Week of December 4th – 8th

Bonjour folks!

I hope you are all doing great! It’s hard to believe it’s already December!

Here are just a few reminders for this month. Our last day of classes before the Winter break is December 22^nd and we will have an early dismissal at 2:30pm that day. We come back to school January 8^th, 2018. I sent home Hot Dog lunch order forms this week and if you are wanting to order your child a Hot Dog lunch, your order has to be sent in to the school by Thursday, December 7^th. Hot Dog lunch will be December 14^th. I also sent home a note about our first Field Trip of the year to the Science Centre scheduled for December 20th. I would really appreciate it if permission slips can be filled out and returned to the school by Friday, December 8^th. If you are able to come with us that day and would like to volunteer, please let me know 🙂 .

Our Christmas Concert is tomorrow – Thursday, December 7^th. We have been busy practicing our songs for the past couple of weeks. The kids are doing great! I am so impressed with their skills when it comes to reading music and playing their instruments! We have our dress rehearsal tomorrow morning at 9:30am (parents can attend if they would like to) and two other performances throughout the day. Our matinée show is scheduled to take place at 1:30pm and our evening performance is set to take place at 6:30pm. Parents and family members will not be needing tickets this year. We are asking parents to have their kids back at school for 6:15pm for the evening performance.

Our Home Reading Program will start to come home Friday (once we’re finished with our Christmas Concert). That was the orange duo-tang I shared with parents at Conferences. We have done a few journal responses together so the kids should be set! This Home Reading Program is an extra tool to help kids improve their Reading. I want the munchkins doing this as often as they can or would like to do it – without having them feel overwhelmed and without having them feel stressed. The more they read at home, the more they will improve when it comes to Reading. If you guys would like a little more information about this Home Reading Program, please refer to the introduction letter in the orange duo-tang 🙂 . I have also shared some tips with the kids when we encounter new words in French. I have encouraged them to use an on-line dictionary if they can access one (I love www.wordreference.com and www.linguee.com – they are both free and easy to use; you can also try www.collinsdictionary.com ). I have also asked them to make a note of new words in their journal and I can go over these new words with them when I correct their journals. Please encourage them to write the date correctly in French at the beginning of each journal response on the top right-hand corner (le – day of the week – date # – month and year: le mercredi 6 décembre 2017 – no commas). Also, please encourage them to check for capitols at the beginning of their sentences and a period at the end of their sentences.

The following two weeks will be filled with a Winter and a Christmas Unit. I will be integrating language arts, visual arts and numeracy activities in these Contextes units focused on Hiver and Noël. We will also be working on cute little Christmas books about reindeers, Christmas lights and things we can see at the North Pole these next couple of weeks. We started working on our reindeer books yesterday and many of us were able to finish them.

We have postponed Étude de mots (Dictée) this week to let us have more time to practice for our Christmas Concert. We will have one more Dictée before the Winter break. I will send some more information about this next week 🙂 .

I believe that is all for now. I hope you all have a great week! Talk to you soon!

Mme Porras 🙂

Week of November 13th – 17th

Bonjour folks!

Sorry for not adding a blog entry sooner. I hope you are all doing well!

Just a few reminders for this next couple of weeks. There will be frozen yogurt for sale every Wednesday at lunch. Parent-Teacher conferences are scheduled to take place November 24^th and a note will be coming home this week with more information. Our next PD day is scheduled for December 1^st (Students will not have school that day). Our next Dictée will take place next Monday (November 20th) and our new sound will be EUR in French. Our school SAC has scheduled a PJ day for November 30^th and kids are encouraged to participate if they wish and wear their PJ’s that day. Bibliothèque will be this Friday so please send the kids’ library books to school that day so they can either return them or so that they can renew them.

In Contexte, we have been wrapping up Halloween and Remembrance Day mini-units. The kids did an amazing job at the Remembrance Day Assembly and their performance was fantastic! Bravo mes amis! Now, we will be starting to prepare for our Christmas Concert. We will be starting two new Contextes units focusing on Hiver (Winter) and Noël (Christmas) this month that will carry on into the month of December. These new Contextes will contain new vocabulary, writing activities, reading comprehension activities, alphabetical order activities, math activities and many more types of activities! We have also started working on a mini cursive writing unit as well seeing as so many of the kids were showing an interest towards cursive writing. We are starting with ‘’helicopter letters’’ (letters that start at the base line, only go up to the middle line and then come back down). We have worked on letters i, r and s so far. We will be starting with lower case letters and then moving on to capital letters. The kids are having fun with this!

In Mathématiques, we are continuing to work on our Numbers 0-100 unit and have started working on addition and subtraction (0-20) as well. The kids are doing great! Kiddos can skip count by 1’s, 2’s and 10’s with no problem. We are still working on counting by 3’s and 5’s with no mistakes. I am so impressed with their ability to decompose numbers and all the different ways they are able to represent numbers from 0-100. I am also impressed with their addition and subtraction skills! They can use many different strategies to help them add and subtract. Bien fait mes amis!

In Étude de mots, we focused on words with the sound IEN last week and this week we will be focusing on words with the sound EUR. Our words will be: un chou-fleur, peur, un docteur, une fleur, du beurre, l’heure, un tracteur, un ordinateur, un raton-laveur et un voleur. Here is the link on Quizlet for the study set pertaining to these words: https://quizlet.com/107092912/etude-de-mots-le-son-eur-flash-cards/ . New spelling words will be coming home today and our test will be Monday, November 20th.

That’s all for now! Have a great week!

Mme Porras

Week of October 16th – 20th

Bonjour folks!

I hope you are all having a great week.

Our first DVD party yesterday was a huge success! The kids had so much fun and really enjoyed all the treats! Thanks to all the parents who sent a treat for the class to share :). We really appreciated it!

Just a few reminders for this week. Our School Book Fair is open all week. We have Frozen Yogurt for sale tomorrow at lunch. We have our Book and Bagel tomorrow morning as well from 8:00am – 8:45am if you can join us. Our spelling test for le son OIN will be this Friday and there will be no Bibliothèque (Library) this week because of the Book Fair taking place in the Library.

In Contexte, we have finished our Rentrée Scolaire Booklets and we are now working on L’automne and L’halloween as our next contextes :). We are busy reviewing new vocabulary pertaining to Fall and Hallowe’en as well as completing different activities within these new Contextes themes (i.e. organizing words in alphabetical order, writing assignments, understanding French texts, answering comprehension questions, etc.). Munchkins are doing fabulous!

In Mathématiques, we are finishing up Patterns and working on different concepts relating to Numbers 0 – 100. We are reviewing how to properly count in French to 100 and how to represent different numbers from 0 – 100 (i.e. tally marks, groups of tens and ones, etc.) as well as decompose different numbers (0 – 100). We are also learning how to write different numbers (0 – 100) in French. We are also practicing how to skip count by 2’s, 3’s and 5’s. The kids can also identify what number(s) come before and after a certain number ranging from 0 – 100. They are doing great!

In Étude de mots, we wrote our son OI test yesterday and they should be coming home today for you folks to see. We are working on the OIN sound in French this week and our spelling test will be this Friday. Our words this week are the following: loin, besoin, moins, un poing, un point, pointu, soin, un groin, le foin, and le coin. We will continue to review these words in class through different word work activities (i.e. rainbow letters, bananagrams, writing words with clay, playing hangman, using magnetic letters to spell our words, using white boards and partners, etc.). We will also be reviewing our spelling words this week with our Cahier des sons booklets. I am so impressed with all of the kiddos’ hard work! Bien fait mes amis!

I think that’s all for this week! Have a great week!

Mme Porras

Week of September 25th – 29th

Bonjour folks!

Here are some reminders for this week 🙂 . We got our new Étude de mots words yesterday and our test will be this Friday. We have Picture Day Thursday and Book Orders are due Friday if you are wanting to order from Scholastic. We were just informed that Frozen Yogurt Sales will be starting up again tomorrow and I believe it is $3.00 for a frozen yogurt. Our school is also participating in the Terry Fox Walk this year – our walk will take place Monday, October 2^nd so we are asking that kids dress for the weather that day.

In Contexte, we are continuing to work through our La rentrée scolaire booklets and we keep expanding our vocabulary in French. We are starting to work on different activities associated to L’automne (Fall) this week and the kids have been exploring with paints in arts education.

In Mathématiques, we are working on identifying patterns in the calendar, we are practicing skip counting (by 1`s and 2`s so far) as well as representing numbers 1 – 20 in different ways (tally marks, drawings, groups of 10’s and 1’s, etc.). We will continue to explore repetitive patterns this week and hope to introduce the concept of increasing and decreasing patterns within the next couple of weeks. Our reading buddies stopped by today and helped us review different strategies to help us with addition.

In Étude de mots, the munchkins had their first test last week. They all did great! Spelling tests went home yesterday. Once you have seen them, could you please sign them and return them to the school. Last week we focused on the sound IN in French and this week we will be focusing on words that contain the sound ON. Our test will take place Friday. Our spelling words this week are: un bonbon, un crayon, content, un dragon, un jongleur, une maison, les montagnes, un mouton, un poisson et son. If you are looking for the study set on Quizlet to go with these words look for: Étude de mots – le son ON. Here is the link to join my page on Quizlet if you would like 🙂  https://quizlet.com/join/8TRtC5Cyt

I believe that is all I have to share with you at this time. Have a great week!

Mme Porras

Toonies for Terry 2017

Week of September 5th – Back to School!

Bonjour folks!

I hope you are all doing well! I am so excited to be starting a new school year with this great group of kids! Thank you to all the parents that have subscribed to the Blog and to the Remind App. I will typically post on our classroom blog once a week (so they tend to be a bit longer). Each entry will contain information regarding what we are doing in Language Arts (which falls into Contexte), Math (Mathématiques); Spelling (Étude de mots) and anything that is taking place in our school that week.

This week we have been working lots on introducing and reinforcing daily classroom procedures and routines. The kids have done amazingly well with all the information they are being asked to process. I am very pleased with everything they have grasped this week. I should also mention they are doing fantastic at communicating with me and their peers in French! I am really impressed with their current level of French :).

In Contexte, we started working on some Rentrée (Back to School) activities in our booklets. We have reviewed colour association, “Back to School Vocabulary” and we have started to learn what word walls are and how to use them. We have also done some ice breakers and “get to know me” activities with the munchkins so I can get some insight into their interests and their personalities :).

In Mathématiques, we have started doing “Calendrier”. We are just practicing writing out the date properly in French (Aujourd’hui, Hier et Demain) as well as learning about tally marks and reviewing basic number facts (1 – 20). I plan on starting our Régularités (Pattern) Unit next week.

We have not started Étude de mots yet. I hope to start it either next week or the following week. I will keep all of you posted on when we decide to start our weekly Étude de mots (Spelling) tests. We will be starting off with the IN sound in French once we start our Étude de mots activities.

Just a few reminders to share with you. We have our Meet the Teacher Night next week on September 14^th from 5:00pm-6:00pm followed by our Welcome Back BBQ at 6:00pm. Book orders went home this week and if you wish to order any books, I ask that you submit your order back to me by September 29^th. I had a great question about Agendas from a parent earlier this week that helped me realize I never mentioned what I was expecting parents to do with Agendas :). Agendas will go home daily with little notes and reminders. Once you have had a chance to look at your child’s agenda, could you please sign or initial it so I know that you have seen our notes for that day. I am also attaching a copy of our School Electronic Device Policy for you all to have.

That’s all for now. Have a great weekend!

Mme Porras

École Centennial School Electronic Device Policy