Monday, November 24, 2014

November is almost over!

I cant believe that this is our last week of November. This school year seems to be flying bye for me! Next week we will start our countdown for Christmas. With a new month comes another new theme: "C'est bientot Noel". Students will be learning  new Christmas vocabulary and opposites (grand-petit). We will also learn how to identify the sounds of the different accents (symbols over letter to change the sound) they will learn how to correctly pronounce the sounds. We are starting to count by 5 and 10 to help us when it comes time to count all our change.

We have started to collect the change for the Turkey drive. The students are supper excited and love adding to the bucket of change. Keep it coming! The Christmas concert is in two week (Dec 9th) I am looking for volunteers to sell candy canes before and after the concert. Ideally I would like to have 6 and 6. I am going to divide the tables into division 1 (K-3) and division 2 (4-6). That there is less people surrounding the tables all at one time. Those who come to sell early to volunteer can go hold their seats. Please email me if you are interested.

We are singing "Douce nuit" and "We need a little Christmas". The students need a little extra practice, so if you have time please practice with them at home, especially the French song. Here is the links to  We need a little Christmas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6OJYTv4ipM. We only sing the part and stop after the first chorus. I will add Douce nuit to the side bare under another voki, seeing that I cannot find the version we sing online.

Next Monday could you all send in the Pink book copy A back with the reading package. We are done of those stories and are now moving onto copy B. I also sent home today your child's portfolio, take a look at it, there is a page for you to fill out. They are due back on Monday Dec 1. If your child came home with it in a green clothe bag, please send that back. I am hoping to keep those until the end of the year to send all their school supplies home in.

Scholastics are Due Dec 5. I will be placing the order then so that the books arrive before Christmas. Thursday is Spirit day, so your child may wear a jersey to show their school spirit. We have parent teacher interviews Thursday evening and all day Friday. Do not forget to sign up for a time. You can find a link on the school website. Library is on Wednesday. Please do not forget to send back your child's report card envelop. We use them for all three reporting periods.
That's all I got this week, keeping it short!
Have a great week and hope to see all of you Thursday or Friday.
Laurie Anne

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Short week

Hi everyone,
I hope you all had a great extended week end with your family and that the weather did not stop some of you from getting out.
Seeing that this is a short week I do not have all that much to share. We have picked our song for the Christmas concert. We will be singing two, one in French (Douce Nuit) ,one in English (We need a little Christmas).  I will send home the lyrics and you can start practicing. I wil try to post the songs somewhere on here. The Christmas concert is on December 9 at St. Mikes church, I am not sure of the time, once I find out more I shall pass it along.
 Wednesday there is a School council meeting at 6h30 if any of you are interested in attending.  Picture retakes will be on Friday morning for those who are wanting their children to have them. We are in charge of morning prayer this week. So we have some brave students who have practiced all last week to get ready. All students will be given the chance to say a prayer throughout the year, if they want that is. Report cards will be sent home November 21 and parent teachers will be held on November 28th. I will be sending home sometime soon, your child's portfolio's. It is a collection of some of their work or quizzes they have done so far this year. Monday November the 17th our class has Rocks and rings in the gym, so that will be exciting.
I hope they students are sharing what they have had the chance to eat in class everyday with you. Again I thank you for helping make this happen.

I am starting to think about my Christmas projects that I do with the class. Every year my class raises money to purchase Turkeys for those who might not otherwise get one.  I have been doing this for about 5 years now and every year we seem to surpass the last with more turkeys. Last year we sold candy canes and collected coins to help purchase around 74 turkeys. My class donated them to the Calgary Food Bank. This year I am hoping to donate them to the Calgary Drop in Center. At the beginning of the school year we went as a staff to serve breakfast. Upon chatting to one of the ladies I learned that the drop in has not had a real Christmas dinner for the thousand who use it  in a long time. The reason for  that is that turkeys are way to expansive. Soo I got to thinking, my class can do that for them, why not! So I am hoping to start our coin collection a little early this year. In the past we usually just collect pennies, but that's no longer so we have started collecting nickels and dimes. this is great because I use it as a math activity seeing that we need to learn how to count by 5's and 10's. I will talk to the students this week about our mission and will plan on starting our coin collection next week. I usually send out a facebook message to all my friends recruiting them to help us out. They are great to respond and we usually have special deliveries of random change dropped off at school! I will be needing some volunteers to help sell the candy canes at the concert, so if you are interested in doing this please let me know. There is usually two shifts before and after the concert. The more people the better and easier it is to cover it all because it can get hectic. So that's one project I have planned for our class. I have one other in the mix but need to figure out some details before I make that big announcement.

The next is a favorite of mine. The students make Christmas cards for seniors. I love this because I have in the past have hand delivered the cards and to see their faces light up is better than any gift. I usually go to a seniors home back in PEI because I know the activities coordinator but I would like to go here this year and if any of you are wanting to come along Id be more than happy to have some company. I need some volunteers though to help cut cardstock in cards, fold them and get them ready for the students to draw on them. I am hoping to start this very soon so if you can start right away that would be great.

I am also looking for a volunteer to come help me get the scholastic orders ready to send home. I have slacked on that department seeing that I was working on report cards. I am thinking of sending home both November and Decembers orders so that you have more selection and if you are wanting to order Christmas gifts you can. That way I can place the order early and guarantee that you will get it all in time. If you are ordering gifts just let me know via email or a little note and I will hold onto them for you!
 ok so short week and a lot of info being put out there for you. I am excited to get things rolling. I know the kids will be pumped too. If you have any other ideas or suggestions on what we could do for a community project I would love to hear them. Enjoy the week everyone!
Chat soon,
Laurie Anne

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Hello November!

Hi everyone,
I hope you all had a great long week end with your kids and that Halloween was not too crazy for you. It was great seeing some of you at the Gala, Thanks for coming out and supporting our school. A huge thank you to some parents who got together and bought the class some cool fieldtrips.

Report cards are just around the corner so lately we have been review a lot in class and having a few quizzes. Something you can do to help your child out is to review the French alphabet sounds, try practicing their French sentence structures and review the sight words daily.
We have started our Fruit and Veggies project today. It was a great success. The students tried pomegranates, black and green olives. We had a few shy ones that didn't want to try any, but I am sure with time they will all be giving it a go. It was hilarious to see their faces when they tried olives! To a couple of their surprises they actually liked them. They are so looking forward to the next coming weeks.

We have been talking about Remembrance day and they meaning behind the poppy. They had some really interesting questions and some I had a hard time answering. The hard ones where why was there a war, who was the bad man, why did he start it and so on. So if you all want to tackle those that would be great! We have our Remembrance day assembly on Friday at 10h30, you are all welcome to join. If you get the chance too on Tuesday next week to attend a service I encourage you to do so.

In math, we are starting to learn more and more about addition and how if we take a certain number of objects and divide it in two that can give us a math problem. ie: I have 8 chocolate bars, I separate them into 2 piles, 4 on one side and 4 on the other. That gives us 4+4=8. You can do this at home, it will reinforce the concept of addition but also work one to one correspondence. We continue to work on the concept of more and less as well.

In Science, we have started to look at our 5 senses. In the next couple of weeks the students will be learning about our sense, their importance's and how we use them everyday. We have a bunch of fun experiments coming our way!

In English, we continue to review the daily sight words and are working on sounding out letters to form small words. We do need to continue to review the letter sounds in English, seeing that we are sometimes getting the French and English sounds mixed up.
Next week we only have a 3 day school week. Remember no school Monday and Tuesday. That's all I can think of at the moment. Have a great week and chat soon.
Laurie Anne