March 20-24, 2017

This first week back from March break was filled with Francofête activities! The kids had Francofête passports and each day had a special theme. Monday was all about French words. The kids learned how to play Scrabble Junior in French, and the whole class played Scrabble on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. There was a Scrabble tournament on Thursday with 2 students from our class (I drew names from a list of students who had won games) playing against other grade 1 students.

On Monday we also read through the words on the Spelling Bee list and wrote some on them in the passports, using stamps with the vowels in red.

We worked with these words throughout the week. The next day the kids read through the list again in partners and identified the words they didn't yet know how to spell by circling them. The next day they wrote out the words they found difficult. Later, we had a dictée of the some of the words.

After this lead up, we had a classroom Spelling Bee to determine who would compete in the school-wide Spelling Bee. We were very proud of the 3 classmates who did so well in that event!

Tuesday's theme was French film, and we watched Le Petit Nicholas in the gym. Wednesday's theme was "the day of 1000 thank-you's." We watched a short animated film that illustrates the "magic words" in French (please, thank you, hello, goodbye, and excuse me) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euruZYeJRgI). The kids wrote out the words as a list in their passports, and then they used the magic words with other students. They collected tally marks from other students each time they used one of the magic words.

Thursday was the dress-up day, check out the video on our school blog to see some of the costumes that day: https://lordlansdowne.wordpress.com/. And Friday was the Spelling Bee. We also observed Earth Hour on Friday, and turned off all the lights in the school from 2pm onward. This provided an opportunity for our class to start talking about electricity and conservation, which leads us into our next inquiry focus on energy. 

Kids were finishing up their structures projects this week, listing their materials and properties and adding words to their photos using Skitch.

We did writer's workshop and reading with a bit less time. We talked about the 3 consonants that "give hugs" to other consonants - s, l and r. Many students find it challenging to blend these letter sounds closely enough with other consonants. The kids read simple syllables with these blends in a game show set-up with 2 teams competing.

We are back to geometry and spatial activities in math. We reviewed the names of the 3D solids and positional language with an activity that had kids giving each other a specific challenge such as "Put the cone beside the cylinder" and so on.

Then we had a fun group challenge of trying to find as many ways as we could to fit pattern blocks into a specific hexagon. The kids started off in their table groups, coming up with as many different hexagon solutions as they could.

The kids got really into it and we decided to line up all the various solutions, with the matching solutions together. Then we eliminated the matches and tried for more new solutions. We counted the solutions and there were nearly 50 ways the class had come up with! There was some rich analysis in comparing the solutions to decide if a given one was new or a repeat of an existing solution.