Our Halloween party was a lot of fun! A GROS merci to all the volunteers who made this event possible (...and in such festive costumes, no less!). Students rotated through 5 centres: Pin the wart on the witch; Mummy wrap (where they wrapped one another in toilet paper to look like a mummy); Ring toss (onto a pointy witch hat); a relay (where they swept an orange 'pumpkin' around with a witches broom); and a Jack o' lantern craft. We sang songs and shared a special snack. Thank you to everyone who brought in some food to share with the group. I loved seeing everyone dressed up in their costumes. We had 3 Captain America's and 3 from Frozen this year. ;) |
Halloween was a lot of fun in Kindergarten! We added 2 new centers this week for students to choose during Les Centres: Bricolage and Deguisement (dress-up). These were some of our Halloween creations at bricolage. Here are some of the Halloween books we read this week: We began the week with a field trip to the Pumpkin Patch. Students were excited to ride on their very first school bus. We rode on a hay wagon, chose pumpkins, and listened to live music. I will be sharing photos soon using Dropbox. A GROS merci to all the volunteers who made this event possible! In class, we learned several new Halloween-themed songs. Check them out under the "les chansons" tab. A class favourite is L'araignee Gypsie. To accompany our song, students made their own spider puppets. We also illustrated the lyrics in our journals. We made Halloween themed Bingo cards with our Big Buddies this week, and we played Bingo together. This game reinforced all of our new Halloween vocabulary. It was also a great introduction to Bingo. We will be playing lots of Alphabet Bingo in November as we work on building letter name recognition. I hope you had lots of fun trick or treating! A friendly reminder: please do not send candy as a snack. :)
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Colour Week was such a fun way of learning our French colour words! I am beginning to hear the children use French in class: “Can I please have the jaune?” C’est fantastique, les amis! Here are some of the books about colours that we have been reading during circle time. Pat le chat (Pete the cat) was a class favourite! There's a Pete the Cat listening library available in the November Scholastics (4 paperbacks and 4 cd's) so if you don't already have these stories, consider adding them to your library. In our journals, we have been busy exploring our colour words. Each step was described in French, and reinforced with visuals: "J'ecris. Je colorie. Je coupe. Je colle." We are focusing on beginning sounds right now. We put the word in our mouth and stretch it out like bubble gum to listen to all the sounds. This will help us when we begin sounding out words and labelling pictures in our journals soon. For our collaborative journal this month, we wrote about our favourite colour. Very soon, I will turn these into a class book that lives in our library. Every month we will write a journal page on a theme we are studying. Last month's page was our self-portraits. At the end of the year, it makes a wonderful Kindergarten portfolio! We learned 2 new songs this week and read some poems together on colours. Check them out under the “Les Chansons” tab. We read this emergent-reader booklet together about our colour theme. I encourage students to track with their finger as I read, and repeat after me. We also use these booklets to find sight words (e.g. circle every time you see "la"). We finished the week with a big Arc-en-ciel theme celebration! Children made rainbow paper chain necklaces, fruit loop bracelets, and a simple rainbow craft. A GROS merci to Valerie for all her help. Everyone had lots of fun. I will put some pictures up from September/October at the end of the month. Do stop by and admire our bulletin board! :)
Welcome to Division 16! We have been very busy learning our new routines. We read David Shannon's David va a l'ecole and Non, David! (When I got to the page with the picture of David's bare bottom, the students erupted with laughter on the carpet!!). Then we brainstormed class rules together. I love this one: "no throwing oranges at someone's face" (a very good rule indeed!!). We decided on the following rules: I use a soft voice. I listen. I walk. I share. I clean up. Every day I think with my head and my heart. In this activity, students thought it was fun to position David somewhere silly on the school. They told me David was doing handstands on the roof, or sliding down the roof and crash-landing. We also made our David masks and role played different rule-breaking scenarios, shouting "Non David!!" I sometimes am able to curb an impulse on the carpet (like poking our neighbours) with a simple "Ah, non David" and a wink. I want to thank all of you for reviewing your family words at home. We had a great first round of Montre et Raconte sharing our family photographs, and learning about the similarities and differences in our families. We began writing in our journals this week about families. I provided cut & paste and tracing templates to students to help them begin to write sentences. I am also encouraging students to use their French vocabulary to identify who is picking them up at the end of the day (e.g. "Je vois maman.").
Spring has sprung! My students are really into Frozen right now, so we watched the above clip about Olaf imagining what it might be like to be a snowman in summer. We then did this little sequencing activity on a melting snowman, using the sentence structure voici. We read Un jour de printemps! and then students contributed their own page using the sentence structure je vois. We are trying to record at least 2 sounds heard in a word. Come by and check out our bulletin board! This afternoon we made cherry blossoms in art using popcorn and oil pastels. The students love watching the air popper! I love the way our art looks displayed in the classroom - so bright! Happy Weekend!
Oh no! A mischievous leprechaun snuck into our class and made a mess. He knocked over chairs, made a mess of our toys, reordered the numbers on our hundred chart, and he even hung up our poor green frog upside down! The children had a blast fixing that silly leprechaun's pranks. The leprechaun left us a note which we read as our morning message. Together students were able to read 25 words! He sent us on a treasure hunt all over the school grounds. We solved riddles to lead us to his pot of gold. We finally found the pot of gold in Madame Natalie's office! In it were delicious chocolate gold coins to share. We celebrated St. Patrick's Day with a math extension. We explored les amis de 10 by cutting out 10 coins and gluing them into 2 groups (those in the pot and those on the ground). We learned what and what makes 10. In Fine Arts, we made our very own puppet leprechauns, but the big hit of the day had to be the leprechaun traps we made with our Big Buddies! Students devised clever schemes to trick a leprechaun into a box. Some made ladders out of popsicle sticks and lured the leprechaun with shiny gold. Others made traps in the shape of a leprechaun hat. But, uh-oh, those trap doors! I absolutely love these projects. They are such a treat for the imagination. Thank you for sending in your boxes and cardboard rolls! I hope you have a wonderful Spring Break! Students were sent home with their Jolly Phonique workbooks so if you are in the mood for a little français over the break, ask your child to teach you some of the sounds. I will see you all on March 31! :)
It was lovely seeing the whole school dressed in pink. It provoked some really great circle time discussions. One of the things we talked about was helpful words and hurtful words. Students brainstormed helpful words, and we talked about how these words make us feel. Someone related this back to our life size Grinch from December, and how our helpful words and actions made his heart grow. We read a fantastic story by Elizabeth Verdick called "Les mots peuvent blesser." I demonstrated for the children how hurtful words hurt us by crumpling up a paper heart. The children got the connection that our own hearts feel crumpled sometimes when someone says hurtful words. We talked about all the ways we could help heal the heart by using helpful words and saying sorry. As we named helpful words, I smoothed the heart back out. Someone pointed out how it still had wrinkles though, and we agreed that sometimes hurtful words can leave a wrinkle in our hearts. That's why it's important to think with our heads and our hearts before we say hurtful words. In the afternoon, children were asked to draw a line down the middle of the page. On one side, they drew a picture with pencil and on the other side, they tried to draw the same picture using crayons. We talked about what a difference the colour made to the picture. Children shared their favourite colours, and we agreed that it was okay for boys to like pink. Colours are for everyone, just like toys are for everyone. I read the children a poem called "The Crayon Box That Talked" about how all the crayons learn to appreciate one another because they are each special and add something unique to the picture. It says: "We are a box of crayons each one of us unique. But when we get together the picture is more complete." As an art extension, students drew self-portraits on crayons. I love how colourful and unique their crayon portraits are! Please come by and check out our bulletin board at drop off or pick up. We finished the day by singing "Je suis unique" and sharing all the wonderful ways in which we are unique! We are officially 100 days smarter! In the morning, we counted to 100 using a 100 board. We then explored several learning centers: we measured the length of our collections, we weighed our collections, we estimated what 100 looks like by choosing between 3 jars of pasta and we made pictures out of our collection. After recess, we made 100 day necklaces using 100 fruit loops. We used a sorting mat to help us count. Students were encouraged to make groups of 10 with their fruit loops. I overheard lots of French colour words and numbers. After lunch, we made portraits of how we will look when we are 100 years old. Students were encouraged to think about details such as wrinkles, grey hair, glasses, beards... In gym, we did 100 actions. Students learned silly dance moves like "stir the pot", "disco", "the swim", "raise the roof"...then we put it all together to music. Our class is really interested in movement and dance.
In the afternoon, we rotated through 3 activities: we painted 100 gumballs using q-tips (10 gumballs in each of 10 different colours), we made 100 hats (by writing numbers 1-10 on 10 different coloured strips), and we made a 100 day trail mix (adding 10 each of 10 ingredients to our goody bag). We worked on the concept that 100 is 10 groups of 10. A GROS merci to all the mamans who helped run our learning centers and to all the families who supplied a goody for our 100 day trail mix. The students had a blast! For Valentine's Day, we have been busy learning about friendship. Our collaborative class book this month was "C'est quoi un ami?" Students journaled about being a good friend. We practiced hearing and recording sounds in words. During centers, we have been practicing writing our friends names. I added a cardboard mailbox to our bricolage center and students started addressing cards to one another and mailing them. It was a big hit! On Valentine's Day, the students came to school so excited to hand out their cards. We decorated paper bags with stickers, jewels, and pom poms to use as mailboxes and I helped the students hand out their Valentines. I appreciate the time you took to help your child write their name and the name of their friends. What fun practice! In the afternoon, we made a cute Valentine puppet. Students practiced their cutting and folding in this simple craft. We also sang our new songs we learned for Valentine's Day. Check them out under the "les chansons" tab. This is a booklet we made with the lyrics to "J'aime papa, J'aime paman". I hope you had a happy Valentine's Day! We have been learning our winter sports, winter clothing, and winter animals. This is a new song we learned on winter sports. I like how it teaches complex French sounds - "ette", "in", "eau". To compliment our study of winter clothing, I made a washing machine out of a cardboard box, which we added to to our kitchen center. During circle time, students make the sounds of a washing machine, and we take turns pulling an item of clothing out of the machine and naming it. In this vocabulary booklet, we practiced lining up our letters appropriately following the model. We talk about lower-case letters as being either giraffes (tall), ladybugs,or monkeys (with tails). It helps the children visualize how best to line up the lower-case letters. In this easy reader, I had the children circle each time they read the word "je". This is great for building sight-word recognition - sometimes we work with j'ai, j'aime, un, une, les, maman, papa... any high-frequency word. It's great fun to do with French books your child takes out from the library. Choose one word to focus on at a time and have your child find it on each page. We had fun celebrating Chinese New Year in the classroom. It was such a natural extension of the work we had been doing on polar animals, as well. The children cut and pasted their own Bingo cards and we played Bingo Thursday afternoon. We did a great fine motor activity, where the children practiced writing their numbers - and also wrote them in Chinese. We also made dragon puppets, and went on a dragon dance through the school. Our Big Buddy class came out to watch as we danced through the halls. Many children told me that was their favourite part of the day. Happy New Year! During December.... We decorated our classroom for Noel. We had fun making pattern chains again, we decorated our sapin together, and we made 3-D snowflakes with our Big Buddies. We also made several crafts: a bonhomme de neige, Père Noel, and a sapin. We celebrated Grinch Day. I read Comment le Grinch a volé Noel and I introduced our life-size Grinch. We brainstormed all the wonderful things we could do to help the Grinch's heart grow. Each sticker represents something positive someone did. The students loved being able to point out which stickers they had contributed. His heart grew 3 sizes! Bravo les amis! We wrote letters to Pere Noel, and he wrote us back! It was very exciting receiving mail from the North Pole. For our December collaborative class book, we each wrote a page about playing in the snow. They are hanging on our bulletin board outside the class. Look at the progress everyone has made at printing their name - and also printing the name of their friend! The primary students gathered in the gym for a cozy winter singalong. Our class favourite is Vive le vent. I hope you were able to come to our Winter Festival. The students looked too cute dressed up as les rennes, and they sang "Père Noel dit Ho, Ho, Ho!" Our classroom even turned into Santa's Workshop, with the elves hard at work making les cartes de Noel and les cadeaux. I hope you enjoyed them! We finished off the month with a classroom party, where we rotated through different activity centers. Our Big Buddy class helped out by running each center. Merci! I hope you enjoyed your Winter Break, and I'm looking forward to a fun week back! |
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January 2016
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