In science this week we finished up our unit on animals. Students finished the covers to their research projects about their favourite animals. We also started on our new science unit which is The Earth's Resources. We will learn the many kinds of resources we have on Earth and how we can help save these resources. On Friday we discussed how we could use the Earth's resources to build our houses. We started making small clay 'bricks' that will be used to build shelters in a new group project. Everyone agreed this was a fun way to end a Friday afternoon and in total we made 709 small bricks. Thanks to Anthony for inspiring us to add up all the ones, tens and hundreds. Our field trip to the Tokyo Water Works Museum next week will further explore water as a resource and how we can conserve it and keep it clean. In Social Studies students talked about the jobs people do and drew pictures and wrote about what they would like to be when they grew up. We have now finished off our unit about Work in the Community and will move onto a new unit entitled Traditions We Share. It is a timely unit as we celebrate Chinese New Year and Japanese Culture Day over the next two weeks. Children participated in three crafts to celebrate Chinese New Year - lantern making, writing secret wishes for their red envelopes and making Chinese zodiac head bands. After a snack of shrimp crackers and braided fried bread we headed upstairs to watch a Taichi performance, listen to Anthony's grandmother play the harmonica as part of a riddle game organised by Ayana and Sumika's mothers. Children were in awe of Tai chi master's demonstration ( sorry about video quality) Thanks to all the parents who helped organise this event. It was a fun celebration. In ELA we continued work on getting to know characters in the stories we read. Children looked at what characters did and said and how knowing these things can help us know the characters and make predictions about what they might do next. We looked at making past tense verbs and writing sentences with these verbs. Children soon realised that there are certain groups according to the way verbs behave when changing to their past tense form.
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In Science this week we almost finished off our unit on animals. We talked a lot about animal groups and did an activity to classify animals by the way they move or their body coverings. Students used their winter break homework projects to write a descriptive paragraph about their animal. We will use this work to make a small book about each animal that children can share with each other and learn about more animals. On Monday students will have a Science quiz on the things they have learnt about animals. We have also taken science out of the classroom too. On campus children have become fascinated with dead cherry tree that is home to various bugs. We have been observing an talking about them quite a bit as well as other living things such as fungus, trees and plants and non living things such as rocks and ice crystals. The weather has been great. In social studies we continued on from last week's market game talking about using money to trade for goods. We made a word web to talk about spending, saving and borrowing. On Friday students talked about doing chores or small jobs for money and how to keep track of the money earned in a chart. In Math we finished the unit on numbers to twenty. Students had fun using connecting cubes to help them understand how to make groups of tens and ones while working on place value. Their homework this week was a review of place value and comparing numbers. In ELA students completed their descriptive writing about their favorite animal, played charades to reinforce verbs in grammar and reviewed short vowel sounds in phonics. Reading this week again focused on getting to know the characters in the books we read and looking at how they change from the beginning to the end of a book. We also talked about making predictions about what characters might do next. We heard from 8 children in Show and Tell. It was very exciting to hear about everyone's winter holidays.
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January 2022
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