December 12-16, 2016

Writer's workshop is going well, partly thanks to our new volunteer, Mathilde, who joins us to support the kids in their writing. The students work with focus and really look forward to sharing their writing with the class during author's chair. The expectation now is to write at least 3 sentences for any one piece of writing, and I have new paper in the writing center with more lines, spaced more closely together. Students can still select the paper with wide lines if that works best for them.

In math we continued to work on more complex equations to develop the concept of equality. We practiced counting by 5's and 10's and then began to work with money. First the kids got familiar with the different coins and their French names by drawing the image on each type of coin and writing the value. We talked about the difference between a cent and a dollar. We also marked our 70th day of school with lots of grouping and counting!

We began working on individual maps of an imaginary neighbourhood, as well as a large map of downtown Toronto which shows the approximate location of the students' homes. Students made a rough draft of their map and chose 6 city places to include on their map and in their legend. Then they made their good copy using cut-out construction paper for the map elements. The project took most kids 2 weeks to complete.

The large map was painted in groups of 4-5 students, following lines I had traced by projecting a googlemap onto a bed sheet!

The visiting artists came and presented another half day workshop on self-portraits. They had taken a photo of each student on their previous visit, and the students used these photos to trace a drawing of themselves onto acetate.

Then they showed the work of Paul Klee, and we talked again about how different colours make us feel. The kids then made collage pieces to represent their feelings. 

These works will be combined together in layers to produce the finished self-portraits.

December 5 - 9, 2016

We learned two new comptines (rhymes) last week and this week, "La voisine dit" and "La clé du royaume." We had 2 Roots of Empathy sessions, and when baby Tagore came to visit us, we did some of our French comptines for him, which he seemed to like.

Beth Vanderweerd, the Roots of Empathy facilitator, also made a book of the kids' drawings of the reasons that a baby might cry. The students really enjoyed her reading of it. They made drawings this week of reasons they themselves might cry or be sad.

The kids wrote more from their puppet show drawings and on many other topics. They started using our classroom dictionaries as a resource for writing, for ideas as well as for words. Some of them started using new writing paper with more lines that are smaller. 

We finally finished our alphabet review! We also had our second dictée. We discussed the sound "k" and I asked the students for the 3 letters that make that sound (c, k, and q). I asked them to vote on which letter they thought was usually in a word if they heard the "k" sound (some students are in the habit of using "k" all the time...). Most thought it was "c," but we did a word sort of familiar words with that sound to find out. The proof lined up with our prediction! We also began to discuss hard and soft c and g. 

We reviewed the vocabulary of city places introduced last week. Each student chose one place (restaurant, park, museum...) to create on a small paper. The kids labelled their city places and we made a city street with all the places lined up along it.

We looked at some maps made by a DaVinci class, in preparation for our mapping project next week. We identified the legends on the maps, and the kids saw how the symbols in the legend were like a code for understanding what was on the map. 

We did our numeracy centres again. And we waded into more complicated "math sentences" (equations) which lend a more complex understanding to the "equal" symbol (=). I wrote the equation 2 + 2 = 1 + 3 and asked if it made any sense. After some discussion, most students agreed that it did. Then I showed the class how to use two-coloured counters to create this kind of equation, using a template that acts as a scaffold. They start by placing the same number of counters in each circle. Then they need to flip them until the number of yellow and red is different on the 2 sides. Then they count the yellow and red counters in each circle and write the equation that corresponds. We did this together in a circle, and then those who could do it independently went to the tables to make more equations while I worked with some less sure kids on the carpet.

We also used the day's snack to tell a story about a brother and sister whose mother needed to give them the same number of vegetables (to be fair) but one liked tomatoes more and one liked pea pods more. We wrote a math equation from our story, 4 + 1 = 3 + 2.

We had our first session with our visiting artists - it was great!!! Leslie and Jade showed the students various self-portraits by Vincent Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo as an introduction to self-portraits. 

Then the artists talked about different line qualities and how they might express different feelings. The kids practised drawing different kinds of lines and then were given heavy paper and pastels. With these materials they drew lines to express how they were feeling right now.

Then Leslie talked about warm and cool colours, and demonstrated how to wet the paper and then paint tempera colours onto it such that the wax pastel resists the paint. The students chose a palette of either warm or cool colours to paint over their pastel drawings.

They began by painting a layer of water onto their drawing.

And then they added the colour!

Next week Leslie and Jade will return and guide the kids in adding layers onto these abstract backgrounds to produce their first self-portraits!

November 28 - December 1, 2016

Along with our usual writer's workshop and Daily 5 reading activities, we had our first dictée this week. The kids came up with sentences using the dictée words (to review their meaning), and we talked about things to remember in terms of their spelling. The kids practised writing out the words a few times on the carpet. We did a practice dictée on the second last day of the week, and the dictée on the last day. This will be our routine going forward, but I will be sending fewer words home. We started off we a larger number of fairly simple words.

We did math centres for the first time. These are numeracy activities that the students do in groups of 3-4 for about 10 minutes each. The groups rotate through the activities so that they hit every centre. They did the number decomposing activity that was introduced last week, where they shake a certain number of counters to find different pairs of numbers that add together to give that number:

They played the Shoe Game that we made last week. It requires them to roll a die and then double the number, and move their piece that many spots forward. This helps them learn their double facts.

The played "Pêcher pour 10" (Fishing for tens), which is the same as Go Fish but the object is to collect pairs that equal 10 instead of pairs of the same card. 

And lastly, they got to match numbers onto a giant 100 chart that I made when I was in teacher's college. This centre is a lot of fun for the kids!

We also read a book with a story that was all about decomposing the number 8. It tells the story of 8 kids having a sleepover party in a bunk bed, and playing a trick on the elderly aunt by changing their arrangement in the 2 beds (7 and 1, 6 and 2, 5 and 3, 4 and 4). We followed up the story by using rekenreks to represent the kids and the bunk bed. The kids played a game in partners where the first person rolls a die to set up their bunk bed with a certain number of kids in the top and bottom beds. Then the second person picks up a card that tells them how many kids go up or down on the bed. The kids represented these 2 situations using a rekenrek, and then drew the rekenrek rows and wrote math sentences to express the split of numbers between the top and bottom bunks. 

Our field trip was terrific! The Theatre Direct performance of the Old Man and the River was full of character, humour and surprises. They did an excellent job of introducing and debriefing the show in French, and the show itself took place with only music and sound effects. Sadly I couldn't take pictures of the show, but I took plenty of us travelling to and from the theatre and playing outside in a great playscape between lunch and the show!

When we got back to school that day, the kids drew their favourite scene from the puppet show and they wrote about it later.