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
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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.
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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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