We started the week by welcoming a very special visitor to K2BeM...Luca!! He was visiting Singapore with his family and decided to drop by the class and catch up with all his old friends. It was lovely to see him and, within 5 minutes, it was as if he had never been away.
This week, we kicked off our new Unit of Study, “Arts Festival.” We started by thinking about what we already understand by the terms “the arts” and “performance” and recorded our ideas as thought showers. Over the coming weeks, we will explore the different elements of performance and, hopefully, incorporate many of them into our K2 Arts Festival on May 9th. Although each class will be performing their own section, the K2 Arts Festival is very much a collective experience. Using the visual and performing arts to convey a message, we hope the production will explore the idea of Service at home, at school and beyond. The process reinforces the UWCSEA Profile skills of creativity and communication but a significant part of the process also involves collaboration. At this stage, the children are bouncing ideas off each other and trying things out together. As teachers, we see our roles as facilitators to guide them through the process and highlight their options but, as much as possible, we want the performances to come from them. It promises to be an exciting journey. We do not want to give too much away as we want everything to be a surprise for you on but here is a little peek at what is in store...
Next week, we will begin work on two collaborative “Friendship Blankets,” one for our friends at Happy Lodge and the other for the Kuma School in Cambodia. The idea is for each child to design and create their own section of the blankets which will then be sewn together and presented to the different organisations.
In Literacy, we have moved on to our fifth Writing Workshop unit, “Persuasive Writing.” In this unit, the children will compose “opinion pieces,” sharing their views and preferences through a combination of drawing and writing. Initially, this involves the children noticing and selecting an issue in their lives and, by thinking about how to solve the problem, determining the intended audience. The next step is to explore the ‘best’ way to share their ideas-signs, adverts, notes, posters, reviews and, of course, letters.
In Reading Workshop, the children have started to explore how “Readers Get to Know Characters.” This unit focuses on comprehension skills such as inferring, activating prior knowledge and synthesis through personal connections or empathising with characters.
It was wonderful to welcome you all to our Mathematics focused Workshare this week. We hope you enjoyed finding out about how we use rotations and how we explore addition and subtraction in a variety of ways using different media. Hopefully, you also went away with a better understanding of how we encourage the children to develop more and more efficient strategies to solve addition and subtraction problems. I think some of you need to practice your number facts to ten and then come back and challenge us to another round of "Quickdraw: Cowboys and Cowgirls."
This week, we also begin tuning-in to our latest Mathematics unit, “Data Handling and Probability.” The children enjoyed sorting and grouping different objects according to given or chosen criteria, explaining their reasoning throughout.
Lastly, a big thank you to the parents who organised and manned the Easter activities on Thursday afternoon. It was the perfect way to end the short week and the children went hopping home wearing their Easter bunny ears! To anyone celebrating this week, we hope you have a great time.
Reminders
*PLEASE SEND IN A WHITE T-SHIRT AND DENIM SHORTS/SKIRT/JEANS ASAP
*Public Holiday-Thursday 1st May-SCHOOL CLOSED
*Staff Professional Development Day-Friday 2nd May-SCHOOL CLOSED
*K2 Arts Festival-Friday 9th May 9.00am in the auditorium
Have a lovely weekend.
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