Week 6

Cough, cough! We hope you are all surviving and managing to stay out of the horrible haze. Miss Ida and I are in school today and it is not the same without our 1BeM friends (it is a lot quieter though!). Let's hope the wind changes direction soon or, even better, that the haze disappears altogether. Fingers crossed...

It might have been a shorter week but it was as action packed as ever in 1BeM. We started the week with a grade level assembly where Ms. Naylor explained all about Service learning and how we can support people in our local community. We learned all about the residents at Happy Lodge Home for the Elderly in Tampines and found out more about our friends at the Kuma School in Cambodia.

We are starting to get excited about our “Community Challenge” (aka “The Amazing Race”) next Friday. The children will work together in small groups to find and follow clues around our campus. Each clue will take them to a different area of the school community where they are tasked with finding a particular community helper and completing a challenge set by them. Each challenge will relate to the role that person has in our community. It promises to be an exciting morning and, hopefully, a great way to bring together much of our learning in this Unit of Study. Thank you to the five parent volunteers who have kindly given up their morning to support this fantastic event...I only hope we are able to go ahead!

In Reading Workshop, we are continuing to concentrate on the idea of “Partner Time” and what it is that makes a good partner, such as active listening, probing questions and supportive comments. We have also been focusing on reading stamina and building up our reading muscles as we try to extend the period of time we are able to remain focused during independent reading times.  

In Writing Workshop, Miss Ida and I are now conferring with small groups or individuals on a daily basis. These conversations highlight areas of strength and development for the children. We compliment them on their writing and, then, nudge them onwards by making suggestions or demonstrating strategies and techniques to improve their writing composition or conventions. These daily conferences are always a positive experience for the children as, once again, the most important aspect of this first unit is that the children see themselves as competent and capable writers who have something valuable to say. 

In Mathematics, we have been focusing on story problems. Whenever the children are presented with a new problem, they are encouraged to articulate and then record their thinking in a variety of ways. In this sense, they are beginning to appreciate that the context of a problem and its interpretation can lead to different representations of the same solution. Using screencasting applications (such as Doodlecast) on the iPads is a very effective way to ascertain a child’s true understanding of a mathematical concept. At the same time, we are beginning to explore the idea of place value and the notion that the value of a digit in a written number depends on its place in the number.

Next week, all being well, we will kick off our second unit of the year, “Measurement and Data.” In this unit, the children will develop accurate measurement techniques, describe lengths that fall between whole numbers, compare measured lengths to target lengths and solve story problems involving the distance between lengths.

Try and have a great weekend!