Mme Hamilton: 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.