Week 3 Term 2

Last week, the children presented their “Passion Projects” to their classmates...and did an absolutely FANTASTIC job! The children worked so hard on their presentations and really took ownership of their learning.

A multitude of passions were shared across the class and the children brought in lots of interesting props, artefacts and, even, costumes to support their presentations. We had lightsabers, dinosaur masks, paint palettes, soccer balls (or footballs as Mr. Morley calls them!), lego models, lots of paintings and drawings as well as loads of lovely action photos! We even had a couple of wonderful homemade movies! Each and every child shared their passion confidently and clearly and happily fielded questions from the audience. Ida and I are feeling very proud today!

A huge thank you to the parents who gave up their time to share their passions again this week. Luckily, the classroom is still in one piece after Anu (Gitanjali's mum) shared her passion for chemisty. The children (and teachers) were mightily impressed with Shripriya's (Jaisimh's mum) films that she had written and directed. We have been promised seats at the Hollywood premiere! Although we are moving on to a new unit, if you have a particular passion you would like to share, just drop me an email and we will find a time. We have created a short iMovie to showcase the Passion Projects and, all being well, you will have the opportunity to enjoy this at the upcoming Student-Led Conferences.

Next week, we will begin tuning into our fourth Unit of Study, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” In this unit, we will investigate how systems can be put into place to care for our environment and community and how our actions can make a difference through reducing, reusing and recycling resources.

In Reading Workshop, we have focused on predicting and inferring. The children chose a selection of new books and practiced making predictions about what might happen next based on what they understand about story structures, characters, picture cues and so on. They have also started exploring the idea of inferring, thinking about the characters in the books, trying to imagine what they are thinking or feeling even when it does not say so in the text. This is an area we will continue to explore in more detail over the next couple of weeks.

In Writing Workshop, the children continue to create thoughtful and imaginative pieces...and some of them are even brining in poems they have written at home! We have spent some time analysing the techniques, or craft, of poets and tried including some of these ideas in our own writing...with magnificent results! If you are lucky, we might also share some of our poems with you at the Student-Led Conferences and will work on revising and editing them over the coming fortnight.

In Mathematics, we have been working on practicing and refining our “Addition Stories” and having a try at introducing more complex problems. We are becoming more efficient at using the classroom resources to help us, particularly the Twenty Frames and the Hundred Square. Over the coming weeks, we will move onto subtraction (and how this works in tandem with addition) and continue to explore number families, before focusing on the concept of place value.

Last Thursday, it was lovely to see all the children dressed up in red, yellow and gold for Chinese New Year. K2BeM joined the rest of the school for a wonderful Lion Dance in the plaza and we finished the week by enjoying some Chinese New Year crafts in the classroom. A big thank you to the parents who came in to share a Chinese New Year story and lead the activities.

On Monday 3rd February, we will send home appointment times for the Student Led Conferences on Friday 14th February, so, please look out for them in the Blue Folders.

Have a great weekend.