A very warm welcome to the New Year and a special welcome to Amelia Lowth and her family who have just joined our 1PTh class community! The first week back has been lovely - the classroom was filled with chatter and excitement about the holidays and gifts and such. It never fails to amaze me how much travelling our children are doing these days and how much knowledge, perspective and insight they acquire from this. It’s wonderful. We had a Holiday Scavenger Hunt to find out who did something brave or creative or tried something new, etc. etc. Have a look at some photos below.
In our current Unit of Study, Arts Festival, children have started to investigate how ideas and feelings can be conveyed through the arts. Some of the questions we will explore are:
What does it mean to be creative?
What makes one way of communicating more effective than another?
What ideas and feelings can be communicated through the arts?
How do artists communicate ideas and feelings?
How might we use music, dance, drama and visual arts to communicate ideas or feelings?
How might we work together to create an original performance?
Should messages be conveyed through the arts? Why?
The plan is for everything to come together on Thursday 4th February in the auditorium at 9.00am (put the date in your diaries now!) at the Grade One Arts Festival performance. 1PTh have already started brainstorming ideas about how we can share what it means to be creative with the world. We have a million ideas right now but in the coming week, we will start to collaborate on a few ideas and see what comes out of it. The process of thinking, planning, designing, etc. is all going to come from children so they have complete ownership of the Arts Festival.
This week, we also introduced a new Writing Workshop unit, “Opinion Writing.” The unit focuses on writers stating an opinion and supplying supportive reasons for that opinion. Over the coming weeks, we will explore the skills involved in opinion writing. We started the unit by sharing what an opinion is and how it has to be supported by reasons and examples to convince someone. Questions that triggered great conversations were, “Cycling is better than riding a motorcycle”, “It is better to have one good friend than many friends”, “Singapore is a great place to live in”, “It is better to have longer playtime than eating time at school” and so on. We also asked questions that started with the phrase, “Would you rather...” to get children to Agree and Disagree and then support their opinions with reasons. It’s been brilliant to hear their arguments!
Reminders and Requests
- 11th January : Swimming starts this week
- 13TH January - no school-PD DAY
- 4th Feb MORNING ARTS FESTIVAL PERFORMANCE
- Please return your child’s Portfolio if you have not already done so
- We still need more shoeboxes for an upcoming Service Initiative
- Don’t forget, every Friday is “Fresh Fruit Friday”
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