We were most interested though in asking lots of questions in our Star Name interview! Luckily the Gruffalo Skyped us last Friday to answer all our questions! What an amazing surprise! We wanted to communicate more with the Gruffalo though, so we also wrote him some letters.
For the last two weeks our Star Name has been The Gruffalo! We explored the letters and sounds in his name as usual and discovered that he has 3 risk-taking letters in his name - two 'f's and one 'l'. Risk-taking letters are the lower-case letters that reach all the way to the sky just like capital letters!
We were most interested though in asking lots of questions in our Star Name interview! Luckily the Gruffalo Skyped us last Friday to answer all our questions! What an amazing surprise! We wanted to communicate more with the Gruffalo though, so we also wrote him some letters.
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For two weeks now we have been exploring a new central idea 'Stories are shared and responded to in different ways' as part of the PYP transdisciplinary theme 'How we express ourselves'. We started our inquiry by sharing and collecting our prior knowledge about stories so we could begin to understand our current knowledge as a group and think about our next steps for our learning. We spent quite a lot of time planning, practicing and preparing our stories. As she watched us, Ms. Alison noticed some common things between our stories. They all had:
Maanya, Libby and Olympia worked as a group to make a book called 'Robbers and the Bloody Castle'. The drew pictures on paper and wrote some words. Then they glued the papers together to make pages for a book and read their book to the class. Phoenix, Mana and Aarna used fabrics and a doll to tell their story about a baby who went to the beach. They expressed the story using words, actions and materials as a setting. Dillon, Elliot, Max and Adrian worked together to tell a story using the wooden house, people and furniture. They also added some fabric and foam letters to complete their story about a giant spider attacking a house. Their story was told through sounds and actions. After we demonstrated our current understandings to each other we reflected as a group and discussed two questions:
Some important ideas emerged about how stories can be real or imaginary. We also began to talk about how stories can teach us things. For the last two weeks Elliot has been our Star Name. He was very excited as he has been waiting for his Star Name for awhile! Elliot's name gave us a chance to practice some letters we are familiar with. Our favourites are the lower case 'l' and lower case 't' which we call our 'risk-taking letters' because they reach to the sky like capital letters!
Our most recent Star Name was Phoenix. We were already familiar with Phoenix's name because our our time spent in the writing centre creating letters to send through the mailbox. Though Phoenix's name starts with a 'P' it actually has the 'F' sound! Some of us even realized that Phoenix actually starts the same as 'phonics'...which Phoenix told us the the nickname her family calls her at home! Phoenix Phonics! In most of our discussions though and in our Literacy Rotations, we focused on the sound 'P' usually makes.
On Wednesday, we had two special events. First our mums and dads came to our classroom to do some different literacy activities with us. We showed how independent we are becoming by guiding our families around and selecting and keeping track of our activities on a choice board.
On Thursday we had a special guest reader...Libby's mum! She read Jack and the Flumflum Tree by Julia Donaldson and played a fun memory game with us using the patchwork sack and items from the story! On Friday we had an especially fun day where we got to dress up like our favourite storybook characters. We had characters like Rapunzel, Charlie, Lola, Harry Potter, the Gingerbread Man, Dr. Ted, Ariel, Barbie and Pinkalicious!
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.
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About Us
We are a group of Kindergarten 1 students at an IB World School in Singapore. Our teacher is Miss Alison. Follow us on our blog and Twitter to see how much we're learning and growing! More Blogs to Follow at ISS:Archives
June 2015
Elementary Principal (Mr. Pinchbeck)
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