Learning about living things

This week we Pre K started our new inquiry unit around the transdisciplinary theme, "How the World Works". The central idea is, "Living things go through many changes."

I started by asking the children, "What is a living thing?"

Although these words were a little tricky for them, once I gave examples of things such as animals, plants, mountains and water, they were pretty good at knowing which were living. Mountain, rocks and water were hard for them to understand as they are part of nature but aren't living.

In groups, they sorted pictures into the 2 categories and glued them to the poster sheet.

In math, children worked independently on skip counting by 2s with worksheets and the students who finished and wanted a challenge did skip counting in 5s too. Using a 1-100 chart, the children were able to count in 5s and circle the numbers                                                                    5, 10, 15, 20 etc.

For handwriting we worked on letter M and N, as well as looking at the initial sounds of I, J, K and L in their phonics books. Every day we are practising our sight words. This week's words are: blue, yellow, jump, three and here.

Feeling hot hot hot

I hope everyone had a nice break from school. It is definitely the case that many children are still tired and it's taking them time to adjust back to the early wake up time. I had a great time in Australia and the children were given a chocolate koala treat from me today to eat at home. We've been able to use the gym a few times this week as well as the library twice because primary school students are away.

In Japanese, the children made hiragana flash cards for ra, ri, ru, re and ro and danced to the '50 characters Ninja' song.

In literacy, we have practised writing our names, rhyming words, identifying initial sounds like /r/ in rhino and we did a word search of simple sight words. We have revised our sight words and I hope the children are practising the 23 word cards they made and took home before the summer break. We also did a cut and paste spelling activity of three letter words with the short /i/ sound in the middle.

Our new words this week are: big, look, two, run and funny. 

In math lessons we have practised counting to 100, skip counting and simple addition between 0-20.

For fun we did a giant colouring activity where every student got a picture that would join together to create a collaborative colouring in poster. Some students chose to try and match their colour schemes with another student's sheet while others did theirs independently. The final piece looks pretty cool!