May 9-13

We finally made the video of our book, Le Tambour Magique, and I will soon make it available for you to view. The kids did a great job of reading their writing and keeping quiet for the recording. We had a lot of students read their writing this week (author's chair) in order to catch up a bit - so many kids want to read to the class and they can find the wait frustrating. We also continued to work on our "son" book and the other Daily 5 activities.

We spent the week exploring patterns. We talked about patterns in our lives, from daily routines to astronomical patterns to life cycles. In partners, each student created a pattern with various materials. When I gave the signal, they switched and began working on their partner's pattern, extending it. We had a couple of hands-on pattern building sessions like this.

Then we added a new wrinkle: one person made the pattern, then the other person had to label it with letters (A, B, C) to identify the structure of the pattern. Another task was to build a pattern from a given structure (eg. ABAC) and then have the partner figure out the structure.

We also spent a period outside on a warm day and made clapping patterns, and person patterns (eg. striped shirt, solid shirt) to repeat and guess. The important concepts for the kids to gain through all this experience are that a pattern has elements that repeat, and the core that repeats can be analyzed and labelled in order to identify families of patterns. 

We also did a story problem in math. It was a complex problem, but I provided the answer and just asked the kids to explain why. They have been doing these problems in pairs, and I provided them with a series of steps to the problem-solving process to help them collaborate better. I have been seeing math partners working in parallel, each doing their own thing and not interacting very much. So now my emphasis is on talking together, using math manipulatives to figure out a problem together, and communicating their thinking. 

Continuing our exploration of energy, we watched an episode of the Magic Schoolbus in French about energy. We discussed the events of the show and we will watch it again next week. The kids need to see it more than once to really understand what is being communicated. We will be having a full day focused on Energy on Monday, and that will wrap up our unit!

May 2-6

In Daily 5 we began a new activity on the carpet. It is a game for practicing decoding words. I wrote 19 "words" on the board, but none was actually a word in French. They were nonsense words like "tipoma", so that the kids would have to read them by decoding rather than as a sight word. The turn passed around the circle, with each student reading a word, then the whole class repeating the word with phonic gestures, and then everyone repeating the word and clapping the syllables. It turned out to be quite engaging - I told the kids that it was an Alien language that used French pronunciation!

We continued making pages for our book of French "sons", and we learned a new rhyme together with gestures.

We have been singing the tune "Nous sommes tous comme les fleurs" by Charlotte Diamond. There isn't a good free recording online that I can find (it is available on Itunes), but here is a link to a video of a kindergarten class performing it on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGl_IqEpKGQ

In math, we continued to explore the measurement of area. I read the Ukrainian folk tale "The Mitten" in which a mitten is lost and becomes a home for more and more animals. The mitten gets stretched larger and larger, and then is found again by the boy who lost it.

Then the kids worked on a sheet, finding the area of the flat mitten at different sizes. At each table they used a different material to fill the area of the mittens, and then counted how many units it took to fill the area. They estimated each time before measuring. We talked again about how larger units produce a smaller number and smaller units produce a larger number in measurement. We also talked about how some units, because of their shape, could not be placed without gaps in between, and whether or not this allowed accuracy.

We moved on to patterning at the end of the week. After some practice drawing different kinds of patterns, we made strips of patterns to decorate cardboard vases for Mother's Day. The kids chose the coloured strips and I encouraged them to think about contrast when choosing the colour to draw with. They also drew the silhouette of a vase on a folded piece of paper, and cut it out to produce a symmetrical vase form. I cut these forms out of cardboard for them, and then they glued the strips onto the vase and I added a cardboard roll to hold dried flowers.

A special event we had this week was a presentation about the Syrian refugee family being sponsored by Lord Lansdowne.  Noura Kevorkian, a Lord Lansdowne parent, is a documentary filmmaker and has visited the family in their Refugee camp in Lebanon. She showed us footage of the mom, dad and 2 sisters, their home and the refugee camp environment. The kids asked lots of questions and saw close up how people live with so much less than what we have in Toronto. They are excited to meet the family when they get to Canada.