January 23-27, 2017

We are moving on now from our focus on simple consonants and vowels to talk about the French digraphs or "sons." This week we looked at "au" which makes the sound "o," and our words of the week contained this digraph. We went back to having Word Work during Daily Five time, and the kids built words using "au."

We talked about the dictée and how to learn the spelling of words in other ways. The kids were not enthusiastic about the option of copying the words of the week multiple times at school to learn their spelling. I will go back to having the dictée next week, but I'll have options for those who find it very stressful to get more support. 

To drill the kids on their knowledge of hard and soft c/g, we played a competitive game in 2 teams. Two players, one from each team, faced off to read a simple syllable starting with c or g. The first person to read it correctly won a point for their team. It was a fun way to gain automaticity with this reading rule.

In Writer's Workshop we did some activities to help the kids come up with their own stories to tell. We made up a story together in French by passing turns around the circle and each student adding a sentence or two to the story. We also talked about the many stories we love from books and movies. The kids each drew a scene from a favourite known story and told the class about it in French. 

Then I showed an example of taking a familiar story (Star Wars) and adding a new twist of one's own to it (Luke's friend Fred, the Jedi). We also began to talk about editing our writing. The kids helped me find spelling and punctuation errors in the story I had written about Fred the Jedi, and we made changes by crossing out words and writing between the lines with a coloured pencil. 

We learned about telling the time to the half hour. With our large floor clock we watched how the hour hand moves to be between hour numbers when the minute hand is on the 6, or the 30 minute point. This is still tricky territory for many of the kids. They practised asking and telling the time orally with toy clocks in pairs. They also got more practise with time work sheets.

In preparation for our last workshop with the visiting artists, the kids wrote words and drew images about their community. This drew on the vocabulary we had learned before the holidays. The artists joined us mid-week, and we completed 4 self-portraits by assembling the various elements completed in the prior workshops. The kids glued their words and images onto the "plate" self-portraits about their community. 

Then they added other collage and drawing and put their photo transfer in the middle. 

The final step was to paint a layer of gel medium over the entire piece.

The kids also put together the line drawn self-portraits they had made on acetate with the water-colour and collage backgrounds. We laid these all out to look at and talk about.

And to end the week, we had another Roots of Empathy session with Baby Tagore.

January 16-19, 2017

In Writer's Workshop, the class invented and wrote a story together by first choosing characters and a setting, drawing a picture, and then coming up with the action. Then they returned to their independent writing projects. At the end of the week, I read them the book Super Ella and asked them each to choose a favourite scene to draw and write about. I gave them all the same writing project for the purposes of assessment.

In math, we began to talk about time. We learned the vocabulary for second, minute and hour by reading the book Dans Une Seconde, which gives fascinating examples of things in the natural world which last these different lengths of time. We talked about what we know about clocks, and compared digital clocks with analog clocks. Then we looked closely at analog clocks, and identified the 2 different number lines around the face for hours (1-12) and for minutes (1-60). The kids made their own clocks from card stock, starting off by writing the hour numbers and the minute numbers on the clock face. They chose a colour for each (hours and minutes), and then coloured the hour and minute hands in the corresponding colours.

Then they used the clocks to practice telling time.

They got more practice telling and writing the time in French through worksheets.

This week we learned telling time to the hour, we'll move on to telling time to the half hour next week. We had a lesson on the carpet in which our taped carpet circle became a giant clock face. Kids added the hour numbers to the clock one at a time, and then we all counted the minute numbers by 5 while one student stepped around the clock face. We added the hour and minute hands, and everyone told the time shown. 

We continued singing our Jours de la Semaine song. We also talked about why we have day and night. We looked at a book that has moving parts illustrating how the sun moves in relation to the earth and how day and night change around the world. Most students were already aware that it is the turning of the earth that makes the sun "rise" and "set." 

We had another Roots of Empathy session. Mme Van der Weerd read a book about bullying, and we talked about the experience of being picked on at school. The kids each thought of a time when someone was mean to them at school, and then drew a picture and added some words. 

January 9-13, 2017

This first week back, we reviewed our class agreements and routines. Time for a fresh start! We talked about our goal during our reading period (to get better at reading!), and scaled back to just doing Read to Self and Partner Reading. I'll re-introduce Listening to Reading (on the iPads) and Word Work once good habits in the first two activities are re-established. I began reading one on one with the kids (rather than reading with them in small groups) to assess each student's progress in reading.

In Writer's Workshop the class saw me write about my holidays as a model for their writing. Some students followed that example, while others went back to writing their fictional stories. Their writing "muscles" were a bit out of shape from the time off, but there was still lots of enthusiasm for reading their writing to the class during Author's Chair.

I decided to wait a few weeks before starting up the dictée. It was causing more stress than I wanted, so I want to talk it over with the class and figure out how to lighten it up for them. We did go back to talking about the letters "c" and "g" and how they change depending on the letters that follow them. Then we practiced reading the following letter combinations together:

In math, we spent one more week wrapping up our learning about money. We started off by practicing skip-counting by 10 and 5. The kids played a game in pairs where they advanced or went back by 10, counting up to 100. They took turns picking up cards that said either +10 or -10, and moved their token accordingly. A green marker moved up whenever a new decade number was reached, and they were supposed to say the French number name together in French each time it went up.

After more practice counting by 5, they coloured in a hundreds chart with the numbers that are multiples of 5. 

Then we put our skip-counting to use to count up coins. As a class, we counted a handful of pennies (less than 20) and found that counting them one by one was slow and inaccurate. So we put the pennies into groups of 5 and counted them by 5, and then switched to counting by 1 for the leftover pennies. Then the students did the same activity in pairs. They began with an unknown number of pennies. They grouped them by 5's and used a number line to count by jumps of 5 and then jumps of 1 for the leftovers.

We began our next inquiry unit, learning about the daily and seasonal cycles. As a fun starting point, we learned a song with the names of the days of the week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpwf5N0rfVE. 

We also had our visiting artists, Leslie and Jade, come for their second-last half day workshop on self-portraits. The kids began a new set of self-portraits that deal with themselves in their communities. The concept is that they are making decorative "plates" with an image of themselves (a photo transfer) in the middle and words and images about their community around the rim. Leslie showed them an example of the idea.

Then the kids painted their "plates" with acrylic paint in a colour that they mixed, with lots of white. Light colours are best for a base for the photo transfer.

Then the kids learned in more detail how to make a photo transfer. They saw Leslie apply acrylic medium over a photocopy of a picture. She showed on a dry example how to soak it in water and remove the paper, to reveal a transparent black and white image. 

Then the kids applied acrylic medium in a thick layer over a photocopy of a photo of themselves. I had taken pictures of all the kids before the holidays in preparation.

They also began sketching ideas about their community, to come up with words and images for the rim of their "plate".

In a couple of weeks Leslie and Jade will return for our last session together, when we'll assemble all the self-portraits. 

An exciting moment this week happened at the end of the day on Friday, when we welcomed Raya to join our classroom. We are so happy to finally have her with us!