The end of the year has arrived already! It has been a wonderful year full of learning, fun and friendship. The children in K1 have grown so much and are so ready for their new challenge in K2. It has been a pleasure teaching these children. They have made me laugh and have made me so proud. I shall miss them all dearly but wish them all the very best in their new class, wherever that may be. Sports Day Class Party
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Wow! What a week. We spent a lot of this week creating stories in our preferred methods. We can't wait to present the stories on Tuesday at the class party. We also worked together as a group to paint Mr Robot in our class! Art Exhibition Tiong Bahru Playground This week we were provided with so many opportunities to learn from Big Teachers (like Ms Bustamante) and Little Teachers (like K2, Grade 2, and Grade 4). There are many benefits of children teaching each other. Some benefits are confidence building, learning by teaching, developing social skills and communication skills. Throughout the week learners from Grade 4 took student action to teach us about what it means to be principled, an aspect of our Learner Profile. They read us a story, played with puppets and even made a board game for us to play. How informative and fun! We also had the opportunity to collaborate with Grade 2 and Kindergarten 2 in order to make collages of habitats. We had so much fun working all together. Finally, we had an exciting session with the K2s doing group work. We worked on stations involving number sense, building 3D shapes with playdough, searching for magnetic objects in rainbow rice and collaborating on an art piece reflecting on our favourite moments of the year. Just as K1, we planned out our Personal Projects. We wrote our own stories and individually chose how we wanted to tell them. Some of us are making puppets, acting it out, singing our stories, creating books out of paper or on the iPads! We had to use our planning and thinking skills because we had to tell Ms Bustamante all the materials and resources we would need to make our stories. This way Ms Bustamante can have everything ready for next week when we will independently create our stories following the plans we made. Mixing Rainbow Rice
These week we explored the feelings and emotions that stories cause. The K1s are experts at discussing how stories make them feel. Some stories make you feel happy because they make you laugh, while others make you feel sad. We made connections to stories mummies and daddies read at home that make us feel things. We also explored what emotions look like on your face and body. For example, we noticed that when people were angry their eyebrows scrunched up and they often crossed their arms or balled their hands into fists. We used mirrors to record what our faces looked like when we felt different emotions. We decided to extend this line of inquiry, looking at how authors and illustrators tell and show feelings or emotions of the characters in stories. We explored how illustrators use colour to show us how the characters feel. We observed that bright colours were usually used for positive emotions, and dark/blue colours were used for negative. Then we read a new story, which showed emotions in a whole different way. In the storybook, Niko Draws a Feeling by Bob Raczka, Niko drew how sadness felt, rather than drawing a sad face. This inspired us to paint some feelings and emotions rather than pictures. It was tricky for us to pain happiness rather than paint a smile. We used our creativity to express what we felt as best as we could! In Early Years, we look for opportunities to take learning outside. The advantages of outdoor learning have been heavily researched and include the following benefits:
This week we took some word work outside, giving the children a new way to explore sight words and the alphabet. We played sight word games involving searching and bean bag tosses. We also challenged the K1s to find the hidden alphabet letters, then work together without help to order them! Activities like this not only support the development of literacy knowledge, but also allow children to work on their ATLs (learning skills such as, communication, gross-motor skills and resolving conflict.) This week I posed a simple question - where do stories come from? Some of the answers were: books! Miss Bustamante! Uhh, movies? So I took the conversation in a different direction - why do we have stories? We all agreed on two simple reasons - we like them (they make us feel good) and they teach us lessons. With this in mind, we looked at cave paintings. Did you know, a long long time ago, before our Mummies and Daddies (and even Grandmas and Grandpas) were born, there were no books? Instead stories were only told by speaking and drawing pictures in caves! When we looked at the paintings we imagined what stories they were telling. We noticed a lot of them had animals - and that the people who drew them must really like animals. Out of all the cave paintings we looked at - none of them had make-believe animals like ogres and fairies. Instead they were all pictures of animals and people that we could really see! We realised that their stories were connected to the lives that people live. This connected to our line of inquiry how stories connect to our experiences. We then created our own K1 Cave Painting stories, to tell everyone about our own experiences. Have a look at our Cave Paintings with stories attached outside K1 next time you’re at the school! 3D shapes Squares or cubes? Triangles or cones? This week we learned about some very special (not flat on paper) shapes! We spotted them in the classroom and in magazines. We even conducted experiments, finding out which 3D shapes can roll, stack, and slide. Symmetry
Symmetry is like a reflection! When you fold it in half and its the same on each side it’s symmetrical! Today the K1’s showed that they were risk-takers and committed by sharing some of their learning from the current unit, How We Express Ourselves. Their performance of Goldilocks and the Three Bears allowed the children to practise their communication and presentation skills while sharing some of the many ways they have explored telling stories. They also practised being reflective by watching their performance beforehand, and thinking about what they were doing really good, and what they could better! I was absolutely astounded to see the final product. This week we also explored numeracy through the story of Three Billy Goats Gruff. They made connections to Goldilocks, as the sizes of characters in Three Billy Goats Gruff were also big, medium and small. They ordered characters from smallest to biggest, and recorded data on sheets.
What a wonderful week it has been! The children really enjoyed going to watch Gretel and Hansel in the theatre! There were lots of laughs on whether it should be Hansel and Gretel or Gretel and Hansel! After watching the engaging performance, we compared the differences between the book and the show. It was fascinating to see that the same story can be interpreted in different ways. Student-Led Conferences were a huge success! It was inspiring to see the K1 students so excited to share their learning. I am overwhelmed at what confident independent learners they have become. Best job ever! The great thing about an IB school is the continuance of the programme for their entire school careers (PYP into MYP into DP). As they transition up through the PYP and into the MYP, the Grade 5 students have an exhibition. This provides students the opportunity to work collaboratively to conduct an in-depth inquiry into real life topics. It also provides us with the opportunity to celebrate their learning and transition into middle school.
The PYP Exhibition was held this week! The K1 students joined their Grade 2 buddies to explore all the group work the Grade 5's have been working on. It was a wonderful experience for everyone involved. This week we learned about 'Word Work,' the third aspect of our Daily 5 routine. Everyday, the children have been choosing whether they want to independently work on Read to Self, Work on Writing, or Word Work. They have grown into such independent learners! With Easter coming up, some children showed great interest in Easter themed activities. Therefore, I provided them with the opportunity to dye boiled eggs! We became thinkers by planning out a design before dyeing the eggs. In order to do this process art, we had to think in several steps. First we planned out a design, thinking about whether it would work on something small. Next we drew the design onto the eggs, sometimes making adjustments to make it fit. Finally we chose our colours and watched the magic happen. The end results were amazing and everyone seemed to have oodles of fun!
This week we dug a little deeper into our Unit of Inquiry and continued to explore the line of inquiry how stories are told. We explored different ways of telling familiar stories. The children worked together, which helped them work on their group decision-making skills and collaboration skills. As the week progressed, the children became more confident to share their stories and retell familiar ones. They had the chance to share their favourite stories with their Grade 2 buddies.
We have begun our final term in K1. The children enjoyed sharing their adventures of the holidays but were also very excited to see each other. This week we welcomed a new student to the class and worked together to remind each other of classroom expectations and following the 4 Bees - Be Respectful, Be Responsible, Be Safe and Be Honester, to help everyone to be happy and to learn at school. All of the K1s demonstrated how caring they were to help each other settle back into the school routines. We also introduced our new Unit of Inquiry - How We Express Ourselves. Our Central Idea is ‘stories are interpreted in many ways’ and we first of all shared our understanding of what a story is. Here are some of the children’s initial ideas:
The classroom has been set up with different provocations about stores and the children have had fun exploring them. We started to explore the first line of inquiry how stories are told by exploring the story We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen in many different ways. We read the book, acted it out, told it through puppets, sequenced some cards, made sensory pictures, told it through music and finally watched the movie. They were surprised to find out that there were so many different ways to tell a story!
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AuthorWe are a class of 4 and 5 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 2019
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