The Craziness of Reorganizing a School

It's been such a busy week with all the planning, rescheduling, getting ready to reorganize, especially a school the size of Amherstview. I was lucky this year not to be affected too much, while other classes went through the difficulty of more drastic changes. Next week we'll have two new students joining our class. I've had a bit of extra work getting notebooks, work, etc. ready for our new friends. We also have a few changes to our class schedule. While most things will be the same, M. Choquette will still be doing Health and M. Manolakas will continue to do Phys. Ed. and Science, some of the timings have changed. I will update the class timetable on the blog to reflect these changes. 

In Language this week, we read "C'est la rentrée" as our shared reading each morning. We looked at the soft and hard "c" in "Le garçon" and "Les quatre clés". We spent some more time on our lap books and should be finished early next week. The class enjoyed sharing so much interesting information about themselves while creating them. Last week Mme Panet began reading "As-tu rempli un seau aujourd'hui" with the class. I finished it with them and then made a bucket wall with tickets where we can all enjoy filling someone's bucket by sharing a positive message with him or her. We had some other fun read alouds this week. "Pat le chat J'adore aller à l'école" was a fun read so close to the start of school. I also really enjoyed reading "Gros poulet" to the class as it has a great message about not judging someone by how they look and about accepting everyone for who they are, even if they seem different. 

The students now each have a label on a bucket. 

In math we continued to look at geometric patterns. In addition to identifying changing attributes, the students looked at different ways of explaining patterns using words, letters, and numbers each time the pattern changes. We had a test on Friday. I was so impressed by how well everyone worked during the test. They were amazingly quiet and on task! I stopped them after a while to take a body break. After a little dancing it was back to finishing up. As they finished, they also started doing a short hands-on test with manipulatives one-on-one with me so that different styles of learners could have several types of opportunities to show me what they know. We will finish that up on Monday. We will begin a unit on representing numbers next week. We will practice writing the numbers in words and representing them in ones, tens and hundreds. We will also be looking at grouping objects in groups of two, five and ten, and counting up to 200. 

Today's colder weather was a reminder that fall is just around the corner. Apple season is upon us! The students made some beautiful apple trees which are now on display in the hall. Take a look the next time you are in the school. We had our two new class members join us at afternoon nutrition break and for art and a little free time/Ketchup time. It was a nice relaxing way to get to know one another for next week. I'm hoping to get out apple picking this week or next, especially after seeing such wonderful art! Have a great weekend!