Week 8 Term 2

Ida and I are always encouraging the children to take action and use their learning in the real world. Over the last couple of weeks, we have been inundated with reports, photos and emails sharing stories of how K2BeM are continuing their learning away from school. It all started when Miguel shared a video of him playing the musical instrument he made from reused rubbish...and then the floodgates opened! Since then, Sebastian has been busy making signs to promote recycling and posting them all over his condo. Ashwin has been making snowmen out of his rubbish and Saanvi has been creating a penguin out of her waste!  Ananya and Finnley have brought in natural materials they found in their own time to use in our art work (more on that later). Coco brought in a nest she found to show how birds use natural materials in the real world. Ansel has even created his own version of "Caine's Arcade" and is thinking of expanding it! Following this week's cooking, Hana went home and insisted on baking her own version of apple crumble. What's more, everyone keeps sending in peelings, cuttings and so on for our ever growing compost bin! Please keep these stories coming...we LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to share them!

This week, we have focused on the idea of recycling. We researched what happens when something is recycled and created flow charts to illustrate the journey a piece of rubbish makes when it leaves our campus and travels to a recycling plant. These are now on display in the Infant Office! We have also created our own Recycling by tearing up old magazines and glueing the pieces onto the famous recycling insignia.

We have also started to explore the concept of finite natural resources and our shared responsibility in this area. We have looked at the work of the wonderful artist, Andy Goldsworthy, who uses found natural materials to create beautiful pieces of art. We collected sticks, leaves, flower petals, stones and so on (and the things Ananya and Finnley shared) and used them to create our own Goldsworthy inspired pieces. This is something we will continue over the next couple of weeks as we hope to create some collaborative pieces on a fairly large scale both in the classroom and the pod.

Today’s book character dress up day was the icing on the cake of a very successful Book Week. There were so many fantastic characters on display and lots of imagination went into their creation...and kudos to the people who reused materials in their creations! 

Earlier in the week, the children were treated to a lovely, interactive visit by Sarah Mounsey and a delightful puppet show by the unique, Nikole Horkin. On Thursday, we enjoyed spending time with our buddies in G3AnH and, together, we created some very imaginative "thingamajigs." It was also really great that the huge majority of the poems K2BeM brought in to share on Tuesday were poems they had penned themselves.

In Writing Workshop, the children have started to create their own pieces. They have been reminded of the importance of planning your writing before committing pencil to paper and, this time around, this has included carefully considering the type of book they wish to create. As the unit progresses, the children will be invited to try and incorporate some of Mo Willems' craft moves into their writing. At this time of year, we also begin to focus more on some of the writing conventions such as punctuation and spelling.

In Reading Workshop, the children have continued working in small groups to perform familiar texts, taking on the roles of characters by using different voices. They have focused on fluency and expression and have studied videos of themselves reading out loud to think about where they might improve.

In Mathematics, we have been focusing on number relationships and the many different ways numbers can be combined to make a given total. We have used the Tiles as a way to illustrate this outside of a ten or twenty frame format and the children are being encouraged to work with greater speed as we become more efficient at instantly recalling number facts. Next week, alongside our ongoing number work, we will introduce measurement and explore measuring using non-standard units.

Lastly, it was great to finally see our Boarder Buddy, David, again this week...he has been super busy with his mock exams! He came to see us and shared his passion for cricket with us all.

Have a great weekend.