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!