This week we have been revisiting one of our favourite poems and songs 'Five Little Ducks' as we study and sort the letters F, D, and H.
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Since the beginning of the school year, Kindergarten 1.2 has been participating in 'Discovery Time'. These sessions, which happen several times each week, allow us time to pursue independent projects and activities based around our personal interests. This experience supports us in taking control of our own learning and develops our skills in reflection, self-awareness and assessment. We learn how to initiate projects and make decisions (as well as take suggestions) on how to extend them. Some of the projects that we initiated between August and October, included:
Though many of our Discovery Time projects are initiated independently, we have opportunities to connect with other children by sharing our work during class meetings. We also view photographs and videos of our processes and listening to what has been documented by Ms. Alison in her notes.
We currently have some time between our planned units of inquiry so for the last two weeks we have been using this space to support a full-time inquiry. We've been busy cooking, baking, selling food in the shop, and creating a restaurant complete with table settings and menus. New ideas are emerging every day and it is always very exciting to see how our play is evolving and extending as we work as a group! Some of the things we are learning authentically through this inquiry:
We are all working towards individual goals in numeracy. Every week or two we are presented with new math baskets which contain activities that help us to work towards our 'next steps' in skills and understandings. Here are some photos from our work this week:
Recently we have been very interested in playing hopscotch during our free outdoor playtime. Today we used this activity as a way of practicing and extending our number knowledge. We made our own hopscotch tracks with partners and practiced writing numbers inside them. Some of us even challenged ourselves to write the numbers beyond 10!
Every day as part of our "Good Morning" song the special helper gets to pick an action for us all to do. Recently the children have been interested in jumping up and down. And the number of times the special helper wants us to jump seems to be getting higher and higher! Yesterday we jumped 17 times! This activity is helping us to develop our counting to higher numbers. We are also practicing counting only one number per jump (one-to-one correspondence). I wonder how many times the special helper will want us to jump tomorrow!
A few weeks ago Max asked: Who is the tallest man in the school? This question immediately created a lot of excitement and busy discussion during our Morning Meeting. Theories were shared and everyone agreed that our Principal Mr. Pinchbeck was probably the tallest man in the school. So Ms. Alison asked us two questions:
First we represented our theories and justifications in our math journals:
Next we addressed the question: How can we find out? Again we went to our math journals to represent our ideas. When we presented our ideas in a class meeting and discussed, two main possibilities emerged:
Later that week we invited the five men to our classroom to line them up and measure them. First we lined them up and debated how they should be arranged to be in correct order from shortest to tallest:
Thank you to all of our male teachers who helped us with our investigation!
After we had collected all of the love hearts and peace signs, we brought them back to our classroom. We started to talk about how some of them were the same and some were different. First we sorted them into 2 groups: hearts and peace signs. Then we noticed that these symbols were different colours, so we sorted them into 4 groups: pink hearts; red hearts; peace signs with green, blue, pink and purple; and peace signs with yellow, pink, blue, and orange. We are becoming very good sorters!
In Kindergarten 1, we learn about numbers through hands-on experiences and play. This week we had the opportunity to pursue independent learning about numbers at a variety of stations. We practiced songs like '5 Little Ducks' & '5 Little Monkeys', formed and represented numbers with playdough, rolled dot cubes and counted a matching number of items, searched for number magnets in the sensory table, stacked cube towers, and counted frogs onto logs. We were so busy guided ourselves between stations and also enjoyed sharing our activities and discoveries about numbers with friends and teachers in a class meeting after the stations. Since we were so interested in the task of sorting in our own free time, Ms. Alison thought it would be a great time to introduce sorting as a whole class investigation. First, we made a connection to our current unit of inquiry ('Who we are is shaped by the people around us') and sorted photograph of ourselves by physical features -- something we've been exploring through self-portraits.
This week we played with different containers at the water table to explore the measurement words 'empty', 'full', 'heavy' and 'light'. We filled and dumped our containers, observing when and how they got heavier and lighter. Here's what we noticed:
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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
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