The first two weeks in grade 1!

Well this past week was a complete blur! I'm finally sitting down to share a bit more about our first two weeks - for more frequent photo updates, check out my instagram!! 

We've been practicing our calendar routine and learning some basic school vocabulary:

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Plans for the first week of school!

Here's what I've got planned so far for the first week of school: 

As always, the start of the year involves a lot of repetition (with all grades, but especially with grade 1). 

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Resources to set up your classroom!

Although I can't get into my classroom to post real pictures of all of these in action yet, I just wanted to share some things that might help make the transition back to school a bit easier for you! 

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French fall resources

I'm starting to (trying to!) wrap my head around the fact that it's almost fall - so it's time to start thinking about fall vocabulary! 

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French back to school resources!

Ok, I know - it's too soon. But it helps to be prepared! Here are some resources that can help save you some time in September, so you can enjoy your summer for a bittttt longer! 

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French word wall file - editable!

I've just posted an *editable* word wall file on TPT! It has 88 basic French words, and then you can add in any of the words that you need for your class! 

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Eric Carle art

We took the past two weeks to make art inspired by the wonderful Eric Carle!

The first week, we painted our papers. We gave each student a large piece of white paper, folded to give them 8 sections. We also gave them a variety of objects they could use to make different textures (e.g. sponges, plastic forks, fake trees, etc).

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Sticker stories

I posted about sticker stories a while ago on my blog here. When I have grade 2s, we start sticker stories in the fall. With my grade ones, I don't introduce them until the spring.

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Practicing telling/writing stories

We have worked really hard all year on creating sentences with lots of details. My kids are really comfortable now adding details to make longggggg sentences, with colours, numbers, sizes, etc.

Now we are shifting focus to more functional sentences! We are learning to tell short stories in French. We've been practicing together following a general format.

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Centres

I took some photos to share this morning as we worked through some of our centres!

I try to keep a balance between introducing new vocabulary and keeping all the old (known) vocabulary in our centres. Some students like the change and challenge of new vocabulary - but I find some need the confidence that comes with those really familiar words. 

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Teaching bird's eye view

We have started the mapping part of our community unit! We borrowed some doll's house furniture from kindergarten land and used them to teach the concept of bird's eye view. This is something that my grade 1s find to be quite challenging when we work through mapping.

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What we've been working on...

Ok so it's FINALLY starting to feel like spring MIGHT be coming soon. We had snow on the weekend and rain this morning. No more negative temperatures in the forecast this week!!! 

Last week we went back to our seasonal changes unit to talk about the transition from winter to spring. My poor little ones were having a hard time wrapping their heads around the typical spring activities we talked about, as they're all very different to the snow and winter boots they're still experiencing. 

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Shrinking during printing

This week I found a new trick for shrinking things when I'm printing them! I can't believe I didn't think to try it before. Normally I print 2 pages per page when I'm printing to save on ink and laminating sheets, but this week I played around with the zoom button.

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Spring bird art

We did art on Tuesday this week and we were THRILLED with how it turned out! I do art with my English partner (we bring all 40 kids together) and she came up with the idea of making the birds using magazine paper.

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Spring file updates!

I hope you're enjoying the final hours of your March break! I've been working through my spring files to do some spring cleaning and spruce them up with some new fonts. 

If you have any of these, please check back to download the newest version from TPT! 

French spring writing:

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Le pendu!

We've been having tons of fun this week playing "Le pendu" together! 

My kids love playing it as a whole class. It's a great way to practice both letters in French and basic vocabulary. As we are focusing on one sound blend a week right now, it's also a fun way to practice those words. This week we played with "ch" words together, and then I split them up into partners to play! 

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Pictures from the past two weeks

Although I've completely dropped with ball with blogging recently, I've still managed to take a few photos over the past two weeks to share!

Here we go...

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Ted Harrison inspired art

Last week we looked at Ted Harrison's art pieces and created our own versions of them.

First, we used pencil. We went step by step to help them draw their outlines. We made sure to draw simple houses, without lots of details, as their pencil lines had to be traceable with crayon. They had a hard time with being told NOT to add details, as we've spend most of the year talking about ADDING them in!

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Valentine's Day Freebie - Bookmarks for students!

This year I've decided to give my students a little bookmark for Valentine's Day. After struggling to find anything in French, I ended up making these simple bookmarks: 

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Winter reading and writing

We've been doing a lot more practice with reading and writing over the past few weeks. Although most of what we do is with manipulatives (sentence building cards) or on whiteboards, sometimes we do put pencil to paper! 

Here are some examples of some practice (or assessment, however you want to use it!) that we have done recently: 

We started with this activity, where they used the cards from the word wall to complete the sentences - making sure the verbs made sense. The follow up sheet to this has blanks for the verbs instead, to practice that way!

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Seasonal changes - Winter mini book

As we've been learning about the seasonal changes living things go through during winter, we've been illustrating our own mini books!! 

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What we've been working on in class...

It feels like time is just FLYING by! We are gearing up to write report cards next week, and life feels like a blur. I can't believe tomorrow is February 1st!!!!! 

Our school (like most schools, I'm sure) never seems to have any laminate. I always miss it when it's refilled! I've been using my winter sentence starters unlaminated (gasp!) and finally managed to get upstairs to use the last little bit that was left on the roll! 

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Winter sentence station, writing, and BAZINGA game!

This week we are focusing on winter vocabulary! We've been having fun with different games, and it's really exciting to hear them starting to remember the new vocabulary.

Today we started practicing our poem of the week, and I introduced this week's 4 words of the week. I photocopied this "set" (our second 8 week set of words) onto coloured paper, laminated them, and then stuck magnets on them. We practice them really quickly each day, and they hunt for the words every morning when they look through French books/Read to self while we wait for O Canada.

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