Our First Week

Friendship and Community Building

The class and I have been busy getting to know each other and learning the routines in class. As I meet the students at the door, I ask them how they are feeling today with the aid of a poster on the door. They are pointing to the poster and also repeating the French vocabulary. Some are even using full sentences. 

We are also building French vocabulary for body parts as we sing the song "Un petit pouce qui marche".  In gym this week, we were playing games that involved colours and following directions that include a colour word and playing a tag based colour game.
 
We have been enjoying many read aloud books about school and friendship. On Friday we read the story Stick and Stone. This is a wonderful book that shares the story of an unlikely friendship between a stick and a stone. After we read the story the students were asked to work in groups to create an area where a stick and a stone could play together. Working together, sharing materials, sharing ideas and deciding on how to build together is really tough work. They all did really well for the first week of school. 

In the picture below you can see the area created by 2 of our classmates. The blue straw is the stick and there is a stone also playing on the structure. 


Number Sense

We are starting our unit on number sense. We will work on number sense almost exclusively until February. Number sense is important because it encourages students to think flexibly and promotes confidence with what a number is, what it represents, and how it relates to other numbers. Students who lack a strong number sense have trouble developing and understanding all mathematical processes including addition and subtraction. 

In class this week, we have been building our French vocabulary for numbers in French. We are also working on the concept that "5", the numeral, represents an amount of things no matter what name we call it (such as five, cinq, funf etc.) We are also working on the idea that counting represents a number of items and is not just something we recite in sequence, like a nursery rhyme. 

Below are attached letters to parents from one of the math resources that I use. They outline some of the concepts we will be working on. 


What you can do at home:

  1. Make sure that your child has more than enough rest. These first few weeks of school are hard on everyone, especially our young ones. There is a lot of structure, noise and people around them all day not to mention new learning opportunities that tire their brain. 
  2. Ask about the play structure your child helped to create. 
  3. Ask if they remember the song "Un petit pouce qui marche".
  4. Have your child count objects (up to 15 things in grade 1 and up to 30 in grade 2). Once they have counted them one way see if they can put them in groups of 2 or 5 to count them. 

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