Wacky Wednesday!!

Wacky Wednesday Dress Up Day

The Elementary student reps (ISPPR) are organizing a dress up day on Wednesday 10th of December.  The theme is ‘WACKY WEDNESDAY’.     

What is WACKY ?                        

zany, madcap, offbeat, quirky, outlandish, eccentric, ridiculous, funny, crazy,  absurd, insane, far out, fantastic, bizarre, peculiar, weird, odd, strange.

To participate students will need to dress up so they look ‘wacky’.

The ISPP reps are even asking the teachers to get involved and dress wacky.  

So get your thinking caps on and dress up on Wacky Wednesday, 10th of December

If you have any other questions please talk to your classroom teacher.

Shapes, Sunglasses, Scientists and Mystery Reader!!

Our Unit of Inquiry is proving to be a very popular!!  The children are having such a great time being little scientists and we have been doing more investigating!!  We followed the same process that we did with the bubbles experiment but this time we were investigating into - "How light and colour affects sight" and we did this in small groups. We decided that light is very important to us and that at times it can change the way we see things. So before we even started the investigation we made a pair of sunglasses each.

Then we started the investigation:

We came up with many questions!! Ms Kelly recorded them for us.

Then we got into small groups and did - I think, I wonder....  We were pretty awesome!!

So here we are doing our experiment and we look pretty cool!!

Then as a whole class we recorded our results...

And in groups we then described what we learned:

It was a great success and we had a blast....

Maths

In Maths we have been learning about shapes - We have been making shapes in many different ways. We can draw them, find them, make them with our bodies and build things with them.  We have been learning the names of each shape, how many sides they have and how many corners. The shapes that we have been really concentrating on are: square, rectangle, triangle, cirlce, hexagon, pentagon, octagon, oval and rhombus.

Check out our shapes!!



The children also hunted around the school for shapes here are some that we found....

They also did many activities in and outside of the classroom - painting shapes, naming shapes, drawing shapes, finding shapes and running to the correct shape.

Mystery Reader

A very big THANK YOU to Anton's Grandfather for coming in and reading to us on Thursday.  He is here visiting from Denmark and it was so great that he took the time to visit us. The children all listened so well to the story and even though Anton's Grandfather usually speaks Danish he very kindly read us the story in English :-)                                                                                                                        

The children really enjoyed the story "Vitello becomes a businessman" written by Kim Fupz Aakeson and Neils Bo Bojesen. It was a very funny story that tells of all the naughty things that Vitello and his friends get up to.

* If you or anyone visiting with you would like to come in and read to the children please click on the following link to sign up:

Mystery Reader sign up

We had certificates this week. A big CONGRATULATIONS to Anna and Dita on recieving a very special award each.

Anna showed that she is an INQUIRER. Anna has thoroughly enjoyed investigating into our unit on light and is always asking questions to learn more and tried all of our new experiments!!  Fantastic work :-)

Dita showed that she is PRINCIPLED. When we chose our groups Dita is happy to go with all of her friends in the class. She makes sure that everyone is included, shares all the equipment and always waits her turn and helps others.  You're a STAR!!

Have a great weekend everyone!!

Fireflies

Today we read a lovely book called "Fireflies" by Julie Brinckloe. 

It is a delightful story that touches on the idea that "you need to set something free in order to keep it"  




The children thoroughly enjoyed listening to the story and it also relates well to our unit on Light. We will be spending time this week discussing the book and talking about man-made and natural light. They will take the story apart and find the ideas at the beginning, the happenings in the middle and the conclusion at the end. 

The children also loved the idea of making a jar full of their own fireflies. So in order to do this I would like to ask each of you to please send:
- a jam jar or a medium sized jar to school (please no large)
Once everyone has brought a jar to school we will make our fireflies.

They do look amazing!!

 

All the Bs - bubbles, buddies, birthdays celebrations

We have had such an awesome week!!  

The children have been working so hard during all of our learning engagements and I have been so proud of all of their hard work. On Thursday we put our scientist "white coats" on and went through the process of how to run an experiment. We decided to do the first experiment as a whole class so that we could see each step and learn what each meant.  Next time we will do it in small groups, then pairs and then individually!

Take a look at the steps we took.

As a class we came up with 2 questions about bubbles

We had a think about our questions and we wondered......
As a class we decided:

Check us out doing the experiment it was SO MUCH FUN!!!!

This is what we saw and recorded.

This is what we learned....

Buddies

Today our buddies came to visit us with their IPads. The children thoroughly enjoy the time they have with their buddies and are always so excited to see them.  They showed us a cool app called "Puppet Pals."  We made a story with them by creating the scenes and we even got to record our voices when we were telling the story. We hope to be doing lots more things with our buddies on the IPads in the future.



Finally we had another birthday celebration.  This time is was Anton who we helped celebrate his 6th birthday.  A very happy birthday to you Anton and thanks for the scrummy biscuits ;-)

and we ended the day with a glow stick party!!

Have a great weekend everyone and enjoy any celebrations you may be having!!

Exploration and birthday celebrations

We have been having such a great time exploring light.  We have been experimenting with many ways to make light, how we can change the colour of light and what happens to light when it is in water.  The children have been very enthusiastic about this unit and have been inquirers asking so many questions.

We have discussed how light can be reflected - the children discovered that "when you shine a light through colour we can see the colour being reflected on our faces, clothes and walls." 

We know that light travels very, very fast. The children said that "they can't see it moving so it must be really fast."

Light moves and bounces off objects - "but it doesn't hurt us when it bounces off us."

Lights can shine very bright or very softly - "you can't look at the sun as it hurts your eyes and is dangerous."

Light rays shine and spread out - "but we can't touch it."

Light can be blocked by objects and then they can make a shadow.  If we are close to the light our shadow is big and if we are far away it is small. We found many shadows around our school campus.

Check out all of our exploration on this slideshow

And we have only just began this unit!!  Wow what fantastic little scientists we have ;-)  

Happy Birthday Marcus!

We were all very happy to help celebrate his 6th birthday with delicious cupcakes. 

Thanks Marcus :-)

 

Candlelight read aloud

Don't forget tonight the candlelight read aloud will be held on the Elementary Campus from 6pm. Please join us for some fabulous bedtime stories, cookies (all donations of cookies are to be taken to the basketball court) and milk. 

The first readers begin at 6pm so come early to get a seat in the room of your choice.

Independent writing

Today for journal writing the children were such fantastic risk takers!! They all tried their very best to write their sentences all by themselves. I was so excited to see so many independent writers. The children were very enthusiastic and all morning our classroom was filled with letters, letter sounds and words. I asked the children at the beginning to be very brave and even when you get to a word that you don't know how to write I want you to check around the classroom to see if you can find it. If you don't see it, then say the word a few times.  After this write down all the letters that you hear when you say the word. I was so proud of them all!!  We even remembered to use our poem to help us put in the fullstops.

Fullstop

I am a fullstop

I look just like a dot

Every time you see me you must stop!

Check out our independent writers!!

Welcome back

It has been a fabulous week back at school.  The children all seemed to have a lovely break and had so much to share about what they did during the water festival holiday.  We had a great time talking with each other and listening to our friends during our morning meeting.  We wrote about our holiday in our journal writing books and it was so exciting to see many of the children using the word wall, dictionary cards and sounding out letters to write their sentences.

Reading

We all really enjoy reading time.  We have been finding our sight words in the books and doing activities to help us understand what we are reading about. We are now concentrating on sounding out the letters of words that we are unsure of and stopping when we get to a fullstop.  

We have been learning a little poem: 

I am a fullstop

I look just like a dot

Every time you see me you must stop!

This also helps the children at writing time remember to add in fullstops.

This week our CVC word family was all the words that end with en.  Here are some of the words we found - pen, hen, ten, zen, Ken, Len, when, men then.

Maths

This week we have introduce 2D shapes to the children. They have been finding them everywhere - around the school, in the classroom and even at home.  The first four shapes that we all said we knew were of course square, triangle, circle and rectangle but then we started finding all sorts of other shapes that we knew.  We made shapes out of play-dough, drew big ones outside with chalk, played a great game where we had to run to the shape that was called out and completed patterns by using the shapes and colours.  We are also continuing with numbers - counting in twos, fives and tens as well as making sure that we are forming and writing our numbers correctly.

Please be sure to look under the Maths tab at the top of the blog to see more information about what we will be doing with the children regarding shapes.

Unit of Inquiry

This week we stared our new Unit of Inquiry on light. I can already tell that we are going to have a lot of fun with this.  The children have been exploring all the light related items we have in the classroom.  We made shadows inside and outside, shined light through sunglasses and coloured paper to see what happens, read lots of books and stories, listened to some songs and much more.  The children have already started bringing things in from home that shows light, uses light or reflects light!!  Wow what a fantastic start to the unit!!

Please click on the following links to listen to our "light" songs:

Fireflies

Shooting star

We had certificates this week.  A big CONGRATULATIONS to Visal, Champa and Floyd on receiving a very special award each.

Floyd showed that he is an INQUIRER. This week when we have been exploring light Floyd has been sharing lots of ideas.  He brought in a torch from home and has been asking lots of questions and looking at ways to find the answers. Fantastic!!

Champa showed that she is a real THINKER. Champa found a problem with the calendar sysetem in our classroom.  She wanted everyone to have a turn at doing it. So she decided that we need a list of names and each day we must put a new name up.  If we follow the list then we will all have a turn. Super job Champa!!

Visal showed he was KNOWLEDGEABLE.  When we are having a group discussion he is always sharing his ideas, thoughts and pieces of information that he knows.  Thanks Visal!

And finally we helped Visal celebrate his birthday today. He was very excited about turning 6. 

Happy Birthday Visal!!

Have a great weekend everyone!!