Zoe and manga

We had some friends and their 12 year old daughter visiting and she was drawing manga style people. The picture below shows Zoe's manga style with her traditional style.

Art from a month ago

Art

Zoe art

Cette semaine / This Week

I don't know why I've never thought to do this before.. but here is the letter from Zoe's teacher on what they are doing in Kindergarten.... (we get one every friday)

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A Week in Kindergarten

This Week / Cette semaine:

In Math we started our unit on Measurement. The children organized themselves by height from the

tallest to the shortest which is always an amusing activity for the teacher to observe! They then had to

say who was "plus grand(e)" and "plus petit(e)" than who. We also read a book called Le collier le plus

long (The Longest Necklace) and we made our own necklaces out of Play-Doh which we measured

with blocks. Later in the week we organized ourselves from the person who had made the shortest

necklace to the person who made the longest.

In our printing practice, we worked on the letter g, focusing on forming the lower case and then upper

case. The students have been working very hard on their printing and have much more confidence

when forming their letters. When writing with your child, please remember to correct any errors you

see them making (starting in the wrong place, taking their pencil off the page when they shouldn't). It

is much easier for your child to correct the error now than when they are in a higher grade.

This week we had our first of six chess lessons with Mr. Churchill. It was a great lesson where the

children learned all about the pawn and how it can move. They were then able to play the "pawn

game" with a partner to try to get their pawn past their opponent's. They did a great job! If you have a

chess set at home it would be great practice for your child to show you what they learned.

Jolly Phonics – on

Action – make your nose look like a pig's nose and make the sound [on]. This is a nasal sound so you

do not hear the nnnn.

Popcorn word – un / une (meaning: a or one)

growing up

At night, when I put the kids to bed, I often have time to reflect on how much things are changing, on how fast they are changing... its all good, but amazing how fast we are living.

We had Easter last weekend and it was finally a fabulous precursor to summer... the kids spent the whole weekend in and out of the house.  They were so pumped the night before the party and it was so nice outside we had lots of time for chasing ... Zoe is in love with playing tag.. "toilet tag", "tv tag", freeze tag, you name it.. however 3 year olds do not know nor care to know how to play tag.  Finn gets upset when he is tagged or when we out run him. So to salvage my sanity we built an obstacle course... off the slide, walk a board, jump over buckets, climb recycling bins, shoot a basket, dribble the ball, do it all over again.  We even added to doing it while carrying a plastic egg in a shovel and added scooters around the kiddie pool.

Zoe is amazing... I hung out in her classroom one day after dropping her off late.. we had to do the last step to get our Permanent Residency (yeah!, we finally did it after 5 years!) and I watched her class mates come up and talk to the teacher in halting french.. every word a pause and action.. Zoe however, just went up to her, said some sentence real quiet, but quite confidently and carried on.. amazing!  She is starting to read, has quite a few sight words, confidently sounds out words, she is working hard on writing too.

She is learning about being with friends, which to keep, which to stay away from.. she mentioned one girl in another class getting bullied.. she was crying, and then Zoe got a look on her face.. she said, "no, I wont' tell you" and then after some encouragement she did.. her friend had said something to the girl who later cried, and Zoe backed the non-crying girl up. and she felt guilty about it.. 

She told me this week that a different girl insisted Zoe bring her chocolate.. and Zoe said she wouldn't do it because it might make other girls feel bad.  Later this week, that same girl ignored Zoe and Zoe now says they are definitely not friends.  It is amazing the drama...

Zoe also today revealed that she played with Stuart today.. said he was throwing her jacket around... I told her that was a sign that he liked her.. you can only imagine the smile on her face.. (I was driving.. I'm imagining it too).. after a yahoo and sigh, she said she was going to marry him some day.

first real day that felt like spring

Luckily, for once, we have a beautiful weekend (4 days!) that
coincides with Easter and warm weather.. the kids spent most of the
day in and out.. and finally as the sunset, we headed off to the
pool.. but.. it was closed.. so I cleaned up the backyard pool, filled
it with hot water and kids had a riot.. I'll post the pics.