September 19-23, 2016

In our letter review and lower case handwriting practice, we got to the letter "m." We had our first "words of the week" and began reading morning messages from me that use those words in playful ways. Our first set of words focus on the vowel sound "a," so one morning all the "a" sounding letters had disappeared!

We sang our vowel song some more, and learned the hand gestures for the vowel sounds including é and è. Then we tried putting different consonants together with those vowel sounds, making the hand gesture for each as we read it. The hand gestures are helpful to give as hints when kids are writing, to draw attention to the vowel sounds in a word that they are trying to translate into letters. 

We began to practice "free" writing, where the students write on a topic of their choice. Because most students have such limited French, I encouraged them to write a sentence from one of the rhymes ("comptines") we've been learning these past few weeks. We have 3 comptines that the kids know, and some were familiar already from SK: "Voici une tasse"; "Moustique 1 moustique 2"; and "La terre est ici." I told the kids that if you can say it, you can write it! "Si tu peux le dire, tu peux l'écrire!" Many of them want to know the correct spelling for a word before writing it. In grade 1, invented spelling is what I want to see because it helps the kids solidify their knowledge of phonics and it allows them to be independent writers. I taught them the writing method I first observed in Tools of the Mind classrooms, where they say out loud the sentence they will write, then draw a series of lines on the paper to represent the words in their statement. A longer word gets a longer line, a shorter word gets a shorter line. So if the child wants to write "voici une tasse" they start by making 3 lines: ________ ____ ____.  I ask them to "read" their lines several times, pointing at each one as they say the word it represents. Then they can work at stretching each word out and getting down the letters for the sounds they hear in order, without the (otherwise frequent) problem of forgetting the words they were writing. They're often writing French words that are new to them so it's a lot to remember!

One day the kids started telling stories of seeing cats or squirrels in parks or yards, and we retold the stories in French and they wrote them down. We used our feelings and needs vocabulary in various ways, and used our Everybody Wins game to work out a conflict between two students in the circle. We read books about feelings, and told stories of times when we have gotten angry. 

The kids practiced silent "reading to self" every day for 10 minutes, and I continued to read 1-on-1 with them at that time. I've read with almost every student now, so that next week I'll be able to give them books at their level and put them into levelled reading groups. 

We celebrated the 10th day of school! Part of our morning routine is to add a "petal" to the flower each day, and when a flower has 5 petals it goes on the board. When two flowers are completed it means we're at a decade number, and those are the days that we bring our collections to school to count up. The flowers fill a 10 frame on the board which will be filled on the 100th day of school. 

The kids used a counting mat to count their collection objects by 2 and by 5. Then they found as many ways as they could to add 2 numbers to make 10.

The rest of the week we focused on saying, reading and writing simple addition and subtraction equations, which we call "les phrases de math." Many students are still constructing their understanding of what addition and subtraction mean. So we acted out addition and subtraction situations and I asked students to use counters to make addition and subtraction sentences independently. Many still need support with this, especially with subtraction. 

We looked at the relationship between addition and subtraction, and tried reversing a simple addition equation to make the corresponding subtraction equation. I think that understanding this relationship is key to addressing the common difficulty students have with subtraction. We read books with simple addition scenarios and came up with equations to represent them. We will need lots of repetition on this material, and it would be great to practice making simple plus and minus equations at home.

With some common language in place, we tackled our first story problem (often called word problems). I showed the kids the steps I would like to see: using math materials to help, we draw the problem, then make an equation to answer it and circle the answer. After all working on a problem, we looked at some of the kids' solutions together and gave feedback on the parts done well and what could be improved the next time.

We ended the week with another art project, this time decorating a frame with coloured tissue. The kids used watered down glue to set the tissue in place. The frames are to go with their weavings, so again we talked about the colours of feelings.