What I learned at school today

So I thought you might all like some free stuff? I started a Teacher pay Teacher store in March this year and I have been busily adding new things that I think would be useful to French Immersion, FSL and French teachers and some things that are good for teachers at all levels. I have some freebies for you below and I also wanted to give you the chance to win  five paid products from my store for FREE!  Entering is easy, just follow me on Teacher pay Teacher or follow this blog .   You'll be first to know when I add new products and new freebies! I will be drawing for a winner August 31st. Don't miss out on your chance! Now for the freebies! Here are a few freebies for you to check out: French writing prompts- La Fête One sample writing prompt that includes 3 versions. Two versions have a word bank included and one only includes the image. This document also includes two pages of lined writing paper for those students who want to write more. Other Wri

"I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down." The 3 little pigs has always been one of my favorite units to teach in grade 1.  The students have a lot of fun hearing and reading different versions of the story. They also love to rewrite this story. The last few years I have tried to do something different. I decided to see if we could use the three little pigs to teach a little science too. On three little pigs day we sat down as a group and I introduced them to my little pig (a green piggy bank) and the big bad wolf (a hairdryer the first year, a large fan with wolf ears on it the second).  I explained that we would be building a house for our pig that would protect him from the wolf. We brainstormed materials that we had available on the board. I had brought in hay and wood for the occasion. Other materials were things the students found around the classroom. Some materials that students suggested: Paper, wood, straw, bricks, wiki sticks,

 Earth day is a great excuse to learn about all sorts of things. Conservation, recycling, reusing and reducing, humans effects on the natural environment and of course crafting and ingenuity. 15 Fun things to do for earth day: 1) Read - J'aime la terre by Todd Parr.   2) Draw tiny drawings on tiny pieces of paper. Don't forget to use both sides! 3) Make junk statues out of materials that would normally be thrown out. 4) Visit the recycling plant. 5) Visit a local thrift store. 6) Plan a playground clean-up. 7) Try a Earth day Je lis et je dessine. 8) Watch  "Sid le Petit Scientist - Jour de la Terre" and do a soil exploration. 9) Plan a sharing/caring swap.  Have kids bring in items they no longer need from home. Students take turns choosing a new item that a friend has brought it.  10) Plan a clothing drive and donate to a local charity. 11) Plant some seeds. Talk about the effects of plants on the environment. 12) Pretend you are the e

We are having lots of fun in grade 1 learning all about butterflies. The butterfly kit we ordered was very disappointing. All the caterpillars died and so we have been reading books, watching videos and making art to try and figure out what should have happened and what might have gone wrong. In this video the photo and text explain the life cycle of a monarch butterfly. By watching this we were able to determine that we didn't have monarch butterflies in our classroom because the caterpillars look different. This video from Ce n'est pas sorcier showed us that their are lots of different kinds of caterpillars and butterflies.  It has some tricky language but some amazing images too. My students loved being able to see different types of caterpillars and butterflies up close. We also liked learning about how silk is made. We also read lots of different kinds of books from the library about butterflies. They all seemed to tell us the same thing. Butterflies have a 4

Sight words are vital to unlocking reading for many students but finding fun ways to introduce them and to give students a chance to practice them can be challenging. I usually introduce one new sight word a day. We then spend the day trying to spot the word when we are flipping through books or when Mme is reading or when we are walking around the school.  Once we have a good collection of words under our belts we can start playing some games with them. Whole Class Games: Quiz, quiz trade: Students each get one sight word. They partner up and show each other the word. Once they have read the word they trade and move on to a new partner. Stand-up: As we practice our word I will pick a "magic" word, letter or sound. When they hear it they stand-up. When the word is gone they sit back down. Act it out: When we read action words, students have fun acting out the word. Silent Word/Sound: When we read through the list students are told they can not read a certa

Using images as writing prompts is nothing new and some would argue that it is an old way of teaching that stunt student creativity and growth when writing. In my experience though a well used writing prompt activity can help students feel successful and give you some important assessment information that isn't tainted by wondering - is my student struggling with ideas, vocabulary or with writing in general? One activity my students and I love to do together is an oral tell me more activity. I will show them a picture on the smartboard. With this image I would tell students to tell their partners what they see. In the beginning students will always say "I see a dog" or "C'est un chien."  I then challenge the students to tell each other more. After a few minutes I stop students and we discuss our ideas. Slowly we build from "It's a dog" to "It's a little brown dog with big ears sitting on a blue boat. He is waiting for someone.&qu

So the Ipads are gone from my classroom and have been replaced with 12 shiny new Samsung Galaxy tablets.  First order of business was to see which of the things that I was able to so with my students on the Ipad, I could still do on the tablet. Figuring out how to do listen to reading was top of my list. There are many individual books available in the Google Play store. Most of the free books do contain advertising or have limited features. I did find a few free apps that are worth checking out. Pierro Pierrette Le secret de la lune Lisbon labs has a large selection of  french book apps however the apps includes advertising. Playtales Gold Although free options do exist I decided that for simplicity and to save time and money it was best to pay for a subscription service instead. I settled on Playtales Gold  . This service costs $25 a year. They have a free version but the advertising is so frequent that it isn't worth looking at. We chose Playtales G

First things first.... How do I turn this thing on?! I can use an Ipad, I can use this thing right? The reality however is that you can't expect this device to behave like an Ipad there are some differences and they have tripped me up as I am trying to learn this device. I admit the setup for my teacher tablet was fairly easy. The tablet talks you through most of it.  It helps if you already have a google account you are using. If you don't already have one you can set one up  here  or follow the directions on your new tablet.  Learning to use it however was a little trickier. Here is one video I used to help learn how to use the device: Some tips. 1) If there is no back button on an app to get you back to the last screen us the return arrow on the bottom of your tablet. 2) Double clicking the home screen 3) The google search box is always on the bottom right  side of the home screens. You can use it to search the web but you can also use it to find app

We had a lot of fun in grade one this week. We made long snowman using our names. I got the ideas from Art with Ms. James . First students had to plan out their snowman. We wrote their names in our journals and counted the number of letters. We then added + 1 because they needed to add a ball for the head. We drew that many balls on the page and wrote our names.... and added a little face too. We knew that each piece of paper had 4 snowballs on it. We had to find out how many sheets of paper we would need to complete the project.  You can download circle template here. We then created our snowmen.  We cut off any excess purple paper. Once we were done making them we all worked together to sort them in order of length. We noticed that even though some snowmen had the same amount of circles they were not the same length. We realized that the reason was that some students had overlapped their circles and some didn't.  We decided that to make a good measurement we needed to make s