The most exciting event of the last couple of weeks was our trip to the High Park Nature Centre. This was the culminating event of our unit on Living Beings. We rode there on the streetcar and then walked through High Park for about 15 minutes before finally arriving.

The kids learned about what signs to look for that animals leave behind: tracks, scat, nests, and body parts (feathers, antlers...). They also got to meet the Bearded Dragon who lives at the Centre.

Then the kids learned more about animal signs at hands-on centres. They examined animal pelts, feathers, nests, etc. and tried to match them with the correct animal.

They made bird-feeders using pine cones, suet and seeds.

They made animal tracks in dough and then tried guessing which animal the tracks belonged to.

And, hilariously, they did the same guessing game with scat! They made animal scat out of clay and guessed which animal would have produced it. The kids loved that!

Then we went outside and played a game about animal signs. All the kids got cards and then had to find those with matching cards to theirs (the same print or animal).

We tried feeding the birds from our hands, without success (the kids were amazingly quiet for this though!).

Then we went searching for animal signs, and the kids found so many! After hiking some more we stopped in the woods and listened for birds. Then the kids hung up the bird feeders they had made. 

Then we thanked our hosts and headed back to Lord Lansdowne.

The kids performed their animal puppet shows the following week. They did a great job of learning to read their scripts and delivering their lines while animating their puppets - not easy to coordinate!

The sight words for these previous weeks have been with the sounds "oi" and "ui". We wrote a comptine (nursery rhyme) together, exploring rhyming words. We also identified 4 technical goals in writing for the end of grade 1: writing in lower case, leaving spaces between words, writing in complete sentences with punctuation, and correctly spelling more and more sight words. I asked the kids to each pick a strategy that made sense for them to focus on, and they wrote it on a brightly coloured sticky note and put it in their writing book as a reminder. We also looked at how to read longer words, how to break them into chunks according to the vowels and then read each chunk (syllable) at a time. The song we've been singing is about the days of the week, find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpwf5N0rfVE

In math we continued to work on time-telling and elapsed time. We also did several story problems, focusing on showing HOW we got our answer. The kids are learning the difference between a math drawing (which shows ideas and quantities) and a regular drawing.

Despite the lack of snow, we made snowflakes. It was also a nice chance to review the names of some geometrical shapes, since we'll soon be delving into geometry. That's all for now!

We have added a new chant to our morning routine, which we say three times while slapping our legs in time. Roughly translated it goes like this: I can speak French, I want to speak French, I will speak French! Yes, I'm brainwashing your children, but for a good cause. I'm insisting now that they speak to me in French, and we have a spot on the board where I add the names of kids who I hear speaking French informally (beyond speaking on the carpet or talking to me). The names of these kids are stacked on top of each other, and our goal is to get a taller stack each week.

Last week we talked about the sound "ou" and our sight words all had this digraph. The kids practiced writing some common sight words onto whiteboards in a circle on the carpet. This way everyone got immediate feedback about any incorrect spelling.

Together we wrote and illustrated the steps involved in getting ready to go outside. This was procedural writing in the form of a cartoon. Each child then wrote and drew themselves getting ready. With snowpants and boots and hats and mittens, it has been a big challenge for us all to learn the steps involved and carry them out several times each day. The class actually improved a lot after writing it all out!

Another writing project was the translation of the information from home about each student's animal. I asked the kids to do their best to translate the words, and then I finished the translation for them. Then I plugged those words into a script template in which two animals meet, and tell each other about themselves (what they like to eat, where they live, something interesting about themselves...). This was the script that went home last weekend, with the audio recording, for kids to practice.

The song we are singing these days names the months of the year. Find it here for practice at home :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_u2SigckNQ. We have also been singing "Alouette, gentil Alouette" to review body part names. And we continue to recite our nursery rhymes.

We celebrated the 80th day of school in our usual fashion, with lots of counting and grouping of concrete objects. We continued to work on telling time. I made a clock face on the carpet, and asked students to place the numbers for the hours, starting with 3, 6, 9 and 12 and then filling in the others.

Then we added the minutes, numbers which don't appear on most clocks but which the kids need to learn. We began by adding 30, then talked about where 5 would go. There was a lot of puzzling as we continued to add minutes beside hours on the clock face. Finally we added the big hand and the little hand. Then we read different times on the clock and then moved the hands to show different times on the clock. We worked with this clock another day to think about elapsed time, answering questions like: if I start watching TV at 7 pm and I watch for 1 hour, what time do I finish? We also practiced counting by 5 again, since the minutes on the clock make jumps of 5.

Report cards will go home on Monday February 8th. If you would like to have a parent/teacher conference, please email me so we can make arrangements. Thanks!

We had a fun and productive first week back at school. The first day back the kids told each other (in pairs) about their holidays, first in English and then in French. Then they wrote about their holidays and illustrated their writing. The class also wrote a true story together offered by one of the students. In our free writing time most students continued to write fictional stories, and some took up the idea of writing stories from their lives. We reviewed all the gestures for spoken sounds that we learned before the holidays. We also reviewed all the sight words covered so far by playing "sight word bingo." We went back to chanting nursery rhymes that we were learning in the fall and we added a couple of new ones.

I introduced a new puppet character to accompany our read-alouds: Imogène Qui Imagine (Imogene who imagines). This sprightly character loves to close her eyes and make mental images of the stories she is reading. We read a book about the trouble with excluding others. In the book, a birthday invitation list on sparkly, pink paper is brandished repeatedly. Imogene closed her eyes and imagined out loud that sparkly, pink list and, adorably, several of the kids called out (with eyes shut tight) "I see it! I can see it too!" This is a reading strategy that will serve them well as the habit becomes engrained.

In math we are learning about measuring time. The kids measured the passage of time with some activities in pairs. One partner would sing the alphabet song while the other did an activity (5 jumping jacks, or a pirouette...). They recorded which letter of the alphabet they got to at the end of each activity. From this, they could compare which activities took more time and which took less time. The discussion of this gave everyone practice with the vocabulary for the passage of time. Then we talked about what time of day we do different things (When does school start? When do we have lunch?...) Students surveyed their classmates to find out when they woke up and when they went to bed. We made a bar graph to show how many students go to bed at which bedtimes. We learned more time vocabulary (watch, clock, big hand, little hand, second hand, minutes, hours, what time is it?) through some read-alouds on the subject. Then the students practised in pairs telling time to the hour and half hour with little clocks with moveable hands.

We resumed our study of living beings. The students looked through a pile of library books on different animals, and each student chose an animal to focus on. I told them to chose an animal of interest to them, because they would be researching that animal, making a puppet of it, and performing a puppet show with it. The kids drew their animal of choice a couple of times, and then cut out the drawing and traced the outline onto felt twice. They added details to the front piece, and both pieces were glued together with stuffing between and glued to a stick. Sadly, I was too busy with the glue gun to get any pictures of the kids making their puppets, but I did catch some of them playing with their puppets during "heure de jeux" at the end of the day on Friday!

I also put up the fantastic labeled body paintings that the kids did before the holidays - they liven up the classroom and the halls!

The beginning of the last week of school before the Winter Holidays was dominated by preparations for our Holiday Concert performances. We rehearsed many times, both the song "Tout ce dont j'ai besoin" and the dance piece to "Tout va être OK". I was really proud of the kids, they put on a wonderful show.

In math, we did a story problem that could be expressed as an equality equation. We also made ridiculously long "math sentences" (aka equations), repeating the "=" over and over again. I showed an example on the board with 6 that went something like this: 2+4 = 3+3 = 6 = 1+5 = 0+6 = 7-1 = 6. At first many of the students thought I was making a joke and that this wasn't a "real" math sentence. But when I challenged them to tell me if what I had written was true, they agreed that yes, the statement was true. And I explained that, in math, if it's true then it's real math. We read the equation all together, both backwards and forwards. Then I asked the kids to each write their own long math sentence. The kids each chose a number to work with, a number they were comfortable with. Once done, they wrote good copies of their equations on long strips of paper. We glued the ends together, because the sentences could be read around the loop over and over again. Then the kids got into partners and practiced reading (or singing!) their math sentences to each other. When ready, they made videos of each other reading their math sentences, using iPads. In the New Year, we will watch some of these videos to review the concept.

Our sight words had the sound "o" in them, made with au/eau. We got in a bit of Writer's Workshop and Daily 5. The other big activity after the Holiday Concert was an art project to consolidate the body part names that we have been reviewing. We started by singing "Alouette, Gentil Alouette" to go over the body part names. Then, in partners, the kids traced each other's outlines onto large paper. Each student painted their body with tempera paint - I invited them to paint however they wished, no need to be representational. They wrote labels of body parts and after cutting out their paper bodies they glued on the labels. 

 We had a lot of fun with this project, and the final art works will go up in the hall for the New Year!

Lastly, thanks so much to all of you for your generous gifts, and here's wishing you a relaxing and joyful holiday!

Sorry it's been so long since my last instalment, it's been a busy time with Progress Reports to prepare and the holidays approaching. I'll recap our activities over the last 2 weeks.

We continue to write and read aloud our stories in Writer's Workshop. After talking about setting and actions, we moved on to talk about characters in our stories. We brainstormed a new list of possibilities for characters. We did an art activity, drawing part of a character and then passing along the paper for the next person to add onto ("Exquisite Corpse"). Afterwards, each student received the character whose head they had drawn, with body parts drawn by different people. I put the students into pairs and asked them to tell their partner (in French) about their character. Students were then invited to write their next story about that character.

This past week we have been talking about how a good story has a problem and a solution. When we tell a story around the circle with the talking piece, we try to introduce a problem and then create a solution. 

In Daily 5 we are now doing Read to Self, Partner Reading, Listening to Reading (on headphones along with the book) and Word Work. The kids have been using iPads for their Word Work, using an app called French Words for Kids. This is an excellent app for teaching phonics, reading, spelling and vocabulary, check this link for a review: http://frenchappsforkids.blogspot.ca/2013/02/french-words-for-kids-montessori.html.

I talked to the class about how to hold a pencil and why it matters. After assessing how each student holds their pencil, I handed out "pencil grips" to some of them. The most common problem is the "thumb wrap", so those kids are training their thumbs to be in contact with the pencil with the help of a pencil grip. 

Our weekly sight words were with the sound on/om and then in/im/ain. We practiced the sight words by saying them with the phonic gestures we have been learning, by writing them and by making sentences with them. We did drills with hard and soft "c" and "g" as well. 

In math we have been working with equations using "greater than" (>) and "less than" (<). We looked at a balance scale with more cubes on one side to illustrate the idea. Later we put 2 colours of cubes on each side, to illustrate equations like 4+2 > 3+1. The same balance scale analogy was used as we moved into equations of equality. In grade 1 students often think that "=" means "the answer is...", so we did activities to get across how the symbol "=" means "is the same as" and that a math equation or math sentence can be read forwards and backwards and tells about relationships between numbers. To show an equality equation we put 3 red cubes and 2 black cubes on one side of the balance scale, and 1 red cube and 4 black cubes on the other side. The scale was balanced with the same weight on either side and we represented this as 3+2 = 1+4. We followed this up with equality equations with an unknown number that the kids had to deduce. We also took a break from this rather heavy math to play Dreidel for Chanukah, and got more familiar with the concept of "half" while we were at it.

In science we have started a unit on "Living Things" which focuses on the needs and characteristics of plants and animals, and environmental stewardship. We began by talking about what we already know about. We made 5 posters, with a section contributed by each table, that use drawings and words to tell what we know about the needs of plants, the characteristics of plants, the needs of animals, the characteristics of animals, and how to protect the environment. We went over all that we know already, and then began developing questions for what we'd like to find out more about. 

We have a collection of simple books about plants and animals, so our next activity had each student choose a book, read it over, and then draw and write about what they found most interesting in the book. Each student presented their drawing and writing to the class. 

In order to talk about animal characteristics, we need to have the vocabulary for body parts. So we reviewed those words by making a class book. For each body part, 2 kids worked together to make a collage of magazine pictures representing it. The pages were bound together into a book. 

We've also been working hard to prepare a dance number for the Holiday Concert next week. The kids did free dance movements to the tune "Tout va être OK" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaTI6VP5QQg). Then we analyzed the song to identify slow parts, building parts, and high energy parts. We decided that the slow parts would be floor movements, the building parts would be walking movements, and the high energy parts would be stationary jumping movements. Then I split the class into 3 groups, and each group came up with movements for one of those moods. I made a video as each student presented their idea for a dance move, and then I put their dance movements together into a dance piece which we have been practicing. I can't wait to see them perform it in front of an audience!

Lastly, we made gingerbread cookies for Christmas. Thanks to the moms who came and made it all possible! 

Cookies will be coming home on Monday!