Month At A Glance
April and May
I hope everyone had a nice spring break. Our focus over the next few months will be our 100th anniversary celebration being held near the end of May. The students will soon be starting an inquiry project as well as learning a decade specific dance. Just a reminder that the grade 3 and 4 classes are looking at the decades from 1940 to 1970.
We have recently finished reading our novel, Silverwing and are going to be working on a reflective process for the next few weeks. We are hoping to start a new novel by the end of April. Students may wish to read the remaining books in the Silverwing series and parents may want to pre-read some of these books as the content becomes more mature.
The students have been working on two-digit by one-digit multiplication in math. This can be fairly complicated at this age and it is important the students have a good understanding of place-value and basic multiplication facts. We will also continue to work with rational numbers. Our multiplication quizzes have been going very well and I have seen improvement in all the students.
Our French Language Arts program will continue to use learning centres which focus on sounds, vocabulary and sentence structure with an added concentration on conjugating verbs in the present tense. We will also be starting independent writing with less assistance and structure than earlier in the year. We will continue our comprehension activities as well. I strongly encourage the students to take their time with this activity, I am still finding many students who are simply copying sentences from the book and are not showing understanding. This is a difficult assignment but will help the students with their oral and reading comprehension as well as their writing. Regular French home reading goes home Monday to Thursday and the students should be doing a minimum of 10 minutes of English reading an evening.
I am expecting all the students to work on their handwriting as they will be required to do it regularly by the end of the month. Some students are making an effort to speak in French at all times, however, there still many who need to be reminded regularly, particularly when working in a group. Please encourage your child to speak French at school as it is an important part of the immersion program.