We had a busy week with all our preparations for the science fair and art show. We still managed to start a few new units and get through a lot of work. We've also been translating our recent experience at the field trip to our playtime and the students have been spending a lot of time looking for bugs at the park (they certainly are much less squeamish when confronted by insects.) We started the week with an assessment on mental mathematic strategies. Then we moved onto numbers to 120. We have been introducing new activities for our maths groups around sorting numbers from 30 - 90 in tens (in both numerals and written form), counting in tens and ones and using two, 2 digit numbers to add together and reach a target number. The main focus of all the activities is getting students to differentiate between the tens and ones mentally and this will help prepare them for the upcoming addition and subtraction to 120 unit! We finished off our formative assessments for our report writing this week. We also started to look at research strategies using both a library's book catalogue and the internet. The main skill we practiced was searching for a very specific key word then expanding our search until we found books or information. We choose to research tiger sharks as a class and to start off we entered the phrase 'tiger shark' into the school book catalogue. There were no matches so we decided to expand the search to 'sharks', which also had no hits (which is untrue as we have a few books all about sharks.) We then expanded to 'Ocean Creatures' and then we were able to find some books to research. We finished our unit on non fiction books this week (fairly early on) and I used this time to have some reading conferences with the students before they start doing the reading assessments in about a weeks time. One area of focus in the conferences was answering comprehension questions effectively and avoid giving opinion unless asked specifically for it. An area that students found difficult was, 'Why did the author write this book?' and I was able to spend some time explaining what exactly is expected. Hopefully this leads to students zipping up the reading levels to get to those chapter books everyone is looking forward to! We resumed our social studies unit this week but unfortunately, a lot of the time was taken with our science presentations! We still managed to get through some work and we looked at how there are different groups within our lives and how we can belong to more than one. The main groups that we tackled were: Family groups (and they can belong to a lot of different kinds), School groups and Community groups. The students sorted different activities that each group would participate in and compared and contrasted different groups to each other. Our class itself turned our to have a lot of different groups inside it but we all belong to one big school group of G1B! This week Amai won the prize raffle and chose to bring in a toy for 1 day. Shinnosuke won the Ms Lindsey prize and is going to chose where he sits next week.
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January 2022
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