What a great first week!

We have just finished out first full week of school. We have been very busy this week with our Unit of Inquiry learning about the weather and checking each day what Phnom Penh looks like on Yahoo Weather. We worked in groups and each group was given a type of weather to discuss and brainstorm about. It was a completely open-ended activity where the children could just put down on their groups piece of paper anything they thought of. We then shared our ideas as a whole class at the end. 

We also spent time making an essential agreement for our classroom. This will help us remember how we all want to feel when we are in our classroom and what we want everyone to do when they're in our room. We used our hand prints to sign the agreement.

We did a lot of work in small groups this week  for Unit of Inquiry, Language and Maths. We talked about what it was like to work in groups and what you need to do in a group to successfully complete an activity. Communication and good listeners were the two main goals we worked on this week.

We spent this week reviewing Language by going back over our Jolly Phonics and making sure we could remember each letter name and sound. We also spent some time on long vowel sounds and blends. We also wrote our first Journal entry about our weekend and the children did a great job writing in their books independently for the first time in Grade One! We practiced our handwriting and concentrated on remembering where to place letters on the line when writing. We also checked that we could remember how to write both the upper case and lower case letters all correctly. 

In Maths we have also been doing a lot of revision. We practiced writing our numbers and making sure they were written correctly, we did a lot of counting - all the way to 100, skip counting in twos, fives and tens and singing lots of fun number songs. In small groups we rotated around various activities which included - showing different ways to make numbers from 1-20, snakes and ladders, dice addition game, practiced writing our numbers, created pictures using different shapes and much more!



Wednesday was our first swimming lesson and it was FANTASTIC! Everyone in the class got to try out our new swimming facilities and everyone gave it the thumbs up!




We started Friday with "Team Time." This is where We as a whole grade get together and share our learning together, sing songs, listen to books and enjoy interacting with others from different classes. This week Ms Rachelle ran team time and shared a really great story called "The night before First Grade.

We also gave out two learner profile certificates to each class. A big congratulations to Raymond and Eito on receiving a very special award each.

Raymond showed that he was a real COMMUNICATOR. Raymond is always very enthusiastic about sharing his thoughts and ideas. He listens well to others and will always participate in group activities. Outstanding effort for our first week at school Raymond!

Eito showed that he was being PRINCIPLED. Eito always joins in all of our classroom activities and encourages others to participate. He shares all equipment in and out of the class and has even brought a football to school so he can play with his friends at beak time and lunch time. Great idea Eito!

We had our first visit to the computer lab on Friday. We meet Mr Matt who is the IT coach and we all got our new usernames and passwords. Mr matt talked to us about logging on and logging off. We even got to play a cool "Cat in the Hat" game. 

Friday was such a busy day! We also met our Class buddies for this year. We are partnered up with Mr James and his Grade 5 class. During the morning we had buddy reading in our class and then the grade fives invited us in the afternoon to their class to play games. We had a great time meeting our new buddies and chatting to the "big kids." It really is a great opportunity for our Grade Ones to have buddies that are higher up the school and we can't wait to see them again!

And finally we had a birthday in our class. A very Happy Birthday to you Charvy, I hope you had a fantastic party at Kids City.

Hope you all have a great weekend!