Newsletter November/December/January 2021/2022

This place is called "Les calanques de Marseille", it is a perfect mix between hiking and relaxing on the beach. This is my go to every year! This is also where I met my husband! 

-Welcome to our Newsletter!

TAOKI 
- We studied and learnt the spelling and the sounds of : /s/, /u/, /f/, /e/, /m/ and are working on the /ch/
- We worked on the vocabulary and created sentences related to the daily life of a student, at school, after school, or during a field trip, the thematic of our poster were : the street (Taoki and his friends taking the bus downtown), the playground at school, the classroom (Taoki and his friends and gardening in the class), the lunch room, the museum. 
- We continued our reading learning journey, students really improve their fluidity I noticed a lot of them use a lot the sign related to the sound to help themselves to read a word which is really great ! 
- We worked on the vocabulary and created sentences related to outdoor activities (biking/hiking/forest...).
- I will increase the amount of writing production, and every new Taoki poster and/or album will be new writing/sentence creation opportunity. 
- To guide the students into this task, I use a color code to show how to compose a basic French sentence :
      *When the action takes place are the "blue words", we focus on present with words          like "now, today, at this moment...
     *Who does the action is always green
    * What is the action (verb) is always red,
     *Where the action takes place w is black. 
      Example : Aujourd'hui, Taoki joue dans la classe 
                             Today Taoki plays in the classroom
- I will introduce the "writing blue pen" as we do in France. Indeed French students in France rarely use pencils to write, so we will be working on holding properly the blue pen, and be careful and focused on our writing since there is no possibility to erase. 
- Students keep progressing in reading and some of them completely amazed me recently by their reading skills and good pronunciation !

​The two classes are really involved and interested into reading and appreciate our reading time 

MATH
- We worked deeper on additions and subtraction equations with the topic 5, we extended our counting sequence to 120 thought 1 to 1 counting, 10 to 10, some students don't need the number chart to count and memorized very well the name of numbers in French, this was with the topic 7.
- I wanted to thank you parents with your involvement into the homework, every time I am checking them, I see how seriously everything is done ! 
-Math is getting harder as well. Indeed the topic 10 in which we are working right now focuses on addition equations under 100.
- The most challenging part now is to understand that 10 ones make one ten, and represent it, applies it to find the right result of a given equation. 
- I grade the students "in situation", during the daily math lesson . I will give as well some test, but I am trying not to overwhelm too much the kids and to propose them different assessment type (I noticed that the kids are a little more relaxed when I assess them during the daily math lesson or orally). 

MORNING RITUALS
- Every morning, we are doing the date, the weather, the schedule etc...
- In a few days, I will introduce a new form of rituals : I will give my "very official" French badge and my microphone to a designated student, who will do the attendance, interact with the class, ask "class, who wants to come on the board and say the date of today ? " or "class ? How are you today...." I did it last year and it was really awesome to see ! 
- I will increased the amount of mental calc, so pretty often during the ritual we will throw a ball and when a student will catch it up he/she will choose an equation and throw the ball to another student who will have to say the result and choose a new equation, etc... 
-A lot of fun ! 
- During some Fridays of each month, we are doing the "Big Friendly Friday". It consists into mixing all the 1st grades together to create 4 new groups who rotates between the four first grade teachers. 
- These BFF are the occasion for me to introduce the other students from the magnet and traditional program to French culture. Our little French Immersion kids are very proud to show and help their friends from other classes to understand what I am saying. 

BEHAVIOR
- The students are gaining a lot of autonomy. They know the rules of the classroom, understand them, and respect them and now is the moment in which I give them as much autonomy as I can, the only condition is to be respectful and responsible.
-Between each switch, they go to the bathroom and relax and get to talk together for 5 minutes, I noticed it makes it easy to have them focus. 
- I showed them how lot use the computers (finding their numbers, their headphones, unplug/re plug it properly. 
- I am using a lot lately the reward system from bloomz, I switched the little flower for a baby dinosaur who will grow inside its egg until he comes out! I would love to have your feedback on it! 

CULTURE / GENERAL ACTIVITIES
- Our holiday winter songs were a success and it was so fun to teach jingle bells in French! 
- You can find french songs in the "sing and train" part of this website and a lot of different resources (science video, vocabulary pronunciation, books...)
- All the 1st grades trained 2 times a week, at the end of the end to learn our songs, we also trained during our BFF deeper in French to understand more the meaning and the pronunciation. 
- SEP Conferences are coming, I will give you your child proficiency report in French. 

If you have any question, feel free to contact me through this website or through Bloomz. 

Thank you ! 

As usually, if you have any question, feel free to contact me through this website or through Bloomz. I wish you all the best for the coming year ! ​