A big week for G1B and me! A big thank to everyone for your well wishes. I am pleased to report that Mrs Hassey and little Rob are recovering well at hospital and should be coming home next week. Our week continued as usual thanks to Mr Ivan covering the class and we were able to get through a lot of work! We started our new unit on ordinal numbers this week, and started off by reviewing the ordinal numbers both in numerals and written. We then moved onto positioning words (before, after, between, next to) then onto relational positioning (2nd from the left, 4th from the right etc.) This will continue through to next week where we will have our summative assessment. We have also started to review some addition and subtraction to get ready for next term's units. We began our summative assessments for creative writing and I was very impressed to see that most people have finished their assessments in 2 days. Pretty impressive as it includes all the planning, editing and publishing! For those who finished quickly, we will be making actual books for our stories which will be hung outside our classroom for everyone to read. Please feel free to pop in and have a squiz if you're in the neighbourhood! We continued with our unit on characters this week and looked at relating the character's actions to ourselves and being able to 'Picture walk' to help us remember the characters actions and reasons as well as making connections to the text and illustrations (the pictures sometimes tell a different story to what is written!) We will be finishing the unit with a character study next week where students will choose their favourite character so far and produce a poster all about them. On Tuesday, Mr Ivan continued our unit on 'Who works at our school' and all of G1 interviewed Ms Yukiko about her role at school. They all prepared questions to ask her beforehand and then finished off a poster to be hung outside on display. On Thursday we started our new unit on 'Being a good helper at school' and we looked at ways children could solve problems positively at school (with an emphasis on not being prompted) and how spot problems before they occur. We had 2 prize draws this week as we missed one last week! The lucky winners were Mina and Reo. We also had a new draw called the, 'Ms Lindsey prize' for the most responsible and neat and tidy student this week. That prize went to Lyla! Well done everybody!
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It was a short week but we managed to get a lot done. We took advantage of the weather again and went outside everyday to the baseball field. A lot of the students enjoyed bug hunting and they even managed to find some shedded snake skin which is now on my desk so they can use the magnifying glasses to look at it. Mathematics. We finished our unit this week on shapes. We worked on halves and quarters in the beginning of the week and we made sure that our fractions were equal to each other, we even managed to touch on the numerator and denominators as well. We also looked at sorting shapes and deciphering some of the tricky language which may crop up in the assessment. Next week we will look at ordinal numbers and positioning for the next unit. Writing. We continued our unit on creative writing this week and most of the students finished their first draft, ready for publishing on Monday. There were a lot of ideas spread across the stories and every one is unique (if not slightly strange.) We looked at editing and dictionary usage as well to help our editing of our work and next week the students will attempt to write their own stories from scratch with no teacher assistance. I look forward to the results! Reading. Our work on characters went on this week. The students were giving their opinions on the characters in stories. We looked at describing their actions as well as their feelings and reasons why they act like they do. We spent a lot of time with our Charlie and Lola books but also looked at Stuck by Oliver Jeffers and 'Beatrice Doesn't Want To' by Laura Numeroff but the students were able to choose any text they wished to investigate as long as they could produce evidence for their arguments. In exciting news, Mr Guy finished our class project in art and our class now has Richard the Reading Octopus hanging from the ceiling. He doesn't have arms yet but as the children read books at school and home, we will make paper chain links to cover the ceiling! Social Studies. We continued to look at 'Who works at school' this week. We had discussions on why people need to work and what skills they would need to do their jobs properly. We talked about how teachers help us at school and started a joint wall presentation with G1A in the play room. Some children's work on how teachers help us have been put up. We even managed to interview Ms Natasha and will have another section about principals up very soon! Next week we will interview Ms Yukiko and find out how her work is integral to helping our school work at peak efficiency! Show and Tell. Show and tell was a massive success again and thank you to everyone who put so much effort into their presentations. There won't be any more show and tells this term but Ms Allison and myself are talking about how show and tell will look next term. The winner of the prize box was ....... Another full week in G1B. I'm very sorry that I was sick on Monday but luckily the students had Mr Ivan and Mr Kish help out. Lucky for them as I know Mr Kish is a great reader! We also took advantage of the lovely autumn weather and spent a lot of time at the baseball field playing football and occasionally rolling around like silly people (I apologise for any grass stains on their uniforms.) We are starting our show and tells again next week, so the students have their presentation forms to complete over the weekend. The topic is, 'My family' and we'd like the students to tell us about their family units! We're going to keep it to immediate family for the moment (so no Uncles and Aunties just now). This fits in with our theme of, 'Everyone is different' for Social Studies (and also gives you a chance to rummage around those old photo albums you may have....) Mathematics. We continued our unit on shapes this week and looked at the properties of 3D shapes. We set up some mathematics stations with activities ranging from recording tessellations, interpreting 3D diagrams, rolling/stacking/sliding 3D shapes and making nets. We also looked at symmetry in shapes and the students made worksheets for each other to solve. This topic will continue into next week as well with even more complicated shapes being introduced (I hope we get to dodecahedrons!) Writing. We started our new creative writing unit this week and it's really closely tied into our work in reading. We looked at story elements in the beginning of the week and looked how every story has a beginning, middle and end. We also look at making our own characters for our own stories. As we started to go through our writing method, we wrote our own story based on Monkey the anaconda (the students chose it) who can turn gold when he eats a peanut butter sandwich (the students have very strange imaginations....) Reading. We also started a new unit in reading this week, we are looking at the characters that we read about in our books. This week we look at identifying who the main character of a book is, what kind of things they like, what kind of things they do and how they make us feel. The students also looked at telling recounts about the event in the book using our five-finger retell technique and this will help them with their reading assessments coming up this month. The unit also tied into our work on creating characters for our writing and we used elements from our reading lessons in our writing lessons to help better plan and structure our stories. Social Studies. This week in social studies the students looked at 'Who makes the rules?' Firstly we looked at why there are rules in the first place and learned they are mainly based around 4 principles; - They keep us safe. - They help us learn. - They help us get along. - They help us be fair. They looked at different scenarios and discussed which was the better way to decide which rules were implemented, either everybody voting on the rules or just 'leaders' voting on the rules (as the government does.) Most students felt that letting everyone vote felt that they everybody could have their say. We then looked at some rules we know about (mainly traffic and road rules) and what the reasoning behind them were. We even had time to look at some road signs from overseas and what they meant and a big thank you to Amai and Ian for translating some of the Spanish road signs we looked up! And the winner of the prize box was........ Ian! Who took home an awesome robot arm!
We had a normal week this week (with the exception of Pink day!) We started a lot of new units as well and the students seem to be enjoying the new material we are going through. We did manage to fit in a mystery reader though this week, a big thank you to Mr O'Neill for coming in and reading an Aussie book for us! Mathematics. We had our summative assessment for subtraction this week. A lot of people found it a little hard, especially when it asked 10-5=7- _ ! We will be revisiting subtraction later in the year to help us refresh our memory and deal with larger sums. We started our unit on shapes this week. We focused on 2D shapes for now and spent most of the week sorting them into groups based on sides and corners. We looked at circles, triangles, rectangles, squares, rhombuses, trapeziums (or trapezoids if you're from America), hexagons and octagons. Students picked up a lot quickly so we even explored shapes in traffic signals and parallel lines! We will continue shapes next week and explore 3D shapes. Show and tell! The students had a great time presenting something for the class in show and tell this week. I'm sorry I don't have anymore photos but I can honestly say everyone did a fantastic job! There will be no show and tell next week but we will continue with it the week after! To clear up any confusion, I am wearing my very special 'listening' hat in the photos to remind the students that we should give listeners our full attention when presenting! Writing. This week we had our summative assessment for narrative writing. The students were expected to follow the writing method and write a narrative paragraph without the help of the teacher! Most students were able to finish this week and began to write some more sensory poetry for our poetry wall outside our classroom. We're hoping that G3B can read our poem and guess what we were writing about! Reading. Our writing leads into our new reading unit as well as we are looking at rhyming poetry. We looked at why word rhyme and how they are used in books to help us read and keep in rhythm. We read a lot of Hairy McClary and Roald Dahl and identified the rhyming couplets in the text and even had a quick sneak peek of limericks. I even managed to find some old (and very gross) poetry I used to read from Australia when I was young, so I apologise if students start reciting rhyming couplets about picking noses at home. Social Studies. For Social Studies this week we were looking at rules and why they exist. We looked at rules that help keep us safe, help us get along, help us be fair and help us learn. We even had a class discussion about the rules at home and I learned a lot about what your expectations of them are (like not jumping on the sofa.....there was a lot about that.) The prize box winner this week was...Katherine again! My goodness this girl must of swallowed a rabbit's foot! Here she is with some more erasers! Lastly, our birthday people for this week were: Shinnosuke, Sumiaki and Hanna! It was the first week back and it was a very busy one! We had a lot of ground to cover but we also had our Halloween celebration and a field trip one after the other. The class managed to get through a lot of work though and I'm glad everyone came back refreshed and ready to go. Mathematics. We tied up all the subjects for our subtraction of numbers 1-10 this week. We tackled a very tricky subject of using addition to solve subtraction problems. This required us to carefully read the question, identify the numbers and what they are (the whole or the part of the number) and then using a number bond to help us visualise the problem. Here's an example: Ms Allison has some pencils. She gives Ms Rey 5 and then has 4 left. How many pencils did she have in the beginning? ? - 5 = 4 5 and 4 are parts of the whole number, therefore adding them together will give us the whole; 5 + 4 = 9 This will serves us well in the assessment which we will have on Monday! Writing. We have our big summative assessment next week for narrative writing, so in the little time we had for writing this week we looked at how we can solve problems independently and some of the grammar that would need to be used. We did a lot of work with our dictionaries to help with our spelling and worked on using the correct plurals for nouns. Reading. For reading this week we wrapped up most of our unit on, 'Tackling Trouble.' This week we looked at rereading to make sense of the sentence and retelling stories individually using sequencing words (which we also tackled in writing) and the retelling stories in partners. These were good skills to learn as they will be used throughout the students school life. We are even hoping that we might be able to observe Mr Ronchetti's class when they are reading to see how the year 6 students recount stories and make meaning. Social studies. This lesson for this week in Social Studies was, 'How can we learn from each other?' We looked at how all of us are different people but we share similarities as well. We also discussed how we could share our likes, dislikes with our peers and how they could benefit us at school. On Friday we looked at how to be good listeners and tried to talk about ourselves for 2 minutes straight, which we found was much harder that it sounds! Winner of the prize box this week.... ...was Shinnosuke! He chose a cool boomerang which I hope he will use in a very large and open space! Lastly. We have a huge array of photo's from our events this week. I would like to say thank you to Molly's mum for accompanying us on our field trip and for taking such lovely photos. HALLOWEEN!Field Trip! |
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January 2022
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