September start to the year!

Bonjour to all of you parents, I just wanted to send off a general e-mail to say hello and update you on what we have been working on in our 7/8 homeroom French immersion class so far. First of all, my name is Angela Baggett and I teach your child during the afternoons for French, Health, Science, Career, Arts Ed. and PhysEd. In the mornings, the students have Kendyll Herauf teaching them English and Social studies, then Rene Pelletier teaching them math and PAA. We started the year in French with our unit: Philosophie et sens de soi, Philosophy and Personal Identity. The grade 7s’s focus is courage and the grade 8’s focus is being faithful to oneself. The students have been hard at work creating a project called “Who am I?”, “Qui-suis-je?” where they describe everything from influences in their lives (family and friends), to their passion or hobbies and what they are interested in for their future. Each student will present one of the areas they wrote about and show us the illustrations they created for that area of their lives. The students seem to be enjoying the project and it is giving me a chance to know each of them better, even as I am teaching them the art of writing in full paragraphs, making grammatical corrections and learning to reflect on and make associations between themselves, their experiences and their future. I find this project has overarching themes with our career concepts. For science, the classes are in like grade groups. While the 7s are in science the 8s are in band and vice versa. Those students who are not taking band are studying Arts Ed. with Mrs Ashton. The grade 8s have been learning about cells and the grade 7s about substances: mixes and solutions. We have textbooks we are using that we use for reading and discussions. We also do many experiments to further our understanding of the concepts we are studying. We will be having a science quiz in the coming weeks. The 7s will also be doing a project where they get to create and document their success with creating a solution or mixture. In health, we have been creating posters in groups about belonging and everyone having an important part of our class. For Career, we started exploring interests, experiences and ways those may lead to a future career. We started a visual project in Art’s Ed. The grade 8s are creating a visual representation of a social issue they care about. They already created idea sketches and started on their masterpiece. They will also be writing artist statements about their work. The grade 7’s focus is on place. We viewed several artist’s representations with place as a theme and started gathering ideas of a place that is important for them. Students made sketches from several perspectives and will be choosing from those to create their own visual representation. We have enjoyed doing some of our Phys. Ed. classes outside while it is still nice weather and started our individual FITT plans. Each student assessed and documented an area of flexibility, cardio strength, cardio endurance and muscular strength. The students set goals and will be checking in throughout the year to see what improvements they have made. One of the methods I use for helping students attain success in their learning is that I allow them to redo work that they didn’t understand or didn’t do well in. We have already done listening and comprehension exercises in French. The students received a numerical mark for their compte de lecture (reading journal) for example. If there were aspects they missed or didn’t complete at the level required, they can redo that section (on their own time) and receive up to half the marks for a retry. If a student does not complete the work on time in class, it is expected that he or she will complete it as homework or they are assigned to study hall at noon to complete and hand in their work. If you ever have questions about what we are learning, about your child’s progress or have a concern, feel free to e-mail me or we can also arrange a face to face meeting. Of course we will also have conferences after the report cards go out and you will be able to see the “Who am I” project, the posters, the artistic creations, quizzes and other work by your child. The year is off to a great start! I have been impressed by many of the student’s work and am enjoying exploring our curricular concepts with them. Angela Baggett 7/8 Homeroom