Thursday 16 February 2017

February 6 - 10, 2017

The sound we focused on this week was "ou" which sounds like "oo" in English. We read together a couple of books that highlight words with this French digraph. The students built words with "ou" during word work time.


 I introduced the five puppet characters I use to teach 5 reading comprehension strategies: Fleur Connecteur, Rolande qui se demande, Didi qui prédit, Imogène qui imagine and Le compte qui raconte. These puppets make connections with the text, ask questions about the text, predict events, make mental images as they read, and retell a story after reading it. We will start off by reading with Fleur Connecteur for a few weeks.

In writer's workshop, we edited a student's story together, adding capital letters and periods and fixing spelling errors. We reviewed all of the comptines we have learned this year, and students were encouraged to write down the comptines if they lacked writing topics. We also finished our Chaque Jour projects.

In math, we continued to work with 2-dimensional shapes. We did a shape hunt, with the kids finding squares, rectangles, circles and triangles all around the classroom.







After collecting several photos of each shape, the students showed some of their photos to the class and from these we discussions we made the following chart of properties of the shapes:


We did another activity that had kids comparing shapes by their properties. The table groups were given a collection of shapes that had some properties in common. They took turns around the table (passing a bean bag to keep track of the turns) playing a "game" in which one person starts by putting a shape onto the paper on the table. Player 2 adds a shape to the paper and says what is the same about the 2 shapes. Player 3 has to try adding another shape that shares the same property. When no more shapes can be added, the game starts again. This had kids noticing round versus straight sides, the number of sides, convex or concave corners, and more.



We also read a book about the 100th day of school, in preparation for the following Monday.

We made cards for 2 babies, one for Julian's new baby sister and one for Mme Dungo's new baby. We used the collage and layering techniques introduced to us by Leslie and Jade.











Monday 13 February 2017

January 30 - February 3, 2017

We added a couple more songs to our repertoire this week. One that lists the months of the year (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_u2SigckNQ) and one that describes the four seasons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWhLSc_FpCM).

Our French son this week was ``eau`` which makes the sound ``oh``. The kids practiced writing words containing this vowel combination.


Daily 5 reading activities continue, with partner reading skills improving.


We began working on the Chaque Jour project, which has the kids drawing and writing about their daily routines. It incorporates their learning about telling time too. Following a model, the kids copied the translated sentences and illustrated them. Then they added clocks with the time shown.







In math, we celebrated the 90th day of school with lots of counting, as usual.







We had our last round of numeracy centers, before finishing up with telling time and moving on to geometry!





We began our geometry unit by playing with pattern blocks. Each child was invited to make a design using the blocks. When they were done, they added up how many of each block was in their design. This required a review of the vocabulary for 2 dimensional shapes. 



The kids wrote on the board, on a large table, how many of each shape they had used. Then I added up the totals for each shape, and we made a graph to see our results more clearly.



Then we talked about ``lines of symmetry`` and I introduced a partner activity where the kids take turns placing a pattern block which their partner matches.





We also used geoboards to make squares, triangles and rectangles. Some kids got interested in making symmetrical designs using those shapes.