about any chaudoudoux we gave or witnessed someone else give. We have a bag of pompoms (representing the chaudoudoux) and for each chaudoudou recounted, the person who gave it puts their hand into the bag, pulls out a "chaudoudou," and puts it into a clear box. We are trying to fill the box together. It's a fun way to promote kindness in our classroom community.

We've been learning the comptine we wrote together last week, and we added actions to it.

Our sight words this week contained the digraph "eu" which makes the same sound as "e".  In writer's workshop we've been focusing on technical elements. We added punctuation and capitals to a text that was missing them. We practiced writing really common sight words from the word wall. We played sight word bingo again. And in their writing, each student now has a technical goal that they are working toward, from this list:

I introduced a new reading comprehension strategy: making predictions. So we met "Didi qui prédit" (Didi who predicts) who is a cousin of the Cookie Monster (there's a striking resemblance). Didi is very impatient and is constantly guessing what will happen next in a story. He loves it when the kids make guesses with him.

In math, we've been learning about money. We read a story about using coins to buy different things. I gave each table a bunch of plastic coins and they sorted these into pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, loonies and toonies. Then I asked the students to draw each coin in a chart with the value for the coin. This is all to familiarize the kids with the coin values, before we start to do operations with them. 

We've been talking about daily routines and the changes that happen through the day. Using the information from home about their daily routines, each student made a book that shows a routine on each page and when it takes place. We talked about the movements of the sun in a day, and I asked the kids to show where the sun is for each of the routines in their book. They also showed where the hands on a clock were for each routine. 

We attended an excellent anti-bullying workshop by John Park on Friday afternoon. Through a very entertaining show we heard about the importance of empathy, kindness, respect, and the good old Golden Rule. We went over what to do if someone is mean to you: tell them to stop, walk away, or tell a teacher in cases where the harassment doesn't stop. I will follow up on these ideas next week with the kids.

Your child's first report card will come home on Monday. I recommend not sharing report cards with kids in the early grades. In my opinion, when young kids are overly aware of their performance being evaluated it can interfere with their intrinsic motivation to try new things and learn. Of course, how to handle report cards is a personal decision made by each parent, I'm just putting in my 2 cents!