What have we been learning since my last long ago post??

The answer to that is: "Sooooooooooooo much!"
We have studied a unit on our community (ma communaute) and our neighbourhood (mon quartier) during which the children the identified things that we see in our community as well as community helpers and the jobs that they do. Some very creative community maps were painted which included schools, malls, homes and an inordinate number of fire trucks for some reason!! They were lovely!
KC and her big sister kindly brought in their train set which has created quite a stir. Thank you to both girls for that! The students played with it alongside the road carpet and building blocks from the classroom to create their own mini-community - it's been the centre of attention and isn't losing popularity!

MZ pointed out to me that I still had a Spring poster up on the wall which prompted us to not only take it down but to review some of the season's vocabulary before embarking on the creation of some outlandishly fabulous flowers for our class tree... If you make it to graduation you can see it for yourselves - there was tissue paper and glitter everywhere - the kind of mess I love! I told the children that we needed to take down the buds from the tree and create flowers of any kind - complete creative freedom - Oh my goodness!

In math, the children reviewed composition and decomposition of numbers. In other words, different ways to make a number. We played a game where ten counters were placed on a grid and one person hid some of them. The guessers then had to figure out how many counters were missing; then check to make sure that the quantity of counters present plus the counters hidden were equal to ten.

Report cards are coming home soon. On the back page of the report card you will see that your child has written a letter to their grade one teacher (you get the original, the teacher will see a copy!). We spent some time talking about different purposes for writing and about what a letter looks like. Then the children used a model to write their own letter and to add a thought of their own. I was mighty impressed, as always!