Haze, Haze go away!

It’s been a wonderfully action packed week and even though the haze has kept us indoors, the children have been having fun and engaging in lots of learning. 

We had our first ever KIDS UP FRONT! on Monday. This was co-presented by Marina and Wilbur who shared the story of the Lantern Festival. The children made bunny rabbit lanterns using paper plates and tasted a variety of delicious moon cakes and pomelos. Thank you Wilbur and Marina and their lovely mums for coming along to support them! This definitely inspired a few children to also think about sharing some of their own traditions and festivals. Our next KIDS UP FRONT will be by Kjerstin and Rebecca after the October break - they will be presenting about Halloween! 

Mr Karl Wilcox led the assembly on Monday to talk about the coming week’s Round Square Conference at school and about Kurt Hahn’s childhood and his vision. 

This week, our children have been using a variety of apps on iPads to assess their learning. For Reading Workshop, each child created a page on the app, ‘Book Creator,’ and titled it “My Reading Life.” On Friday, they created a page for the month of October and recorded themselves reading a page from a ‘Just Right Book’. For every new month, children will record their reading with their reading buddy and play it back to hear their reading. It’s a wonderful way for children to track their own reading and see the progress over time. There are always personal targets attached to this task. The children have also been using an app called ‘Doodlecast’ to read a few pages and talk about strategies they used to read tricky and unfamiliar words.

We have also been using iPads to explore Communities on the ‘Pebblego’ website - here is the link: http://www.pebblego.com/login/ (the Login Username and Password is UWC). 

We have started to round off the unit by conducting summative assessments. This is done through discussions and by writing our understandings on paper using the “I used to think...” and “Now I think...” mapping tool. We have also used a series of concentric circles to record our growing understanding of the central idea on communities. Please continue to have these discussions with your children at home. 

On Thursday, the children were delighted to have their first ever Art session with our primary school art teacher, Mr Hamish Betts. Mr Betts did a tour around his art studio and we explored various tools and art materials with absolute delight and wonderment! One child exclaimed, “I want to sleep here at night!” In art, children explored types of lines, density of lines, shading, patterns and so on. Children were invited to get into teams and design a city as a collaborative piece of art work. We are so lucky to have Mr Betts as our art teacher! In class, the children have been exploring lines and primary colours and learning about the story and works of the famous artist Piet Mondrian. We have started to create our own Piet Mondrian inspired pieces of art. We will share pictures of these in our next week’s blog.

Although the children have been disappointed at the lack of opportunities to go outdoors and play, it has brought them together as a class community and allowed them to learn even more about each other. It has also brought out the creative side in them...look at some of the pictures that show the makings and execution of a play! This was really sweet (These photos have been taken by our students).

Reminders:

Whole School Service Day (no single subject classes) - Monday, October 5
Grade 11 students will join us in our classrooms for Service Day activities

Individual and Class Photos - Wednesday, October 7 

Last day of School - Friday, October 9

School reopens - Monday, October 26