October 3-7, 2016

We celebrated the first student birthday of the year this week. For every student's birthday, we make cards for them and sing them "Bon anniversaire." Students with summer birthdays will get celebrated in June.

I introduced to the kids our "je veux parler de..." (I want to talk about...) jar. Students are welcome to write down topics that they want the class to discuss, around how we do things, our agreements, or any classroom issues.

We learned a new song for Thanksgiving, Merci maman la terre (Thank You Mother Earth) by Arthur l'Aventurier. This song is on his album, Les saisons en ballon, and is available on iTunes. Find the album and link to iTunes here: http://www.arthurlaventurier.com/univers-arthur/aventures.php. You will need to scroll down, the album is from 2004.

Our alphabet review progressed to the letter "r". Our words of the week were with the sound "e" and we learned the gestures for l, m and r.

We began oral storytelling, with the story of Grandmother's Old-Fashioned Bed. I told the story to the kids, with lots of hand gestures. I will keep telling this story many times, and gradually the kids, with the help of the hand gestures, will be able to tell it themselves.

We continued to write simple sentences generated by the students. They are becoming more confident with invented spelling. I broke down the scaffolded writing process into 6 steps for them, which they follow each time we write.

We fine-tuned the habits for Partner Reading, including how to choose a partner so that we avoid hurt feelings. We welcomed our volunteer Louise who will join us each Wednesday for Reading. She is a retired teacher and is francophone, and she enjoys reading with the kids. 

We marked the 20th day of school with lots of counting of our collections. We counted 20 objects in groups of 2, 5 and 10. Then we made equations that added up to 20 by splitting the group of objects and counting the 2 groups.

We sang along with a fun counting rap, which is available on Youtube. It is a good one because you see the digits and the number word as you hear the number name. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIUr8omTpCs. 

We worked more with 10 frames. The kids did an activity in partners where they took turns showing a 10 frame number and asking in French "How much?", "How much more to make 10?", "How much more/less to make 5?" We are working to establish 5 and 10 as benchmark numbers, so that the students' sense of all the other single digit numbers includes that number's relationship to 5 and 10. 

We finished the week with another story problem, this time involving subtraction. After acting it out with the whole class, students found solutions to the problem using counters. Once they were done, some students shared their responses on the carpet and we discussed their work - what seemed to work and where they needed to fix something or improve something.