November 14-17, 2016

I told the class a new story, "le nom de l'arbre", with gestures and audience participation. Afterwards, I asked them to draw a scene from the story. The kids were able to tell in French what was happening in their picture. The story also provided many kids with material to write about later in writer's workshop.

Our words of the week all contained the vowel "o", and we sang a song that also had that sound repeated: Mon Sac à Dos" by Gregg Lerock. Find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdo69O2B2c4. The song details all the things normally found in a backpack, and then adds some ridiculous things (like windows...). After singing it for a few days, the students illustrated classroom objects in the song, the things in their backpack.

We also took a closer look at the letters d, b, p and q. We drew on them and related them to different images, to learn to tell them apart. 

In math, we did addition and subtraction on the big number line on the floor of our classroom. Students used bean bags to mark each number in the equation, and jumped them backwards and forwards.

We began learning about even and odd numbers. We talked about the Madeleine books, with the girls walking in two straight lines. I asked everyone to draw two lines of people, and make a math sentence to describe how many people there were. When the kids shared their equations, we had a series of "doubles" (4+4=8, 5+5=10...). The kids learned that these were even numbers because every person had a partner, while odd numbers have 1 leftover. 

As we worked with odd and even numbers, some questions arose. We kept those questions and students who finished their work early worked on answering them.

We also celebrated the 50th day of school - halfway to 100!