Our first-ever Francofête week was a great success! The kids had a great time and expanded their perspectives on the Francophone world. We played a version of Bananagrams almost every day, finding French words to spell. The kids kept a record in their Francofête "passport" each day of how many words they made in 10 minutes.

Thanks to the Spelling Bee preparations, all the kids got a lot better at spelling common French sight words - thanks for all the support, studying that word list at home! We studied the word list at school as well, with kids in partners quizzing each other and copying the words. We had 2 dictées (their first ever I think), each time asking them to write 10 words from the list. On the basis of the dictée results, 3 finalists were chosen and we had a Spelling Bee in our class to get down to 2 finalists. Those 2 students participated in the school-wide Spelling Bee held on Thursday, with all the students watching. All the grade 1 and 2 contestants competed together for the title, and our 2 contestants ended up in the final 3 with one grade 2 student! But in the end the grade 2 student won, though our 2 contestants performed admirably. Their classmates really cheered them on. 

Each day had a theme, so we did a "mille mercis" (a thousand thank-yous) activitiy on Wednesday, which was the day of politeness. After talking together about all the things we appreciate about our classmates at school, the kids wrote thank-you messages in each other's Francofête passports. We also looked at the presentation on flags and celebrities from Francophone countries, the same one I prepared and sent out to you earlier this week. In addition to that, we visited a great interactive website that has Francophone children from all over the world talking about their lives in short videos. The kids explored this site in partners on the iPads and we looked at it together as a class. Here is the link; we only scratched the surface and there is a lot more there to explore: http://laoujedors.com/carte-du-monde.

In math, we started the week with our geometry centers and then returned to doing some story problems. I am focusing on the skills to tackle story problems because many students have trouble knowing where to start when presented with a story problem. They tend to be very focused on finding the right answer, and once someone gets the answer the news spreads, and then kids will write down that answer without having really thought through or discussed the problem themselves. So I showed them the following 2 examples of work I might see:

I asked them which example looked like better work, and most thought example A looked better. We probed this and I suggested that maybe student A had gotten that answer from someone else, and some students saw that the thinking of student B was visible and that they had made mistakes and started over. We talked about making mistakes and how mistakes show that you are taking a risk and learning. 

We returned to our Structures inquiry. Before the March break, the students were all asked to take 3 photos of their structure as they built it to document the beginning, the middle and the end. I showed them how to use the Skitch app on the iPads, which allows you to put text and arrows onto a photo. They returned to their photos and began writing about each one to describe that stage of construction. 

And lastly, we had a new "héro de français" (French hero), someone who went without speaking English in our classroom for a day. And the class together climbed up "l'echelle" (the ladder) to receive the prize (for speaking French) of painting during heure de jeux.