Just a quick reminder...
It would be much appreciated if you could please initial your child's agenda each night, even if nothing is written there. It is helpful for me to know that you are staying current with it so I can send a note in the agenda, if I need to communicate with you for any reason. Thank you!
Now, a few updates about what we have been up to in Portable 7!
Last Friday, we were invited on to Madame Natalie's class to watch "La Mystérieuse Mademoiselle C" with her students, so this week we used that book as our read aloud. The vocabulary is a bit complex in some parts for many of the grade 3s, but they seem to be interested and getting the gist of the book because they were able to see the "big picture" when we watched the film. The rich vocabulary of the book is helpful for the grade 3s to hear aloud, and we have discussed many new words together.
Pascale (a resource teacher at our school) has been coming in for 30 minutes each morning during our literacy block and she has been helping me introduce the Daily Five literacy program. In French, this is "Les 5 au Quotidien", and the goal of it is for the grade 3s to eventually be able to work independently on 5 different literacy elements throughout the week (Reading to Self, Reading to Another Student, Word Study, Writing Activity, Listening to a Text), which gives me a chance to do guided reading with smaller groups of students based on reading levels. This approach to literacy is new to me, but many teachers at Woodroffe are using it in their classrooms with great success.
In math, we have been continuing practicing skip counting (backwards and forwards) by 2s, 5s, and 10s, using hundreds charts ("grilles de 100") as well as number lines ("droites numériques"). Some students are quickly grasping these concepts while others are finding them more challenging. All students would benefit from extra practice of this at home, especially when it comes to finding the patterns ("Trouve la suite"), i.e. noticing that when we count by 5s starting at 4, we count 4, 9, 14, 19, 24, 29..., and there is a pattern in the "units digit" of 4, 9, 4, 9, 4, 9...
The students also worked at creating self-portrait crafts, using different colours of construction paper for different parts of their faces, and yarn for their hair, and we reviewed french vocabulary for parts of the face. Everyone seemed to enjoy working on this activity, and they are now displayed on our wall if you are ever interested in checking them out! I will leave them up for Meet the Teacher night, on September 24th. More details to come about that night.
Thank you to all who have sent in newspaper, and to those parent volunteers who came in on Thursday to help with our project! On Thursday afternoon, we spent an hour folding newspaper into origami compost bin liners, and it was a big success. The grade 3s loved this activity, and we will be doing it again at some point soon, so please continue to send in newspaper if you have any lying around. After folding and refolding different newspapers, we discovered that the Ottawa Citizen seems to work best! For those who missed the note that was sent home, we are creating these compost bin liners to sell in packets, as part of a fundaiser for a clean water project in India (through the organization "Sopar").
I hope you are all having another wonderful weekend!
No comments:
Post a Comment