Deepavali We continued our inquiry into how cultures express themselves through celebration by learning a little more about Deepavali/Diwali. First we explored the celebrations display that showed us many features of Deepavali, and next we added to the Elementary School's collaborative mandala rangoli in the playground. We also tried some yummy Indian food, Vada, that people often eat during Deepavali. Finally, we listened to a presentation about our friend's experience and how he celebrates Deepavali/Diwali at home. Sharing The Planet While the celebrations unit is running all year, we started to inquire into our new unit: Sharing the Planet. The central idea is cycles affect the behaviour of living things. But before we could start to unpack what that means, we had to learn about what living things were! We made a lot of connections to our Science units, and how we learned about birds and plants and that they were both living things. Next we went for a walk around the school to spot living and non-living things. Flowers Inspired by our lessons on living things and plants, we explored Heritage Time this week through flowers. We learned how to say and write flowers in our mother tongues, made a collage out of real petals and developed our fine motor skills by rolling and making flower imprints on clay.
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How do you grow a plant? Our Kindergarten children were very knowledgeable about growing plants! They used many key words such as "soil" "seeds" "sun rays" "water" and "oxygen". We started to plant tomatoes, beans and chia seeds! We can't wait to be observers as we watch our plants grow. Unit of Inquiry - Deepavali Celebration We also started our new unit How We Express Ourselves. This unit will be running for the rest of the year alongside other units. The central idea is: Cultures express themselves through celebrations.
We started to dive into this unit by exploring the upcoming holiday Deepavali/Diwali. We started to look at the features of the celebration, with Ms Smita coming in and telling us the story behind Deepavali. We also started to make connections to what meaning people assign to the celebration. We made rangolis out of sand, and even celebrated by lighting sparklers! What a fun start to our year long unit.
Mystery Bags One afternoon Ms Bustamante brought out 5 bags with different colour spots on them. She asked us: “Can you order them from lightest to heaviest?” But there was one trick, we had to do this by using our observation skills, but we were only allowed to look not touch! Not only did we have to make a prediction ordering them from lightest to heaviest, but we had to justify our answers as well. "I think the yellow is heaviest because it's so fat" "I think the purple is the lightest because it's standing so straight" "I think the green one is lightest because it looks so small" Next, we agreed that it would be more fair is we could observe the bags once more but feel it in our hands. The order of the bags changed. But Ms Bustamante asked us, how can we really measure which one is heaviest and lightest? We came up with the idea of using scales! We measured each one until we found the one that was heaviest compared to all, and so on. We even found that two were the same weight, how sneaky! Experiential Week Experiential week was a great success! The Kindergarteners and Grade 1s worked together this week to develop their communication skills, social skills, and thinking skills by learning through doing and reflecting! Have a look at some of the activities we got up to this week.
Thank you for attending the Three Way Conferences on Wednesday and supporting your child's learning. It's so refreshing to hear everyones visions for their children.
We have continued to discuss our responsibilities this week, exploring what our personal responsibilities are in class and at school. We even had a special visitor come into class this week to talk to the Kindergarten students about her responsibilities. The special visitor was Ms Tilney, our principal! She told us she has three main responsibilities for the children: 1. Making sure we're safe 2. Making sure we're happy 3. Making sure we're learning Ms Tilney read us a hilarious story about a boy who's responsibility was to make sure Dragons didn't eat spicy salsa... And he failed! The consequences were disastrous. This got us thinking about what happens when we don't do our responsibilities. Take some time this weekend to discuss with your children what your and their responsibilities or jobs are at home and what might happen if they don't get done!
This week we dove right into our next line of inquiry Taking Care of My Mind. The students were quick to make connections with mindfulness, meditation and yoga! We explored why it is important to take care of your mind, and in the library Ms Ally read us The Good Egg by Jory John. In this story the Good Egg gets so stressed he eventually cracks! We agreed none of us want to crack, so we decided to make some sensory bottles as a way to help us calm down.
This week we spent a lot of time practising our literacy routines, and becoming really good at being independent learners. While Ms Bustamante did not get many photos of us in action, she managed to get a great example of students practising 'Read to Self' in our comfy class library!
What is a recipe? Lots of us had heard of a recipe before, but we didn't know how to read one, or the parts of it. We knew a recipe tells you how to make something, so Ms Bustamante showed us a recipe on how to make Play Dough. We learned that recipes have: - A title - Ingredients - Equipment - Instructions There were a lot of lists included! We carefully followed the recipe to make some playdough for class. We made connections to our capacity area. When we played with rainbow rice we had measured how many cups does it take to fill a container, and just like that we had to measure out cups for flour and water. Healthy Smoothies During class we used our knew knowledge of both healthy eating and recipe writing to make our own recipes for smoothies, some we really loved, and others we thought were too sour.
Taking care of my body Our first line of inquiry is: Taking care of my body. This week we heard great show and tells all about different ways we take care of our body, and a reoccurring theme was how important it is to eat healthy! So we started to look at what is healthy food, and how eating healthy is important for taking care of our body. First we tuned in and sorted food into healthy (yellow) and unhealthy (red) groups. Next, we collaboratively worked together to draw a rainbow of foods on a chart of healthy and unhealthy. This chart is currently on our wall, and as we learn more about the foods we can add to it at any point! Things that help me become a better learner We also started to unpack the line of inquiry: "Things that help me become a better learner." We discussed how our classroom helps us learn better. Ms Bustamante had set up an area to do with capacity and these helped us learn better by: Exploring empty, nearly empty, half full, nearly full and full in the sand pit. Science In Science we have been learning about birds' beaks. Specifically, we have been learning about how the shape of their beak can tell us what they eat! We did our own experiment pretending to be birds with different types of beaks, trying to eat different types of food. We used different shaped tweezers, tongs and pegs to mimic birds, and found that certain tools were better at picking up "seeds" (shells), "berries" (beads) and insects!
Not only were the students actively engaged in this experiment, but they made connections and developed fine motor skills. We had so much fun!
An inquiry into measurement - a child's curiousity This week we introduced measurement, and jotted down all of our ideas to what measurement means to us. We read the story Actual Size by Steve Jenkins, and on a page where it showed the actual size of an ant eaters tongue, one of the children posed an inquiry: I think if we put everyones tongue together, it would be the same size as an anteater's tongue. So we decided to investigate this inquiry and see if we could it was true or not. On the next day, Ms Bustamante asked us a teacher's question: "How many blocks long is our tongues? How many blocks long is the anteater's tongue?" This way we could really check who's tongue was truly longer. It was really tricky to measure curvy or twirly objects with blocks, so we decided to straighten it all out. After this we could finally measure using non-standard units of measurement (blocks) and guess what! The anteater's tongue was actually longer than all of ours put together! Measuring our heights Exploring bigger, smaller, taller, shorter, longer outside Comparing length, is it longer or shorter than a crayon?
Working Independently
The children have been working really hard this week; both with their teachers, and independently! We practiced completing activities independently. Look at how hard we've been working all by ourselves.
In week 2, the UOI was introduced as well as our central idea. My teacher question for the children was: What is a routine? We sorted out home routines vs school routines. We also made picture cards to help us become more independent with our morning routine when we arrive at school. Starting next week, children will use their routine cards to take responsibility for following their morning routine independently. Fine Motor Skills Fine motor skills are important for children of all ages to develop. These skills are essential for helping children to have proper pencil grip and become more independent in self-care such as buttoning clothing, putting on shoes, etc. We had a chance to develop our fine motor skills this week by carefully decorating our names with small items and using a cotton bud to dot along the lines. Science
Last week we started exploring what it means to be a scientist! Bert & Ernie from Sesame Street told us that scientists observe and ask questions. We carefully developed our research skills by observing a shell and drawing what we saw in week 1. In week 2 we took our learning outside to observe what was in the garden. What wonderful scientists we have! |
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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