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!!