November 28 - December 1, 2016

Along with our usual writer's workshop and Daily 5 reading activities, we had our first dictée this week. The kids came up with sentences using the dictée words (to review their meaning), and we talked about things to remember in terms of their spelling. The kids practised writing out the words a few times on the carpet. We did a practice dictée on the second last day of the week, and the dictée on the last day. This will be our routine going forward, but I will be sending fewer words home. We started off we a larger number of fairly simple words.

We did math centres for the first time. These are numeracy activities that the students do in groups of 3-4 for about 10 minutes each. The groups rotate through the activities so that they hit every centre. They did the number decomposing activity that was introduced last week, where they shake a certain number of counters to find different pairs of numbers that add together to give that number:

They played the Shoe Game that we made last week. It requires them to roll a die and then double the number, and move their piece that many spots forward. This helps them learn their double facts.

The played "Pêcher pour 10" (Fishing for tens), which is the same as Go Fish but the object is to collect pairs that equal 10 instead of pairs of the same card. 

And lastly, they got to match numbers onto a giant 100 chart that I made when I was in teacher's college. This centre is a lot of fun for the kids!

We also read a book with a story that was all about decomposing the number 8. It tells the story of 8 kids having a sleepover party in a bunk bed, and playing a trick on the elderly aunt by changing their arrangement in the 2 beds (7 and 1, 6 and 2, 5 and 3, 4 and 4). We followed up the story by using rekenreks to represent the kids and the bunk bed. The kids played a game in partners where the first person rolls a die to set up their bunk bed with a certain number of kids in the top and bottom beds. Then the second person picks up a card that tells them how many kids go up or down on the bed. The kids represented these 2 situations using a rekenrek, and then drew the rekenrek rows and wrote math sentences to express the split of numbers between the top and bottom bunks. 

Our field trip was terrific! The Theatre Direct performance of the Old Man and the River was full of character, humour and surprises. They did an excellent job of introducing and debriefing the show in French, and the show itself took place with only music and sound effects. Sadly I couldn't take pictures of the show, but I took plenty of us travelling to and from the theatre and playing outside in a great playscape between lunch and the show!

When we got back to school that day, the kids drew their favourite scene from the puppet show and they wrote about it later.