November 21-25, 2016

We continued to tell "le nom de l'arbre" together. The kids added writing to the illustrations they made last week. In writer's workshop, we told some of our favourite stories on the carpet, and then kids tried to write them as simple stories in French. We are moving from writing single sentences to writing actual stories now, which is very exciting!

Our words of the week had the sound "u" in them.

We also looked at what happens when we come across 2 vowels beside each other. In most cases, we hear the sound of both vowels, as in the following chart and text.

But there are a few special cases, where 2 vowels make a new sound together. The kids helped me find these on our "mur de sons" (sound wall).

We added a new iPad game to the word work time during reading. It is a fun game that gets kids spelling words, with letter sounds provided. The kids really enjoy it! Check it out here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/french-words-for-kids-learn/id396224808?mt=8

We continued to talk about odd and even numbers. I placed different arrangements of shoes on the carpet, and asked students to tell us if there was an odd or even number of shoes, and to explain why.

Then I asked the students to draw their family, and answer how many pairs of shoes they were wearing, and how many single shoes they were wearing.

The next day I asked everyone to draw 2 shoes on a small piece of paper. Once I had collected them all, I asked the class: how many shoes did we draw? There were 15 kids at school that day.

This question was quite tricky for many students, so that was why I sent it home to do again as homework with a different number. 

I used the drawings of the shoes to make the Shoe Game, which we will start playing next week.

At the end of the week, I introduced a simple activity that the kids will be doing independently in math centers starting next week. The student chooses a number, and then uses 2-sided counters to find all the possible pairs of numbers that add up to that number. 

For fun, we also counted up our field trip money by skip-counting together. First we counted by 10's, then 5's, then 2's, then 1's. It added up to a lot of money!

We also began our unit exploring our local community. We started off by talking about all the different kinds of places we find on city streets, to introduce the French vocabulary for these places.