Week 4

This week our focus has been on thinking about the different communities we all come from and belong to - in particular, our school community and the people who make up the essential parts of UWCSEA East. We had a great time exploring the campus, photographing and interviewing individuals so that we could learn more about their role in the UWC community.  The students really enjoyed this exercise and gained an understanding of the people in our school community who help us every day. We will continue to have further discussions on this in the coming days and find more opportunities to meet more people in our school community...this is a really huge campus!

In our Reading Workshop unit, we have been establishing routines as readers and learning to take care of books. We have also been thinking a bit about who we are as readers, our favourite kinds of books and places we enjoy reading. The children now have their Reading Partners who they share books with and for this, we have come up with some ideas on what makes a good reading partner. 

Thank you for continuing to support your child with their reading at home. Your child has brought home a new poem to read to you this weekend...please ask them to read this aloud with you. Please also add in one of your own poems to the folder if you can! 

Why read Poetry?

I came across an article recently which talked about the beauty of poetry - “Poetry, at its very best, inserts an image into your mind which becomes un-banishable, un-impeachable.  It gives you new ways to experience the world and express your thoughts. It can take the mundane and transform it into something meaningful.  As you chew on and digest a poem with your brain, some phrases or words, images, may become stuck, like a popcorn kernel, in your mind’s molars, forever lodged there.” It’s important to read poems aloud, not silently. By doing this, the poem will come to life in so many different ways, after all, words are only half alive when they are silent.

This week, we have been making number lines and playing games involving comparing numbers and counting. “Staircases,” “Memory Game,” and “Five in a Row” are some of the games we have been playing in class. These games are designed to encourage number sense and mental computations and we will continue to explore these in the coming weeks. 

Have a great long weekend and to our Singaporean parents, happy voting! 

- Poonam and Jae