I am very hopeful that spring is in the air! We are continuing to work on our play and will soon be going "on tour" in the school and sending out invitations once the sets are designed and the (fairly simple!) costumes prepared!
If you wish to help or review with your children at home, have them retell the story to you or I can send home the puppets each student has and they can present the piece for you as a puppet show. I am going to give students a chance to do a video rehearsal so they can start thinking about staging and hear how they sound as a group (this will be for viewing within the classroom only).
We continue to build on vocabulary from Les trois petits cochons and are also working on recognizing sound blends in French to build reading decoding skills (in this case, sounding out words). So far we have focused on the -eau/-au and -ille/-il blends. This can be a good reading challenge to try with the French books your child is bringing home, see if they can find words with those endings in the book. I will send home a list of blends in the communication books as we continue.
Here are some words we found at school:
-ille/-il
gentille/gentil
fille
quille
-eau/-au
bandeau
peau
chaud
oiseau
haut
Finally, a big thanks to all the parents who sent me back the forms telling me a little more about yourself and your child. I see that reading skills are an area of concern or interest for many of you. I have been reviewing choosing "just right" books at school and providing both individual reading time, time to read with a partner, reading aloud, and time to read with me in small groups (all in French) to encourage reading interest and enjoyment and have brought in some of my favourite picture books to share with the class.
If you have high speed internat access at home, I encourage you to re-visit RAZ Kids. It is a fun way to access levelled books (in English only at this point) online. Don't forget about the links available on the www.ugdsb.on.ca website either! From there you can go to UG2GO and find a number of resources in both English and French. And, of course, sometimes the "old fashioned" ways are the best, so the class has commenced the "Je lis" take home reading program wherein each student can take home 2 books (one English, one French) each night and then bring them back to exchange for more books. I have been asking students to give a little feedback about whether they liked the books they chose and also to reflect on whether it was too easy, too hard, or just right. Next I will be asking for students to present a book they especially loved to the class and tell about it.
In the world of reading assessment, I will be checking in with students individually to see how their reading comprehension is progressing and will have feedback available soon.
In math we are looking at the components that make up numbers (ones, tens, hundreds) to help build addition and subtraction skills, naming even and odd numbers, graphing the weather data we have collected (hoping for more sunny days and less snowy ones in April!) and writing equations. Coming up soon are units on money and measurement, both fun hands-on topics!
As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please don't hesitate to be in touch through email or by phone at the school.
Merci!
Mme Robi.
