Wow it’s been a wild last two and a half weeks with so much going on I completely let updates fall by the wayside. My apologies for that!
Let’s start by saying a big hello, or “hola” to our newest classmate, Hugo. He is from Brazil. We’re so glad to have you here!
In Phonics we looked at the letters N (Niko was happy to be put on our letter poster), M, I, and S. We’re really getting into a good routine with phonics and the children look forward to “alphabet time”. They often start asking me in the morning, “what letter is it today, Ms. M?” Needless to say, while they enjoyed this Global Citizenship Week we had this week (more on that later) they missed their alphabet time.
In Writer’s Workshop we finished off our unit “Writing With Sentences” by making a storybook of our own. Before that penultimate project we also looked at some mechanics of writing such as when to use a capital letter and how to space our writing (no spaces within a word and a finger space between them).
In Maths we slowed down our unit on Comparing Numbers so that the students could get a strong grasp on the concepts of more and less. We took a break from it altogether this week because we were focusing on Global Citizenship but we’ll be back at it next week!
And who can forget about the dinosaurs? We got a special package from Dr. Rattlebone who heard we were good at identifying dinosaurs. We opened the boxes and found dinosaur bones that we had to put together. We did that and then worked on our museum display that everyone was able to come and see. They got to see the dinosaur skeleton that Dr. Rattlebone sent us, our bones we dug up, our fossils we made, and dinosaur art that we made. The students were very proud to show off their work.
On our final week of our dinosaur unit we read Harry and the Bucket Full of Dinosaurs. Wouldn’t you know it? Our dinosaurs went missing, just like Harry’s. We created missing posters and got a letter from Harry the next day telling us we had to travel to DinoLand to find our missing dinosaurs. So, we hopped into our magic buckets and off to DinoLand we went. First we had to cross a river and find out about things that could float or sink. Then we had to help Terry the Tyranosaurus fix her toothache. Finally we had to visit (make) a desert island and that’s where we found our dinosaurs!
Additionally, we looked at what dinosaurs ate. We used our kitchen food toys to feed the dinosaurs. We learned that some ate meat and had really pointy teeth, while others ate plants and vegetables and had flat teeth to help them chew. Lastly we made dinosaur costumes and had a little dinosaur dance party to finish off the unit.
During Calendar Time we hit an important milestone – the 50th day of school. We count what day of school it is every day and we’ll have a 100-day party when the time comes. We’re over half-way there!
And last, but definitely not least: this week was Global Citizenship Week! We learned lots about how to protect the Earth and how plants can help our environment. We made some art with leaves and twigs that Mrs. Sim was so kind as to gather for us. On Tuesday when the weather was better we went outside and planted some native Korean wildflowers. Today we looked at the different countries we are all from. We also baked some cookies using seeds and fruits. Those were met with mixed reviews.
