Chinese New Year Celebrations We learned about Chinese New Year celebrations. We heard the story about Nian, the monster, and that we decorate with red to scare him away. We also heard a Chinese Folklore called "The Magic Paintbrush." We enjoyed coming up with our own magic paintbrush stories, and what acts of kindness we could do if we had our own magic paintbrush. Inspired by the language Mandarin, and calligraphy brushes, we made our own calligraphy paintings using the zodiac animals characters. We really enjoyed practicing the Chinese characters, and wanted to practice drawing the numbers as well! We practiced drawing the Chinese characters as well as the English numerals next to them, in our red and gold sand trays. We also worked together with our Grade 2 buddies to build long chains to create a paper chain dragon, and playing Hot Orange! Similar to hot potato, but with an orange and to Chinese New Year festive music.
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Celebrating Pongal We continued to learn about how different cultures express themselves by exploring the celebration "Pongal" from South India this week. We did a variety of activities such as making miniature rice pots after eating Pongal, decorating cows and making kites. 100 Days of School! Hard to believe that we've had 100 days of school so far! I love all the efforts everybody put into their 100 themed shirts. We enjoyed celebrating the number 100 by participating in many activities such as: taking 100 steps, running for 100 seconds, stamping 100, stacking 100 cups, sorting 100 items, sticking 100 stickers and writing about "When I'm 100 years old..." 100 Year Old Kindergarteners 100 Steps Stacking 100 Cups Sorting 100 Items
What a wonderful first week back, catching up with our friends and talking about our holidays. Our focus for inquiry this week was in our year long ‘How We Express Ourselves’ unit with the central idea ‘Cultures express themselves through celebration’. We spoke about New Years Day and watched some of Singapore's fireworks, then we made our own fireworks paintings and wrote some New Year's resolutions. We also enjoyed catching up with our Grade 2 buddies, making new friends and listening to lots of stories.
This semester has just flew by, and what a fantastic semester it has been. Thank you for all your kind contributions to the class party on Tuesday, it was amazing to celebrate our time together. It was lovely to see the children having so much fun playing games, being silly and being children. I know this was a very special time for them. Our field trip to Orchard was a success this week! We enjoyed playing "eye spy" for Christmas themed decorations. That's it for Semester One! I look forward to welcoming the children back in the new year, rested and ready to enjoy all the experiences that await them in Semester Two! Have a wonderful holiday!
Celebration Passports In order to track our year long unit about celebrations, we have our very own celebration passports! Every time we learn about a different culture and celebration, we get a stamp. This week we revisited Deepavali and Thanksgiving, before learning about Christmas. International Day The Kindergarten students worked with some Grade 6 and Grade 11 students to make terrariums for the Preston Campus. We learned that plants provide oxygen which is good for our Earth, and helps to battle climate change. This focused on the UN Sustainable Development Goal 13, Climate Action.
Fruit is fun To extend our learning from last week, we looked at the cross sections of various fruits we ate in our fruit salad and more. We carefully observed and drew detailed scientific pictures of our favourite looking fruit. Unit Wrap Up Today there was a real live gameshow in the class! As a wrap up for our Sharing the Planet unit, we had a gameshow quiz! Children chose questions on the screen, and when they got the answer right, they won prizes, just like a real game show. We have very knowledgeable children in the class. They answered all different questions about:
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Winter Surprise The children walked into Kindergarten on Monday to find out that it had "snowed" over the weekend! They were very surprised to find the classroom still dark with cotton snow all over the floor and their winter clothes laid out on the table! They had to sign in their name using shaving cream snow and really enjoyed making snow angels and having a gentle snowball fight. Can you build a snowman? Ms. Bustamante prepared three different types of "snow" for the children to play with. Her instructions were to build a snowman. The children discussed which snow was easiest to build with, and the children who had experienced snow before said that shaving foam mixed with baking soda made the most realistic snow. Melting Snowmen There was a lot of discussions this week on what would actually happen if it snowed in Singapore. Some of the students claimed it would just melt because Singapore is too hot! So we made melting snowmen, and came up with many creative reasons as to why our snowmen melted. The children really used their thinking skills to come up with creative ideas such as:
Hot Chocolate and Winter Poems with our Buddies During our buddy session with the Grade 2 class this week we really enjoyed sipping on hot chocolate, and learning about what a poem is. We even made winter themed poems with the guidance of our buddies! In Ms. Bustamante's classroom, we used our fine motor skills to carefully craft an edible marshmallow snowman! Fruit Salad Wow, it was so amazing to have such a variety of fruits for our salad today! We really enjoyed exploring all the different "suitcases" and seeds! We found some seeds were tiny and there was a lot, some seeds were hidden deep inside the fruit, and some fruits had big seeds called stones! The salad was so delicious and some of us had second and third helpings. Festive Friday
Autumn Investigation As we have no Autumn season in Singapore, the children were lucky enough to have a surprise package all the way from Europe! This package included real oak leaves, maple leaves, chestnut leaves, conkers, and walnuts that had fallen on the ground during Autumn in Austria. We had an investigation into these Autumn artefacts and used our senses to describe the items. The children made connections to the conkers looking like chestnuts, and some had eaten walnuts and pumpkins before at home. While they didn’t use the sense of “taste” to try anything, they use magnifying glasses to look at the items in detail and thoroughly used their sense of touch to explore the items further. Mixing Leaves Further connecting the life cycle of a leaf, and the many colours we find them during Summer, Spring and Autumn, the children used their senses to mix paint together to make colourful leaves. They used descriptive language to describe the process of the paint mixing, and used their fine motor skills to mix it all together. Trip to Preston We had such a great trip to visit the Preston campus to see where our school will be next year. The children enjoyed looking for birds, looking at the library and of course eating pizza!
Seasons of the Year Thank you to all who sent in seasons themed Show and Tells. The children were very excited to talk about their experiences and connections they make at home. This week I asked them to collect sticks and leaves from outdoors so we could make trees in different seasons using natural materials. We looked at what trees look like during the different seasons, and identified that we would need green leaves, yellow leaves, orange leaves and red leaves to show all the seasons. However, once we came back and sorted our leaves into different colours, we realised we had lots of yellow and green, but no orange or red! It was decided that this is because there is no Autumn in Singapore as there is in other countries. Kindergarten also collaborated with Visual Arts to learn about the life cycle of a leaf. What does it mean to be caring? The 'What does is mean to be caring?' video was presented during our school assembly today. The Kindergarteners were so proud and received great responses. Please enjoy the video below. Multiple literacies: making a garden out of loose parts We have been so lucky to explore plants in many different ways. We've explored plants during art lessons, labelled plants in Science, wrote and drew pictures of plants during writing time, and today we decided to make a garden out of loose part materials in the classroom! It's so wonderful to see the children authentically learning through multiple ways.
Living Things: Plants In addition to our unit on living things, we have been diving deeper into plants during Science lessons. We have been learning that plants grow both above and below the ground! Therefore we planted some plants that grow above; tomatoes and green beans, and plants that grow below; onions! These plants have already started growing so much. We had fun decorating our cups so we can easily spot our own plants. As well as making papier mache fruits and vegetables to teach those who walk past which plants grow above the ground and below the ground. We are Caring and Kind We've spent a lot of time focusing on what it means to be caring these last couple of weeks. Being caring is one of our learner profiles, which every IB learner strives to be. We discussed what makes a good friend, as well as the importance of using kind words. We learned about Pompom words, which are words that make you feel happy, make you smile and are kind. We also discussed Sandpaper words, which are words that "scratch" your feelings, like sandpaper scratches things, these are unkind words that make you feel bad. In addition to this, we've made a video in collaboration with some of Grade 1 on 'What Does it Mean to be Caring?' The video is still a work in progress, but you can view preview screenshots of the video here. Shaving Cream Fun
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AuthorWe are a class of 4-6 year olds at an international school in Singapore! We learn by playing, inquiring and having fun. Our teacher is Ms Bustamante, and this is our learning journey! Archives
June 2020
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