Mystery Reader!

We would like to begin our Mystery Readers next week. Please click on the link to sign up for a week that works best for you. You can also find out more information about what a mystery reader is by following the link. Remember if the time doesn't fit with your schedule I am more than happy to discuss another time that would be better for you.

Mystery Reader - Sign Up

It really is a highlight for the children and they are so happy when we have a special guest so please don't be shy!

Making connections and taking action!

Phew, it has been a busy month!! Moving to a new campus, starting school, having both my daughters Molly and Ella's birthdays in the space of a few weeks and a whole month of school done! We have been so busy in Grade one inquiring into our Unit on "Weather" and making connections between many of our other curriculum subjects, especially Maths and Language.

Last week I asked the children to bring to school or send in some pictures of them in different types of weather. Thanks so much to the children who sent in their pictures. We had a show and share session where the children who had pictures were the experts and had small groups rotating around the class getting to see all the pictures and ask questions from our experts. There were lots of interesting questions and some great discussions about the clothes they were wearing and the activities they do in different types of weather.

I was delighted when Adrien, from our class, arrived on Thursday with his very OWN weather station! It is so great to see that he is making connections and taking action with his learning, by bringing in something from home to share with his friends at school, related to our current unit. The weather station was so cool! It had all sorts of exciting things for us to use and inquiry into. It had a rain gauge, thermometer, anemometer and wind vane. After Adrien introduced his weather station to the class we decided it would be a great idea to find some where around the school to put it and take measurements throughout the day.

Check out our slideshow:
We made predictions first - the temperature, wind speed and rainfall (sadly no rain fell on Thursday plus the wind let us down too) before we went to check on our weather station to see what was happening. Ask your child about this experiment and how we recorded our information.



Anna was so awesome and also took action this week by bring to school a drawing she made of a weather station! She did a show and share session with the class and showed us what her weather station does. She even had help from her little sister Nina!

We also spent a lot of time looking at the different words we use when explaining or talking about the weather. We had help from Mr Jon who visited our class to help us do lots of language activities to get us thinking about the correct terminology. We had fun learning lot of new words!



During Maths we have been doing a lot of graphing. We have been gathering information and using this information to make bar graphs, line graphs or tally graphs. Our morning question has been a great way to gather information for this. This week during our calendar time we have a "pick and problem" card. We got a pattern card, although this wan't related to our current maths unit I was so pleased to see how many of the children used their prior knowledge to answer it. The question asked them to create a pattern.

On Friday we talked a lot about the clouds. We went outside and just lay down for a bit to see the sky and what was happening. Then we went back to the class to check out on the internet information about what we saw:

We found out that there were lots of different types clouds with very tricky names! But we learnt a lot about three types of clouds - Cumulus & Cumulonimbus, stratus & stratocumulus and cirrus. We had fun weather watching and throughout the day many of the children told me that they saw one or two of these types of clouds during snack time, lunch or just looking out the window during class time.

We also had Mr Matt our IT Coach come to our class to show us how to search the internet on our IPads for weather images and save them!

We also helped Irrham celebrate his sixth birthday. A very happy birthday to you Irrham. Thanks for the delicious cupcakes :-)

Hope you have all had a great weekend!

Another busy week!

Our week was full of continuing to master our classroom and school routines. We discussed our safety drills as a class - Fire drill, Lock down and Safe haven. The children were very good at following instructions and know exactly what they have to do for each situation. Well done Grade One :-)

We also started our reading program this week. The children are taking one book home each day, they should read this book to an adult at home and then that adult needs to sign the reading log so I can see that they have read to someone. The following day they are able to change for a new book ONLY if they have had their reading log signed. Please help your child at home with reading everyday and also remind them to bring the book back to school the following day. If they don't bring the book back they can't take a new one home and then they will miss out on enjoying reading a new book. Thanks in advance for your help with this. More information is posted under the Language tab at the top of the home page. 

Next week each child will bring home either five sight words or five spelling words that they will learn for the week and then be tested on every Friday. These words will not only help the children with reading but also their writing skills.

We started guided reading groups in class this week. The children are very keen readers and we have had lots of great discussions about the books we have been reading and doing lots of different activities to help with comprehension. We have also been working on different strategies we can use when reading and how to work out unknown words. We know that we can sound out the letters, use the pictures on the page, read on and then go back and re-read the sentence, ask a friend, check for meaning, does it make sense? I was very impressed with all the different ways the children identified! We have very clever children in Grade One! We also had time to work on building on our letter recognition and sight words.

Our writing focus has been concentrating on Recounts and Procedural Writing. This week we have been looking at the different procedures we have in school and in the classroom. 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 recipe. In small groups I asked the children to come up with the ingredients for making a friend. We used our imaginations and pretended that we had a big bowl and were mixing in all the ingredients to make a good friend.

I think we got all the ingredients just right!! Next step to make the procedure to make this fabulous friend :-)

For Unit of Inquiry we have been tuning into - Weather. We have brainstormed everything we know about weather, sorted photos, checked the weather patterns for Phnom Penh, spent time checking out the window to see what is happening and made awesome weather posters. 

On Friday we got to watch half of "The Magic School Bus - Weather" it is an excellent video to help the children be exposed to some of the terminology used for weather and how the system of weather works on a child friendly level. We will spend more time this week watching it but here is the clip for you to watch with your child too.

Friday also meant we got to visit our buddies again! This time we got our Grade five buddies to help us on the internet to research different types of weather. We had a brainstorm together about all the different types of weather we may like to inquire into. Our list included sunny, stormy, snowy, sleet, hail, rainy, icy, autumn, spring, hurricane, tornado and many more. We joined our buddies and talked about searching images of these different weathers and once they had explored all the ones of interest they had to chose their favourite image that really stood out to them. They were then inquirying into their favourite photo by doing "I See, I Think, I Wonder. It was so great to have our buddies help us navigate the internet and the Grade Ones did an awesome job filling in the information about what they saw.

And just for fun we got to have a bit of free choice time too. Her are a few of the very creative constructions going on in our class.

Photos Please

Our Unit of Inquiry for the next 5 weeks is inquiring into weather.

Our Central Idea: Understanding how the weather works allows people to make plans.

Can I ask you to help your child bring into school a photo of themselves (or email me and I can print it out) in different types of weather. It can be from any season - summer, autumn, winter or spring. We would like to see the clothing that you might wear for the weather and the kinds of activities you might do in that weather. It is a great way to share our experiences and also for some who have never experienced certain types of weather to learn from their peers.

Thanks in advance for helping with this.

Reading this week

In an effort to provide a holistic reading program, we ask for your home support.  Today, the students have begun bringing home reading books and reading logs.  The purpose of our take home reader program is for students to read books that are at their independent reading levels (that they can read by themselves) for decoding, fluency and comprehension.  

You can support your child by setting aside some time to read together every night.  We encourage you to use the included suggestions for helping with reading at home.  This will help to ensure a high level of success and enjoyment.

Your child will choose a book to take home each day. The book should be read nightly, and returned each morning with the signed (by parent) reading log. The students will in turn choose a new book to read for the following day.  

If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact your homeroom teacher.

Thanks in advance.

After School Activities

For more information please contact afterschool@ispp.edu.kh

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!

Changes in Schedule

Due to a clash in timetables Mr Andy has had to make a slight change in our specials schedule. Tuesday will now be our swimming day and Wednesday and Thursday PE days. The new schedule was sent home in your child's yellow folder today.

For Your Information

We start swimming tomorrow!

 Please make sure that your child brings in a separate bag with - a swimsuit, towel and goggles (optional)

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If you look under the tab - Classroom Information - you will see the following information:

• the lunch menus for the school lunch
• all important information about Grade One
• Our classroom schedule.

What's on your plate?

Every morning I have talked to the children about what is on the menu at the cafeteria to help them have a better idea of what they might like to eat that day. If your child had decided that they would like to continue with the school lunches could you please inform me by email as soon as possible. That way I can make sure that those children are aware of what food options they have that day and help them at lunchtime to get their meals.

P.E

The children had their first lesson of P.E today with Mr Andy. He did a lot of team building activities. He sent a picture of the children doing an activity where they had to stay absolutely silent and get into order from shortest to tallest. Apparently they did an excellent job and were silent!!

Parent Evening

This Thursday 13th August

In the Black Box Theatre

 at 6pm

Looking forward to seeing you there!

What a great start to school!

We had a fantastic first two days at school. The children were very busy exploring the new campus and learning about the different routines and environment. We took a tour around our HUGE new campus to find out where everything was. We were pretty tired after all the walking around but the children were very positive about the new school and some even said it was "the best day and school ever!"

We spent lots of time in the classroom getting to know each other and learning everyone's names. We have two students in our class that are new to ISPP this year and already they have settled into the school and class with ease. We have a really wonderful feel to the classroom and it really feels like a little community.

Who is in Ms Kelly and Ms Nhoep's class

The children also got to meet some of their specialist teachers while touring around the school and of course finding important places like - the nurses station, elementary school office, toilets and most importantly the swimming pool and playground :-) The school field was a hit with the children and it is such a fantastic place for the children to run around on. I'm so excited they get to enjoy such a huge open space this year.

In class the children enjoyed maths and language centres, table top activities and drawing self portraits, as well as having time to enjoy free choice sessions. It was so nice to see all the children interacting so positively with each other, and as you will see from the pictures (once my camera will let me upload them!!) we had all sorts of interesting things happen.