Flexibility

Well it's been another week where the flexibility and patience of the students have been called upon. It started out as a normal week. But then then on Tuesday, the power went out for awhile, limiting what we could do in class, especially with our "ateliers". The electricians chose that time to show up to run electricity to the projector for the SMARTBOARD. But with no power, they decided to come back on Wednesday morning. When we got the power back a little later, the installers from the SMARTBOARD company showed up to install the speakers that had been on backorder. It was a little noisy to work through but we managed. 

The electricians were already at work on Wednesday morning when I arrived. It was just a slight inconvenience to find somewhere to take my class for the morning compared to the water ban that had been put in place that morning. We weren't allowed to drink or even wash our hands in the water. It wasn't long, however until there were water coolers throughout the school and hand sanitizer in the halls and classrooms. By Thursday, a hand-washing station had been installed. The students loved going to the water coolers. They definitely drank more water than ever before. 

Luckily on Wednesday, Mme Deloughery was kind enough to allow us to come to her class for the morning while the electricians worked. The two classes practised our song for the Holiday Concert on December 17. We are doing the song "Ça sent la banane", which compares winter on a tropical island with winter here. It is a fast but catchy song and the children seem to be enjoying learning it. We then had reading buddies and some independent work before heading back to our own classroom. 

One of this week's poems projected onto the SMARTBOARD 

In language, the grade twos did the comptines "Le lutin" and "Poustache" to review the "in" and "ch" sounds. The grade threes finished up "Le concours des fourrures" on Monday and then did the booklet "Le voleur des choux-fleurs" with the "eur/oir" sounds the rest of the week. We did "ateliers" every day except Wednesday and Friday. The centres were mostly the same. There was a new game in the reading centres where they needed to match an image with the syllables that make up the word. There were new poems to complete in the writing centres and the students now have dictionaries to complete vocabulary activities. 

Syllable game

Partner reading and follow-up activity

In math, we continued to work on measurement activities. Some students are still finishing up some graphing activities as part of the guided math centre with me. They had a new game in a centre where they had to order a list of numbers from smallest to largest (review). There were also new problems in the group problem solving centre. Mrs. McLaren comes in everyday for 1/2 hour during our math centres. She usually works with the students who are doing the group problem while I am with the guided math group. 

While the SMARTBOARD still isn't set up to use, we can use the ELMO with the projector on it. I hope the guys from IT come back soon to finish setting it up. I would like to be able to play our song on it while we practise, instead of just playing it on my iPad, which is not ideal. Right now I can only project the words. 

Our song

I'm getting things much more organized now that we're getting used to the "ateliers", disruptions, and changes to the classroom. "Les buts d'apprentissage" board has been updated in its new location and there are more anchor charts and visuals up. I'm still preparing activities and games for the centres but I'm getting through it. The next big project is to organize the math games by strand as I'm starting to have quite a few. But that's next week's project...

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