Term 3 week 3

Hello parents of Kindergarten A

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend planned and are out and about enjoying this great weather!

English

We have been continuing to improve our English language skills this week.  We are enjoying our story writing and copying lessons. Where as a class we create a story using verbs, adjectives, nouns etc and different students help build up the story sentence by sentence.

After we create the story we copy it down to practice our English writing and to memorise sentence structure.

Out English chart has been helping us focus more on using English the majority of the time in our class. On Tuesday most of the class received stickers for their efforts and I am sure in no time we will be giving out our first English achievement certificates.

Maths

In maths this week we learned a little about fractions,  practised our addition and subtraction drills and reviewed our skip counting.

I have been quite impressed with how well everyone has been improving with with addition and subtraction drills.  Everyone is not only getting faster but more importantly they are getting more accurate, taking their time to make sure the answers are correct before they move on.

Unit of Inquiry

In our units of inquiry this week we made our final decisions on what we want to do for our YEP performance and without giving too much of the performance away the class has opted to perform a play with a traditional festival dance at the end.

We set to work looking at different plays that have a clear message and that have enough parts for every student at have a role as well as short enough to be performed and memorized. We also made dragon masks and started practicing our festival dance with the help of Ms Rika and Ms Nao.

Finally we are looking at possible costumes for our performance but it seems that everyone in the class would like to wear a happi for our final dance of the year together. 

Play

We spent time in the gym this week but we have all been very careful to regularly spray or was our hands so that we can protect ourselves from the flu or any other germs that are floating around in the colder months.

Graduation Photos

On Friday this week we all got dressed up to have our graduation and class photos taken! 

It was a lot of fun though we did find the hats to be funny!

Show and Tell

On Thursday Taisei and Kazushi decided to do their show and tell time together because they had the same toy they wanted to share with the class. They wanted to go together so that everyone would have a change to play with the toy!

Japanese class

Before each Japanese class to get us in the right mindset we always sing country roads in Japanese.

Important Information

Height and Weight checks

The height and weight checks have been done and will be emailed you you on Monday.

Homework

In the homework packet this week you will find -

Maths drills

English story writing

Chinese New Year dragon craft

YEP ticket design competition form

Japanese homework

Influenza

Just a reminder to parents that influenza has been keeping children home recently so please keep healthy and let us know if your child has had a fever or has been feeling sick. 

We have been taking extra precautions in class with washing our hands, wearing masks and using alcohol spray to keep the germs away. 

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

Term 3 week 2

Hello parents of Kinder A

English

This week we have been working more on our phonics, writing and speaking on top of our usual reading.

For our writing lessons we have been making up short four sentence stories together and copying them off the board to improve our handwriting. I have been very impressed with our writing but some of us have been having trouble with a few of our letters. I will be sending home a few drill pages for homework to correct these letters.

Also sent home as English homework is a story page for the children to practice their sentence structures and to allow them to tell stories.

We have also introduced an English speaking chart in our classroom. All the rewards and penalties have been devised by the students themselves! From its introduction I have already seen our students learning new words, helping each other speak English better and being excellent tutors and teachers to weaker English speakers in the class.

Maths

We have been doing speed addition and subtractions drills in class this week. Simple equations that we can all so but with a five minute time line. This is to improve our quick maths skills, stop us relying on our fingers and help us be faster but also accurate.

Unit of Inquiry

We have been looking at different celebrations and festivals around the would. On Tuesday we looked at Chinese festivals and we were all very interested to learn about the similarities between the Chinese Qingming (grave cleaning day) and the Japanese Obon festival. We were also amazing by the dragon boat racing festival!

We have looked at different traditional costumes and looking at the similarities and differences between Japan, China, Korea, Turkey. Should any parents have these traditional clothes at home we would be very interesting in learning more about them and how they are worn.

LAter this week we made posters of traditional costumes of separate countries so that we can start deciding what we would like to wear for our YEP performance.

Play time

We have been enjoying time both in the park and in the gym this week. Soccer has been thoroughly enjoyed in the gym and we have been getting better at our kicking and catching.

Important information

I have been asked by Mr Soydan to ask all parents to purchase their child a jump rope and have them bring it to school on Tuesdays for the physical education lesson. These can be purchases from any Daiso or hyaku en store.