For the last two weeks our Star Name has been Jack from Jack in the Beanstalk. This name gave us an opportunity to explore the letter 'J' which was new to some of us. The name and story also gave us an opportunity within our unit of inquiry to explore the key concept 'perspective'. Many of us had different opinions about Jack and the 'good' and 'bad' characters in this story. Some of us thought Jack was principled and some of us thought he was not. We worked on sharing our opinions and justifying our ideas with a Philosophy for Children discussion: We also represented our ideas with drawing and writing in our journals:
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For the last two weeks our Star Name has been' Wolf'. . . as in the Big Bad Wolf from The Three Little Pigs! The Wolf gave us a chance to study the letter W. We were able to think of so many other words that start with the 'w' sound! We also had many questions for the Wolf. We sent him a letter in the mailbox and he emailed Ms. Alison with a voice recording answering our questions!
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. 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.
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. For the last two weeks our Star Name has been Caileigh. As we pieced together the letters of her name we realized it was much longer than some of the other names we have studied. 8 letters long in fact! Someone wondered: "Could there even be a name with 10 letters?" So we worked as a group to think of long names that we knew. We discovered that Cinderella is 10 letters long! Even longer than Caileigh! For the last two weeks our Star Name has been Isaiah. He has two letters in his name which we haven't explored yet as a class: S and H. We practiced the sounds and actions for the letters and formed them in different ways, including with stones. We also practiced forming Isaiah's special letter I with our bodies like we saw in the Sesame Street podcast for the letter I. |
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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