Wow! What an exciting week here in Ms. M’s class.
In Phonics we finished off our alphabet sounds with the letter Z on Monday and on Tuesday we all graduated and got our Unit 2 – Initial Sounds workbooks and a great ABC certificate. We also used our PE time to have an excellent ABC party. We played games like rolling a GIANT ball to each other while reciting the alphabet, making the letters with our bodies, and doing animal actions that corresponded with each letter of the alphabet. What a great time we had. Then we started our Unit 2 – Initial Sounds. We looked at the letter L for 2 days and O for one day. We’ll continue with O on Monday as each letter we look at will take 2 days. This unit will take us through the end of the term. As we looked closely at each letter we made a letter sounds poster and also practiced writing the letters independently on small whiteboards.
In Writer’s Workshop we started slowly sounding out words. I let the children know that if they didn’t feel ready to write words, it’s OK. They can just add lots of detail to their pictures and do their best to add labels. We also learned “I make mistakes and that’s OK!” Making mistakes doesn’t make us bad – it’s a part of learning! If we make a mistake we can just cross it out and try again.
In Maths we started looking at the numbers 6 – 10. We did 6, 7, and 8 this week. We practiced counting on by rolling a die (or a dot cube as we often call them in class), counting the number, and putting a marker on our game board for the next number after what we rolled. That’s a pretty tricky skill so we’ll be working on it lots. We also looked at what is called “conservation of number”. Simply put, we learned that no matter how we arranged our snap cubes the number stayed the same. Every time we rearranged them and counted them we always had 8. Today we practiced writing the numbers 0-8 on our whiteboards and then we worked in pairs to collect sets of 0-8 classroom items.
And holy cow, has our new IPC unit been a hit! We went on a hunt for dinosaur eggs on Monday. The children had great fun smashing them open and finding a dinosaur inside to catch their curiosity to begin the unit. We used our dinosaur toys to sort dinosaurs into land (with 2 and 4 legs), air, and water animals. We definitely have mostly land dinos. Then we found dinosaur footprints leading from our class to the Hall one day when we came in from break. We followed them and found a life-sized tyrannosaurus footprint. It was the same size as Elena! We found out that all 14 of our shoes (mine included) did not fill up a tyrannosaurus footprint but 77 toy dinos will. We also learned that this dinosaur was 9 meters long and our class laying end to end was not that long. We measured 7 meters but I’m a little iffy on that accuracy as we were making sure not to kick each other in the head. Safety first!
Mr. Green has spoken in the Newsletter about most of the school doing InCAS tests. Our class does not do those tests, however there is some of the year testing both for FS1 and FS2 that the children completed with Ms. Jiyu this week. These are just baseline tests to assess what prior learning the children have. We will do these tests again at the end of the year. It is a low-stress way to understand what the students know.
Our calendar is marked for our Halloween party on November 29th. Everyone is already planning and plotting their costumes. We’re excited every morning as we do our calendar to watch the days get closer.
That’s it for this week! Enjoy the weekend and we’ll see you again on Monday.
