Summer Vacation arrives

This week it's fair to say we are all tired but excited to have a break from school. 😅

On Monday, the children practised their short vowel sounds again by working together to find the missing vowel in a three letter word. They are definitely getting better at knowing what sound matches the letter.

In other phonics lessons, we used their phonics books to match upper case letter to their lower case letters such as Ee, Ff, Gh, and Hh. They also looked at pictures of words starting with these letters and had to write what the letter was.

With help from me, the children made sight words cards so that on the holiday they can practise memorising 24 words we have learnt so far. This week's words are: come, see, up, one and help.

In math, we practised our counting up to 100 as well as counting by 2s, 5s and doing simple addition.
Today we used math cards to match the number to a picture of the number such as 6 sticks with the word 'six' and the number 6.

On Tuesday, afternoon we had centre time and played snakes and ladders, puzzles and memory game.

For inquiry, we watched the video Ms Yui filmed of the children as they cleaned up our classroom last week when it got messed up by Ms Aurora. We looked at which students were really working hard to pick up toys as well as they ones that weren't really helping. Luckily almost everyone helped a lot! So this reflection really shows how much better the children understand that teamwork is important.

On Saturday I am flying to Australia (Brisbane and Melbourne) for 3 weeks. I hope everyone has a fantastic break and if your children can do a little handwriting, RAZ reading and practise their sight words that would be AMAZING!

Enjoy summer,
Ms Rachael.

Stuck inside all week!

Sadly Pre K B have been stuck inside all week because of the heat and rain. We have been able to play in the gym but the children have a lot of energy to burn. I hope the weather clears up for the weekend.

This week, we revised the short /o/  and /u/ vowel sounds and did a cut and paste spelling activity. Our sight words 'not', 'play', 'red' 'my' and 'it'  have been mastered by most students over the last 2 weeks.

I introduced them to Raz books this week by projecting the level aa books on the screen and we read them together. We read 'Big', 'Funny Cat' and 'The Zoo.' I hope that by doing this every day as well as what they do at home they will soon be reading simple sentences independently.

In math, the children used a number line to do simple addition up to 10 as well as counters and blocks to do some bigger questions like 10 ᐩ 10 and even bigger challenge of putting all of unifix blocks together! They found out it made 100.

For Japanese, the students learnt the hiragana ya, yu and yo. (や, よ, ゆ).
On Friday afternoon we watched Boss Baby as we could only use the gym for 20 minutes.

For summer break I will be sending some homework for the children to practise. I understand many people are going away but if you get them to do 5 mins of handwriting a day that would be fantastic.

Yay, finishing our first IB unit

This week is the last week of our first inquiry unit: Who We Are. The central idea, "Communication with others impacts our relationships" has been the focus and now we are finalising our assessment to see what they children learnt. One of the last activities we did was a human knot in groups of 7. The children had to untangle themselves without letting go. They found it tricky but it was fun.

The final assessment was a massive clean up challenge on Friday. When we went to the park, someone (Ms Aurora) came in and messed up our classroom on purpose and when we came back, I told the children a big earthquake had messed it up. They believed me and straight away they went to work tidying everything up. I was really impressed that it only took them 10 minutes to pick up all the toys.

In phonics, we have continued to practise our short vowel sounds every morning. This is something we did on Thursday.

For math, we have continued with our regular counting up to 100 as well as some simple addition using dice.

Our field trip to Nilfrel in Suita was a lot of fun, the animals were amazing and all the children loved the pigmy hippos. Of course, it was a long and tiring day so Mr James and I were very happy that the children didn't complain too much and walked a long way to the park for lunch.

Rainy season has arrived!

After a rainy morning on Monday we made the most of the sandpit at the park and everyone loved making things with wet sand. Taz, Yushou and Keita had a takoyaki shop and Rudraksh, Diti and Manish were making Mt Everest with a tunnel.

That day we revised our short vowel sounds and on Tuesday we did a cut and paste activity where there students had to make the 3 letter word using the picture as a clue. On Thursday, we played Rhyming Bingo in which I would call out a word that rhymes with one of their pictures, and they had to put a counter on it. If they got 5 in row they had to shout Bingo!

In math, they worked in pairs to do an activity where they had to count how many objects they found in the picture and work out the addition answer. It was tricky for most children as the answers were over 10. Also, they found it hard to find all the objects in the picture. We also did simple addition using a number line.

We read a book called The Gift of Nothing for our unit of inquiry. It was a story about a cat who can't think of anything to get for his friend. He goes to the store and looks at all the cool things but decides he will give his friend a box of nothing. His friend doesn't understand the gift so the cat explains that he is the gift, because friends are more important than material possessions. Rudraksh suggested that maybe the box was also the gift, because what child doesn't love a box to play with?

We also read a book called Dylan the Doctor. It was about a doctor who was always caring for his friends but then he got so tired. So his friends showed that they were caring and put him to bed and looked after him. We talked about responsibilities that different people have such as doctors, teachers, police officers and firefighters. We also read a book called Be Kind about a girl who gets laughed at by her classmates and another girl thinks about how she can help her feel better. 

For art and craft we did some painting to make a butterfly by folding it in half and then imprinting one pattern onto the other half.

Finally, Friday was Japanese Culture Day and everyone looked very cute in their yukata and jinbei. I'll post the photos on Seesaw.