Being Balanced and Brave


 Dear Turtle Class Families,


We have been on some alphabetical adventures recently in class, where we have imagined we have lost our names! We were inspired by a book called "The Girl Who Lost Her Name' and we also had to help Joyce find her lost name in the ocean! 



The Turtle Class has been busily using their imaginations to create fictional stories of how they were able to find the letters in their names. They are eager to share their books with you soon! To further support your child's phonological awareness of initial letter sounds, playing games such as 'I Spy' can help them begin to recognise familiar grapheme-phoneme correspondences.


Recently, the class has thoroughly enjoyed playing a game called "Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?"


Please find the lyrics to the fun song/game below:

We have recently unpacked one of our Learner Profile attributes for this unit of inquiry - "Communicators" and have learned that there are many different ways to communicate. For example, through facial expressions, body movements, sign language, drawings, symbols, written words, paintings, dance and performing arts!

We will begin using new communication skills and play a variety of fun games such as charades to practise how to be successful communicators.

When we try new activities or learn new skills, it can feel a little scary as it is unfamiliar. We have shown the Turtle Class what happens to our brains when we learn something new, though using the following diagrams from Dr. Liz Angoff.


We can make many connections in our brain. The things we are good at (our strengths), are like strong highways that we have built through lots of practise, such as walking and talking.


When we try new activities, we haven't built strong connections/highways yet. We call these highways 'under construction'.


It is important to try and practise new skills, as it helps build strong connections in our brains. If we don't try anything new, then these important connections will not be built.

We proceeded to read a story about a Koala named Kevin, who was too afraid to try anything new. However, when he eventually tried something different, he became a lot happier with the support from his kind friends!

We want to encourage the Turtle Class to have a positive, "I can" attitude when trying something new and unfamiliar, as this will help them to become courageous learners in their new Primary School learning environments!


Being balanced is important!






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Taking Action in the Early Years

Image
  Dear Turtle Class Families, We have continued to inquire into Causation and Responsibility in regard to taking care of our planet Earth. The children were asked the following question, "Where does all of our rubbish go?" We were very impressed with some of the children's prior knowledge who responded with, "A dumpsite!" We explored how lots of our rubbish cannot be recycled and therefore it is sent to a landfill, which can be a problem for our planet Earth. We watched a small clip from the Disney movie Wall-E, which also highlighted the importance of recycling and caring for our planet.  These are some funny clips from the movie too: The class then explored a variety of other ways in which we can help take care of our planet. Reading  The Earth Book  story written by Todd Parr, gave us lots to discuss and think about. Through a number of recycling activities in class, the children were able to revisit and transfer the knowledge gained in our previous unit of i...
Read more

How We Express Ourselves

Image
Welcome back to our final Term in the Turtle Class! It only feels like yesterday when the Turtle Class transitioned into their new K2 learning space from the K1 Dolphin Class!  We are looking forward to a fun-filled Term 3 together. This week, we began tuning into our new unit of inquiry - 'How We Express Ourselves (HWEO). This unit's central idea will focus on the following: "People can express their imagination and ideas in different ways."  On Thursday, we received a very special gift from a famous story character named Jack from the Jack and the Beanstalk story. Jack gifted us some magic beans, which we plan to plant and eagerly await our very own giant beanstalks to grow! Please note that we will now begin uploading photographs and videos into our new unit of inquiry Google Photo Albums, which can be found below: AM Class HWEO PM Class HWEO
Read more

Sharing The Planet (STP)

Image
 Dear Turtle Class Families, We are in full swing of our current unit of inquiry (UOI) - Sharing The Planet (STP), which the class have been thoroughly enjoying! To find out more about this unit please see a recent blog post from Brenda, our PYP Coordinator, HERE . One of our Learner Profile attributes that we will be exploring further in this unit is how to be effective inquirers, from using technology to exploring outside, asking questions and using books to help us search for answers to our wondering. The class became aware that there are different types of books in our school library - Fictional texts and Non-Fictional texts. The Turtle Class have been using more non-fiction texts to help us gain new knowledge about nature and the world around us.      We also enjoyed a walk along Bowen Road last week, where the class had the opportunity to experience our co-existence with nature. We had some great discussions about what we saw, heard, smelt and felt during our e...
Read more