Highlights from our week!

Mystery Reader

A very big THANK YOU to Lisa Walker (Owen's Mum) for coming in on Wednesday to be our mystery reader. It was an absolute delight to see Owen's face register that his mum was sitting in our classroom. We were treated to a great story by one of our favourite authors Dr Seuss. The children were such great listeners and thoroughly enjoyed having a visitor reading to them.

The children are very proud when they have a parent, relative or friend come in to read. Please don't miss out on the chance to share a story or a fun activity with our class. 

Follow this link to sign up:

Mystery Guest - Sign Up

Realistic Fiction

Ms Rachel came to our class on Thursday to introduce to us a style of writing called Realistic Fiction. We looked back over a book that we were very familiar with 'Wemberly Worried'. We took the story apart and filled in a 'story mountain' planner. This is where we talked about the characters, setting, build up, problem, resolution and ending. Ms Rachel explained to us all of these things and then together we decided to make up our own realistic fiction story using the story mountain planner. We have called our story 'Pearlie Proud', we are just in the planning stages but we will share our published piece soon!

Maths

Adding 3 numbers together with a partner. Explain your thinking and show how you worked out the answer. It was really interesting at how differently the students came to solve the equations. 

Buddies

Always enjoy spending time with our Grade 4 buddies. This week we started to made puppets for our puppet theatre. We will be making short role plays showing various interactions in the coming weeks. Watch this space!

Hope you have all had a great weekend! Ready to start book week!

Book Week!

Monday 20 - Friday 24 November

There are many activities planned for next week, including working with our visiting authors, David Schwartz and Kate Klise, parents reading in their mother tongue every day, Poem in Your Pocket, Drop Everything And Read, creating collaborative books, Candlelight Read Aloud, Monument Books sales, Rate It! and Review It!, Book Drive for Green Umbrella, and so much more! Click here for the Elementary Parent Book Week Brochure that you also received in an email this week.

There is also a 'Character' dress up day on Friday. The children can come to school dressed in their favourite book character. We will have an assembly first thing in the morning followed by a parade of all our wonderful costumes.

Please help your child to look at different books and decide on a costume they would like to wear. It is a great way to finish the week and everyone really gets into the spirit of it all!

Here is a overview of what will be happening next week.

Monday
Mystery Reader
Opening assembly
D.E.A.R - Drop Everything And Read

Tuesday
Mystery Reader
Poem in your pocket day
D.E.A.R - Drop Everything And Read

Wednesday
Mystery Reader
Visiting author workshop
Door decorating judging
D.E.A.R - Drop Everything And Read

Thursday
Mystery Reader
D.E.A.R - Drop Everything And Read
Monument book fair - If you would like your child to purchase a book please give them some money before school. I can look after it for them. 

Candlelight Read Aloud - 6pm

Friday
Closing Assembly
Mystery Reader
D.E.A.R - Drop Everything And Read
Book Day costume parade

Short But Busy Week!

Maths

We had a great calendar question this week - 'Who can jump the farthest in your class?'

We went outside to find out the answer.

After many fine efforts and a few recalls "Timo" was the winner! Congratulations Timo :-)

Explain Everything

Mr Matt our IT coach also came to visit us and introduced the class to an awesome app called 'Explain Everything'. He showed us one of the many great things we can do - we now know how to cut out a picture and add it to the Explain Everything app and add text and movement. Ask your child about what they did. They all had an absolute laugh experimenting with this application.

Central Idea

Together with Mr. Jon we looked at our new Unit of Inquiry and what our central idea is. We unpacked this idea so we could have a better understanding of what the keywords meant. 

Birthday Celebrations

Finally, we helped our friend Valerie on Monday celebrate her seventh birthday. We hope you had a great day and thanks for the delicious homemade cookies :-)

and also Kongkea had her birthday on Monday too! Thanks so much for the delicious cupcakes :-)

Hope you all enjoyed your weekend!

Another #Travellingtale Completed!

Our class had another opportunity to join 4 other schools around the world to collaborate on another travelling tale. We joined with schools from Luxembourg, USA, Switzerland and New Zealand. This time we were in charge of creating the problem. We had to make things go wrong! We needed to decide if we wanted to add a mystery, or make bad things happen, or create disagreements. We went with a mystery and a few bad things happening.


Take a look at our journey:

Watching what the other two schools had already created. 

Brainstorming our ideas and creating the problem for the characters.

Choosing our icons to go with our problem.

Recording our part of the tale.

After 2 other schools completed their part of the tale we are ready to share it with you. Enjoy our story about "The Halloween Pumpkins."

We thought the story was fantastic!

Fun & Games

Mr Jon shared with us some tricks to learning weather vocabulary. We were all so great at sorting and grouping our new words. Students being teachers and helping out their classmates with explaining unknown words being fantastic risk takers!

Buddies

Our Grade 4 buddies recently went on a field trip to see 'Street Art in Phnom Penh.' They had some awesome new ideas and shared them with us during our time together.

A sneak peek at what we did in our final week. Don't want to give too much away as will be on Seesaw in the coming days. Let's just say we had a lot of fun and were very creative!

A very big thank you to Mr Borey who shared with the children some interesting information about the Water Festival Celebration. The children always enjoy learning more about the different holidays we have here.

Wishing you all a happy and safe Water Festival. See you back at school on Monday, November 6th.

Grade 10 and Mystery Reader!

Grade 10 Show

On Tuesday morning we were invited to watch a show that the Grade 10 students had created for the Grade One students. Having come and interviewed us at the beginning of the year we were very excited to see what they had created. The show had it all - adventure, magic, evil, a witch, wands for everyone and even audience participation! Congratulations to the Grade 10 students!

Mystery Reader

The students rushed back to class after the lunch bell went on Wednesday, in anticipation to see who our mystery reader was. Once we were all in class we heard a loud knock at the door and so Emma went to see who it was. To her surprise and delight there stood her dad. Earlier in the day the students were having a discussion about who they thought it might be and Emma was very adamant it definitely wouldn't be her mum or dad! Well it certainly was a surprise then :-)

A very big thank you to Simon Underhill (Emma's Dad) for coming in to be our second mystery reader! We are very grateful to you for taking time out of your day to read to us :-) Simon read us two stories that had the students thoroughly engaged and at one stage decided to take over one of the characters and help read the story!

If you or any of your family or friends are visiting and would like to come in and be our mystery guest, please do sign up. The children thoroughly enjoy having different people come in and share stories and activities with them.

Mystery Guest - Sign Up

Writing A Procedure, Guest Speaker & Buddies

During this unit of inquiry - How we organise ourselves - we have been learning about procedures and what they are. We looked at various types of writing to see if we could recognise what procedural writing looks like. We had to arrange the pieces of writing into two categories - procedure and not a procedure.

We knew that a piece of procedural writing should be telling us how to do something. It should have instructions and tell us step by step what to do. The students did a really good job at organising the different pieces of writing.

We also discussed the different procedures we have in and around school. We had a big discussion about procedures having a system and steps to it. We could recognise many things in our everyday life that are procedures and even when we try to cook something we need to follow a procedure. 

We had a turn at writing a procedure. Mr Jon showed us how to make a lovely cup of tea. First we talked about each step he would have to do to make it. Then we watched as he showed us the steps. Next we had a set of photos for that procedure that had to be put into the correct order. Finally we wrote the instructions for making a cup of tea.

Captain Mike

On Thursday Mr Brown came over from the secondary school to share with us his knowledge of sailing and how he has to be mindful of the weather to safely travel on the sea in a boat. We had so many questions and thoroughly enjoyed listening to the answers.

Buddies

Also on Thursday our buddies came to hang out and help us with measuring using standard and non-standard units. We had a lot of fun measuring various things and were challenged to find out if some theories were true or false.

- Is your arm span the same as your height?

- Is your forearm the same size as your foot?

- Is the circumference of your neck the same as your waist?

- Is you pointer and thumb the length of your nose?

Ask your child to show you what we did. It was a lot of fun!