First Day of School!

By Friday afternoon, my Grade One classroom was finally ready for the first day of school. I've posted pics I took with my phone on the way out the door.

I remind myself every September that even though I'm tempted to put up a whole lot more, I need to start out with blank bulletin boards - or simply placeholders - until I have the chance to actually teach the various posters and displays.  Especially in Grade One French Immersion , there's little point in displaying anchor charts or posters of sounds or numbers until they can actually pronounce, let alone read, the content. Might as well use wallpaper! Plus, I like to have at least two boards of student work up for Curriculum Night.

The Guided Reading Board and Word Wall are ready to fill in. I did, however, manage to get the alphabet letters up - with staples this time - forget about "mavalus tape" - my room is the queen of masking tape resistance.

My centre d'écoute and centre de lecture.  New this year is an idea I found on Pinterest for organizing magnetic letters for initial alphabet/writing centre work. It's a shoebag, bought at Canadian Tire for around $12. Now, almost each letter has its own labeled see-through pouch. It's not that I don't appreciate the sensory thrill of digging through a basket to find a letter, I just don't get the frustration involved when they can't find the right one, or perhaps there are no additional letters to be found. This way, the children can immediately see if there aren't any more available.

Now, I still need to create some duo-tang labels and to repair some of the classroom library books.

Looking forward to a great year!

Over the moon with AIM story re-tell!

My grade ones decided not to contain their excitement as they headed off in partners with their new "Compositions" cahiers! 

Journal writing in Grade 1 French Immersion is so boring! At least it is the way I do it (blush)! Since the children start out with no French at all, it is so often a case of fill-in-the-blanks when it comes to writing in their journals. Okay for calligraphy practice but...boring.

This year's last AIM play was "Les trois petits cochons". My class were pros by the time it was introduced and could recite the entire play along with me from it's very first presentation. Of course they'd done the fantastic scaffolded worksheets and answered tons of questions. They'd presented puppet shows and were just about to perform their "live action" play. 

Following an AIM document (sorry - unknown photo copy) 

• I began by asking the children if the story I recited verbatim was exactly the same as the play they knew so well. Yes, they agreed it was. 
• Then I began to paraphrase the story, adding some juicy details, but essentially telling the same tale. Well! Such delight when they learned that le premier petit cochon adored pizza with fromage while the deuxième petit cochon liked to watch TV.
• First the students were invited to start re-telling the story orally - much appreciated. Mama cochon tells them they are too big for the house etc...
• Then they are shown new cahiers and told that the may write and illustrate their own version of the play.
• The hook is that they are to work in partners and share ideas but essentially write their own tale.
• Huge excitement as they spread out in the classroom two by two.
• The key, of course, is that they now had all the tools they needed to start writing: they were totally comforable with the play, its vocabulary and sentence structure; they knew how to use their word wall and they knew how to use their primary dictionary. 
• Add imagination et voila! I couldn't get them to stop writing for recess! :-)

BRAVO!