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.