It’s December!
I wasn’t planning to blog today. I was all like, whew. November’s over. Then when I got home, E was out gallivanting downtown with Auntie Em, so I went to pay the bills. Then I felt rather stressed, so I thought a blog post might do me some good. Just a little one. (Along with hazelnut Baileys and David Francey.)
Here’s some stuff I liked about today.
1. Discovering another activity, besides story time, that holds kindergartners rapt for several minutes at a time. What is this magical thing, you ask? Taking turns throwing bean bags into a bin in the middle of the circle. Even my wiggliest group sat quiet, waiting for their turns. And all for the sake of learning positional vocabulary – based on whether the beanbags landed inside or outside the bin. [I taught them to say, “En dedans! Excellent!” (it rhymes in French, I swear), and “En dehors, essaie encore.” They sounded cute.] [See how I’m all gifted with French rhymes? I even have a French version of “Heads Up 7 Up” you can ask me about.]
2. Seeing the Grade 4/5 class working on their “eco-houses”. Once a week, I go into their class to help out, and they’ve been working for several weeks now on planning and building a model of an environmentally efficient house. You should have seen the solar panels, rooftop gardens, greenhouses, windmills, and geodesic domes. Not to mention hearing them tossing around the ecological terminology like little experts. ‘Twas awesome.
3. Doing my phrase mystère with the 5/6 class. Once a week or so, I write a fun fact in French on the board and we translate it as a group, using the cognates, our basic vocab, and deductive reasoning. Today, our phrase mystère was about how polar bears hide their muzzles with their paws to complete their camouflage when tracking prey. They were stuck on museau (muzzle) and guessing all kinds of semi-logical things. They guessed “den” and “hole” – and I couldn’t help it, I got the giggles when a couple of them started doing impressions of airheaded polar bears inadvertently drawing attention to their dens by trying to hide them with their paws. (I guess you had to be there.) I totally pictured them like the silly bears in this clip:
And if you’d enjoy another example of how much the youngsters rock the casbah, try reading Blogging…With, um, Kids?, by Aunt Becky. You’ll like it.
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ohhhhh, what a great coming generation! and how lucky they are to have you as their teacher!
Hey! Ontario Nature is receiving nominations for their conservation awards! Deadline 30 March. Do we have a candidate here?
I’ve played French 7 up. We called it Qui touche? and when the kids tip toe around and touch someone, they have to whisper “Qui touche” disguising their voices.
In my case, the kids wanted to know how to say “Heads down, coming around” and “Heads up, seven up”. We just use “Tetes en bas, on y va,’ and then “Leve la tete, voici les sept.”