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.
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