Communication

On Monday morning the class were given a tuning in activity to get them really thinking about effective and ineffective communication,

The challenge:
You and your group are stranded on an island with only a few materials with you. The water surrounding the island is full of sharks and you do not have a boat to get you to another island for help.

The goal:
To effectively communicate a message to any other group on the other islands and get the item that you require. You can only use the the materials you have with you.

The task:
Organise yourselves and brainstorm for some bright ideas on how you can best use your material to help you communicate your messages without talking or yelling to the other groups.

We had two groups that successfully got the item that they required, others were not so lucky.

Once back in the classroom we had time to reflect on what we thought went well in our groups, what did not go so well and what would have made it better. There were some really fantastic ideas and clever thinkers that grasped the idea of how communication can be really helpful when it is effective but very frustrating when it is ineffective.

Maths

We have been doing lots of work this week on 2D shapes and place value. We have been taking numbers apart and looking at how many digits they have, where they are placed - ones, tens, hundreds and expanding numbers to show each digits value. We have also been looking at all the 2D shapes that we know, drawing and labelling them. Next week we will be going outside on a shape hunt.

We do love building towers in our class. We used all sorts of shapes and patterns for our morning calendar question this week. The question was: who can build the tallest tower that could also free stand. We had a lot of tumbles and rumbles with a lot of smiles and laughter :-)

A very big thank you to Sabine Park (Magalie's mum) who kindly came in on Wednesday as our Mystery Reader. We listened to a fantastic story about a book eating boy! Some of the boys in our class were also keen to give it a try but luckily we talked them out of it ;-)

On Thursday we had an excellent presentation done by one of the teachers here at ISPP Mr. Sovathna. He shared with us his expertise on communicating in sign language. He talked to us about what it would feel like to not be able to hear and the different ways that you can still communicate with each other even though you are not talking with your voice. We tried lots of different kinds of signs and expressions. The children were really interested in signing the alphabet and learning words such as thank you, brother, sister and friend. A big thank you to Sovathna for taking the time to come in and share with us :-)

Have a great weekend everyone!