Last week Kindergarten 1 visited the Adventure Playground at the Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. Since then we have been reflecting on how we moved at the park by representing our movement in different ways. First we worked as a class to map our movement, using My Map Book by Sarah Fanelli as inspiration:

As a whole class we also spent some time constructing what we remembered about the Adventure Playground using different building blocks and materials. 

After completing some drawing and writing in our journals about the Adventure Playground, the children had an opportunity to select a material or 'language' that they felt would best express their movement experience at the playground. 

Some children chose to work with paint: 

Some children worked with clay: 

Some children used the iPads and the Puppet Pals app to photograph our Adventure Playground structure and themselves to digitally represent their movement: 

These varied representation experiences have provided many opportunities for us to review and discover different movement vocabulary. 

Today we practiced forming the numbers 1-10 in our Kindergarten 1 playground. We used paintbrushes with water to "paint" the numbers on the ground! This was a great opportunity for us to review how the numbers are formed and cooperate as partners to guess (and sometimes correct the formation of) each other's numbers. Many of the children want to do this activity again so we may explore it next week with letters. 

For the last two weeks our Star Name has been Cailynne. Cailynne's twin sister Caileigh was our Star Name before the holidays so she guessed it would be her turn next! Cailynne's name was a good chance for us to review letters and sounds we have studied in other class names. As part of our literacy rotations we spent time sorting picture cards by the beginning consonants in the words, hunting for letters in a poem, forming letters with pipe cleaners and pencils on paper, playing alphabet bingo, and continuing our work with the Pocket Phonics app on the class iPads.  

Today we demonstrated our ability to be risk-takers and challenged our bodies and movement skills at the Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Adventure Playground. We had so much fun moving in many different ways - like running, jumping, sliding, crawling, swinging, pulling, and more! This park has such incredible structures which definitely inspired us to stretch beyond our movement comfort zone and extend our coordination and skills. 

As the week we continues, we will be reflecting on our Adventure Playground experience by reviewing the photographs and videos that were taken and discussing our memories. We will be representing our movement through different language including visual art and writing. 

Our new unit of inquiry is part of the PYP transdisciplinary theme 'How We Organize Ourselves'. We will be exploring movement through the central idea: 'We move in different ways and for different purposes'. We started inquiring into this idea last week with an invitation in our Multipurpose Room. We had so much fun responding to the different equipment and exploring the different ways we can move our bodies! Check it out! 

This week is our first week at school after the holidays. We have welcomed three new friends and enjoyed reconnecting with our returning friends. We have been missing one special friend though, Mrs. Mano our teaching assistant, who has been ill and absent for most of the week. We are looking forward to seeing her again sometime next week, but in the meantime wanted to send her a message. We wrote words and drew pictures to make cards and posters for her and then created a video message. We miss you Mrs. Mano! See you soon! :)