December 19-23, 2016

Concert preparations took up the beginning of our week, culminating in a fun and lively performance with Mme Dungo on Tuesday night. We finished the large and small maps in time to display them for the parents on that night.

Our dictée words last week contained hard and soft "c," and this week they contained hard and soft "g." We talked more about the rule for these changeling consonants, using the analogy of clouds for soft letters and bricks for hard letters.

We continued to work with coins, and applied our understanding of expressions of equality with them. The kids had an open-ended task, to put coins on either side of the equals symbol and then write the corresponding math equation using the coin values. This allowed them to work with different amounts and seek their appropriate challenge level.

We looked at these photos of the kids' work together, and discussed them to better understand coin amounts. This picture was especially helpful for understanding the relationship between a cent and a dollar:

We had another fantastic workshop with the visiting artists. The theme this time was to do with our families. Leslie started off by reading a book about families, in all their various forms. We talked a bit about our feelings in relation to our families. The kids warmed up their drawing skills by drawing lines that spoke of their feelings about their families.

Then we looked at the work of Hans Kline, and talked about the feelings we saw in his abstract work in black and white.

Then Jade demonstrated how to apply black acrylic paint onto canvas using a cardboard applicator. 

Then the kids had a go at it, making abstract images that expressed feelings about their families.

After another demonstration, and once the black paint had mostly dried, the kids went back to their abstract images with white acrylic paint. They used the white paint to mask some areas or to surround certain elements and highlight them.

Our morning with Leslie and Jade finished with an opportunity to learn more about their art work. They showed the class some of their pieces and the kids asked lots of questions.

December 12-16, 2016

Writer's workshop is going well, partly thanks to our new volunteer, Mathilde, who joins us to support the kids in their writing. The students work with focus and really look forward to sharing their writing with the class during author's chair. The expectation now is to write at least 3 sentences for any one piece of writing, and I have new paper in the writing center with more lines, spaced more closely together. Students can still select the paper with wide lines if that works best for them.

In math we continued to work on more complex equations to develop the concept of equality. We practiced counting by 5's and 10's and then began to work with money. First the kids got familiar with the different coins and their French names by drawing the image on each type of coin and writing the value. We talked about the difference between a cent and a dollar. We also marked our 70th day of school with lots of grouping and counting!

We began working on individual maps of an imaginary neighbourhood, as well as a large map of downtown Toronto which shows the approximate location of the students' homes. Students made a rough draft of their map and chose 6 city places to include on their map and in their legend. Then they made their good copy using cut-out construction paper for the map elements. The project took most kids 2 weeks to complete.

The large map was painted in groups of 4-5 students, following lines I had traced by projecting a googlemap onto a bed sheet!

The visiting artists came and presented another half day workshop on self-portraits. They had taken a photo of each student on their previous visit, and the students used these photos to trace a drawing of themselves onto acetate.

Then they showed the work of Paul Klee, and we talked again about how different colours make us feel. The kids then made collage pieces to represent their feelings. 

These works will be combined together in layers to produce the finished self-portraits.

December 5 - 9, 2016

We learned two new comptines (rhymes) last week and this week, "La voisine dit" and "La clé du royaume." We had 2 Roots of Empathy sessions, and when baby Tagore came to visit us, we did some of our French comptines for him, which he seemed to like.

Beth Vanderweerd, the Roots of Empathy facilitator, also made a book of the kids' drawings of the reasons that a baby might cry. The students really enjoyed her reading of it. They made drawings this week of reasons they themselves might cry or be sad.

The kids wrote more from their puppet show drawings and on many other topics. They started using our classroom dictionaries as a resource for writing, for ideas as well as for words. Some of them started using new writing paper with more lines that are smaller. 

We finally finished our alphabet review! We also had our second dictée. We discussed the sound "k" and I asked the students for the 3 letters that make that sound (c, k, and q). I asked them to vote on which letter they thought was usually in a word if they heard the "k" sound (some students are in the habit of using "k" all the time...). Most thought it was "c," but we did a word sort of familiar words with that sound to find out. The proof lined up with our prediction! We also began to discuss hard and soft c and g. 

We reviewed the vocabulary of city places introduced last week. Each student chose one place (restaurant, park, museum...) to create on a small paper. The kids labelled their city places and we made a city street with all the places lined up along it.

We looked at some maps made by a DaVinci class, in preparation for our mapping project next week. We identified the legends on the maps, and the kids saw how the symbols in the legend were like a code for understanding what was on the map. 

We did our numeracy centres again. And we waded into more complicated "math sentences" (equations) which lend a more complex understanding to the "equal" symbol (=). I wrote the equation 2 + 2 = 1 + 3 and asked if it made any sense. After some discussion, most students agreed that it did. Then I showed the class how to use two-coloured counters to create this kind of equation, using a template that acts as a scaffold. They start by placing the same number of counters in each circle. Then they need to flip them until the number of yellow and red is different on the 2 sides. Then they count the yellow and red counters in each circle and write the equation that corresponds. We did this together in a circle, and then those who could do it independently went to the tables to make more equations while I worked with some less sure kids on the carpet.

We also used the day's snack to tell a story about a brother and sister whose mother needed to give them the same number of vegetables (to be fair) but one liked tomatoes more and one liked pea pods more. We wrote a math equation from our story, 4 + 1 = 3 + 2.

We had our first session with our visiting artists - it was great!!! Leslie and Jade showed the students various self-portraits by Vincent Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo as an introduction to self-portraits. 

Then the artists talked about different line qualities and how they might express different feelings. The kids practised drawing different kinds of lines and then were given heavy paper and pastels. With these materials they drew lines to express how they were feeling right now.

Then Leslie talked about warm and cool colours, and demonstrated how to wet the paper and then paint tempera colours onto it such that the wax pastel resists the paint. The students chose a palette of either warm or cool colours to paint over their pastel drawings.

They began by painting a layer of water onto their drawing.

And then they added the colour!

Next week Leslie and Jade will return and guide the kids in adding layers onto these abstract backgrounds to produce their first self-portraits!