YEAR 1
Lights, camera, action!
Much of this week has been taken up with busy preparations for the EIS West Winter Concert. The children have enjoyed making props for their performance, including some beautifully decorated Japanese fans that they designed and made in their art lesson with Miss Sonia. In addition to this, the children have also been involved in daily class rehearsals for the concert. They have been working hard to memorize their lines for the performance and enjoyed learning how to sing a Japanese New Year song, with the help of Miss Katya, in their music lessons. Yuwa and Keisuke have been invaluable, patiently helping us to learn how to pronounce some very challenging Japanese words! They have been the most wonderful teachers.
Also, a big thank you to Yuwa’s mummy who made the class a Peach Boy flag and headband. These inspired a renewed interest in the traditional Japanese story that we learnt last week, and the children eagerly worked together to act it out for a delighted Ulyana, who arrived back from overseas on Monday. Writing the story this week has been a breeze as the children know the story so well.
We continued with our focus on Measurement and Time in Mathematics this week. The children easily sequenced the days of the week, so challenged themselves to order the months of the year. They then decided to add everyone’s birthdays and discovered that October had the most birthdays and April, July and November did not have any. They also had great fun engaging in many practical activities that supported their understanding what one minute and five minutes feels like.
With Christmas just around the corner, Year 1 asked if they could decorate our classrooms. A few children chose to decorate the bookcase with tinsel and after using two packets, sadly discovered that they did not have enough tinsel to finish the job. This inspired some quick thinking as they began to estimate how much more I would need to buy. Their estimates ranged from two to five more packets. On Wednesday, after some very careful measuring, Marcus was delighted to discover that his estimate of two was indeed correct. Bravo!
YEAR 2
Year 2 has new respect for circus clowns; for science, we tried our hand at twisting, turning, pulling, bending our chosen material to help it change shape. What started as a project to make an animal out of a balloon, quickly became an ambition to just practice our bending and twisting techniques! It wasn’t an easy task we learned! But it was engaging, and students enjoyed the process. In the end, we tried to just make ‘sausages’!
Year 2 continues to be a happy place to learn, as students spent class time together, and play time together outside: how many year 2’s does it take to play on a see-saw? Almost all of them, as you can see in the picture. Year 2 continues to put its best foot forward to help each other out, use words to describe what we like in a friend, as we discussed during our PSHE class this week.
One more week to go before our winter break; next week Tuesday, our concert should be ready for you to see via zoom, or have access to in video form.
Have a wonderful weekend!
Year 2 Team.
