Week 5

It was such a shame that we had to postpone the trip to Forest Adventure this week...the same thing happened to 1BeM last year! The children were very disappointed but, in true UWCSEA style, they understand the decision and they are still talking to us. Hopefully, we will be able to rearrange our adventure for some time fairly soon.

This week, we focused on our various responsibilities within the different communities we belong to. You might have noticed that “The Grade One Community Agreements” are now proudly displayed in the pod and we have added our signatures to them (in a very creative way!) to show that we understand our role in honouring them. We will refer to these agreements continually throughout the year.

We have also been comparing and contrasting the UWCSEA community with the Kuma Cambodia community and exploring Venn Diagrams as a way to record our findings. We are discovering that seemingly mundane tasks, such as getting to school, can look enormously different depending on your location. We also met with our "Boarder Buddy," Lana, for the first time this week. She introduced herself to the class and told us all about growing up in a very different community in southern Russia. We are hoping that we can find a time to meet up with her next week to have a tour of the boarding house here at UWCSEA to find out about life in this very unique part of the campus.

On Thursday, we had a lovely afternoon with our buddies from 4PBa in Mr. Betts' art studio. Together, we created some beautiful pieces using a variety of techniques as we explored the idea of line and pattern.

In Reading Workshop, we have been thinking about reading partners and what it is that makes a “good” partner, including the strategies we can adopt to be considered and considerate listeners and how to offer and receive feedback in a supportive way. We also enjoyed organising our plentiful class library to make selecting “just right” books a more straightforward process going forward.

In Writing Workshop, our small moment stories are becoming more detailed as we expand on our original ideas, as always remembering the mantra, “When I’m done, I’ve only just begun!” Although we are more concerned with writing composition at this stage, we are starting to consider the conventions too and are exploring a number of strategies to help us “have a go” when writing unfamiliar words, such as “say it, slide it, hear it, write it.” 

In Mathematics, we are continuing to build up our bank of hands-on, minds-on number games, "Double Compare" and “Five in a Row” proved very popular this week, as did "Ten Frame Fill" on the iPads. Next week, we will start to explore the idea of problem solving, with a particular emphasis on word problems. Articulating and recording how we solve word problems offers a very revealing insight into a child’s deeper mathematical understanding of a particular concept and we will constantly return to word problems throughout the year.

Reminders and Requests

*Thursday 24th September-Hari Raya Haji Public Holiday-SCHOOL CLOSED

*Friday 2nd October-The G1 Community Challenge (aka The Amazing Race)-more details to follow soon

Have a great weekend.