This week we worked a lot with the story Le Tambour Magique (The Magic Drum). We told it together on the carpet several times, with gestures, so that kids could begin to learn to tell the story themselves. I drew a line on the whiteboard and put 19 spots on it, and together we identified 19 scenes in the story in order. I drew kids' names randomly, and each student chose which part they would illustrate and write about.

The kids started by making a rough draft, drawing their story scene and writing about what was happening. Then I put them into pairs and they did some editing, using the editing checklist. After fixing a few things, they wrote and drew a good copy in pencil. Then they painted on fields of colour with tempera paints, and finally traced over their pencil outlines with black marker for contrast. Here are some examples of the 3 stages their work went through:

The exciting final product was a book that I read to the class on Friday!

In Daily 5 time, we began a new word work activity in which the kids use letter tiles to spell words with a target sound. This week we began with the vowels.

There is also the opportunity to study this week's dictée words during word work time. We had our first weekly dictée on Friday, and the kids did well.

We also used the iPads in a new way. I recently learned how to enable them to voice type in French, so the kids tried it out. They read their stories from writer's workshop into the microphone of an iPad, to have the words typed up. The results were mixed, less successful than what I've seen with first language English voice typing (not surprising). I was hoping the kids could all type their stories this way for inclusion in a class book of stories, but seeing it in action has made me reconsider this.

The kids presented their Skitch structures presentations to the class. We kept it short and snappy to keep everyone's interest, they just read their sentences from their slides to the class.

We returned to our discussions about growth mindset. In discussion, the kids came up with 3 strategies to counter negative messages they tell themselves (which we called an "unfriendly voice" in your head): 1) Ignore it, 2) Take a break from the activity, and 3) Talk back to the voice and tell yourself "I can do it!". We also talked about the friendly and unfriendly voices being our thoughts, and we debated about whether or not we can decide to change our thoughts. Throughout the week, kids had a chance to present a short skit with their 2 puppets: one friendly puppet who gives messages of encouragement, and one unfriendly puppet who gives negative messages. We used the student's continuum of activities made previously (things I do with confidence vs. things I have difficulty doing) as a starting point to chose the difficult activity that would bring up the negative "voice". Students acted out doing their difficult activity, and had a friend animate their 2 puppets, starting off with negative messages. Then the student tried one of our strategies, and often had a dialogue with the unfriendly puppet until the friendly puppet replaced it.

We wrapped up our geometry unit and moved on to measurement. We will be learning about length and then area in the next while. I introduced the basic vocabulary, and then challenged the kids to find 3 objects in the classroom, one longer than a popsicle stick, one the same length as a popsicle stick, and one shorter than a popsicle stick. They brought these 3 items to the carpet, and in a circle we held up each group of objects. Then we went around the circle, and each student compared one of their objects to one of their neighbour's objects. They needed to say in French "Mine is longer/shorter than yours."