One of the activities the American International Section did this year was linked to our unit on memoirs. In order to understand what a memoir is in the English-speaking world, we explored memoirs in six words. The concept of trying to tell a story using the absolute minimum of words…
The American Section is kicking off 2021 with a book club unit. Students chose one out of four book choices to read in groups. They created a reading schedule and meet once a week to discuss what they’ve read so far. Reading different books encourages students to explore unfamiliar genres…
The American Section has just finished a six-week unit on memoirs. We read several different anchor texts from well-known and not-so-well-known authors to learn how a memoir can tell the story of an important memory about a person, a place, an object, or an animal. The writer tells the reader…
Part of the American section’s work on The Watsons Go To Birmingham is to study important events and moments in the fight for Black Americans’ civil rights during the 1950s and 60s. School integration is mentioned in chapter 9 of the novel, so we focused on the story of Ruby…
One of the complete works the American Section is reading this year is Christopher Paul Curtis’s book The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963. It tells the story of Kenny Watson and his family as they make their way from Flint, Michigan to Birmingham, Alabama in the middle of the Civil…
The American International Section is back in session at Les Renardières! After distance learning last Spring, it became clear that we all need to brush up on our computer skills. One of the ways we’re doing that is by creating our own Google Sites on our classroom tablets to…
Have you ever wondered how the United States went from the 13th original colonies to a country that spans from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean? In our second unit of distance learning, we are exploring the main events in the 19th century that contributed to Westward Expansion from the…
What has the American Section been working on at home? Well, for the first part of our distance learning, we wrote journal responses, learned how to improve our word choices in creative writing, and also learned how to write like a scientist! We studied different examples of ecosystems and food…
The 5èmes in the American International Section have been studying iconic American women this year to work on their use of the preterite and to add to their knowledge of American history. After reading extracts from the book Rad American Women A-Z by Kate Schatz, they each chose a woman…
To continue our work on poetry this year, the 6th graders in the American Section read “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou. After analyzing the structure of the poem and highlighting rhyming words, they then looked for examples of figurative language in the poem. In 6th grade, the students learn…