Unit 1 of inquiry has come to an end

 

Our first unit of inquiry has come to an end and now we are starting a unit about science, especially about materials. 

In the first unit, “Who We Are: Self awareness helps us understand ourselves and others”, we learnt about what makes a person unique. For example, is everyone’s family the same or are they different? How do members of our family make us special? Do you have an older sister or brother who as taught you many things? Or a grandparent or aunt or uncle who taught you how to cook, fish or ride a bike? Hiroka said he likes to go fishing with his grandpa. 

Miyu loves to play with Daito and he has taught her many things. 

Students also drew pictures of their house and neighbourhood and talked about if they know who their neighbours are or the local shopkeeper they see everyday. Anna A said her dad is always friendly to the shopkeeper at the convenience store. 

Do we all have the same interests or not? We looked at what we can do to be a good friend to others and what we can do if we are feeling sad or frustrated with someone. E.g. Euanne said she likes to have quiet time in her room to calm down. Others said they will read a book or draw or watch TV. 

If you’re angry with someone at school, we talked about walking away until you feel calm, doing Rock, Scissors, Paper to decide who will use the toy, or ask a teacher to help solve your problem.

Then we looked at the kinder class compared to the wider world. Do all children eat rice, fish and vegetables for lunch, or are other countries different? Do all schools look like Abroad or are they different? We looked at pictures of students in classrooms learning outside in Australia, Brazil and other countries. Some had no shoes or t shirts on because it’s so hot!

Kinder students also compared how they look compared to their friends. Do all children in Japan and black hair and dark brown eyes? We realised that even in Japan, children have lighter hair or darker hair, lighter skin or darker skin, or if you are like me and Hanna, different hair and eye colours too. 

Finally we looked at what things we all have in common. So we took a vote on who prefers dogs or cats? Most people liked cats which was interesting! Everyone liked pizza in our class and most children like Demon Slayer and Jujitsu Kaisen!

In art, Ms Bel tried to do activities related to the unit so the children drew a portrait of their own face. They also drew a map of the Horie neighbourhood and designed their own neighbourhood. 

In English, we have been revising a lot of phase 3 sounds from last year and practising letter formation. I started to introduce 5 new sight words a week for them to learn, as well as practising the pre primer and primer words from last year. Many students are still struggling to remember these sounds - /igh/ (long I sound such as night, light), /th/ sound, /oi /and /ai/ sounds.

I will hopefully test all the students for a second time on RAZ to see if they can level up before the parent- teacher conferences. 

In math, we have been practising counting to 100 and counting back from 30 - 0. We have revised skip counting by 2s and 5s and introduced skip counting my 10s. After practising addition for quite a while, we have also started learning subtraction. In the last week I introduced place value, for example, the number 24 is made of 2 tens and 4 ones/units. We have been using number rods to practise making numbers up to 100.