Dear Parents,
Due to early dismissal at 12 O’clock there will be no lunch at school for students tomorrow.
Due to early dismissal at 12 O’clock there will be no lunch at school for students tomorrow.
Dear Parents,
Due to early dismissal at 12 O’clock there will be no lunch at school for students tomorrow.
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Dear Parents,
This week is our last week for How the World Works. We will be designing and building solutions to different everyday problems using our understanding of simple and compound machines. Thank you for all the resources you've sent in from home. We have more than enough to get us through the week. In Math, we will use this week to revisit some previously learnt skills and concepts. We will also introduce qualitative probability - certainly, more likely, equally likely, less likely, impossible. Students will learn to justify their reasoning through observation and logical reasoning. For example: How likely is it that it will rain in Dubai today? Response: It is less likely to rain in Dubai today because we know that Dubai is a desert region that usually experiences little rainfall. The sun is shining brightly outside as well. How likely are you to pick up a black card from a deck of cards? Response: It is equally likely that I will pick a black card because within a deck of cards, there is an equal number of red and black cards. In Language, we have just published our explanation of why Mr. Gum is a horrible man. We will spend the rest of the week re-visiting non-fiction guided reading texts and will also begin our reading of The Iron Man. Our first few follow-up activities for The Iron Man will be centered around predicting what the story will be about based on a few introductory clues, visualizing scenes and creating mind maps, and creating diary entries while empathizing with a given character. Announcements/Reminders:
Dear Parents, What a fabulous week we had last week. The Aquathlon went well, the students had a blast with Sports Day, and our Andy Stanton author visit was a huge success. I hope some of your children went home and shared stories with you about how funny and engaging he was! This week we will be wrapping up our class reading of You're a Bad Man, Mr. Gum. We are currently using this text to help us focus on writing good paragraphs. A strong paragraph begins with a topic sentence which introduces the main idea. We then support the main idea with examples and details that strengthen and provide evidence for the topic sentence. Finally we conclude by restating the topic sentence using different words. We can also add how the main idea helps readers/learners to understand___(fill in the blank)__. Attached below are a few graphic organizer you can use at home with your child as a post-reading activity to check for understanding and support writing. Choose an angle and write a paragraph. You may want to prompt your child with a question specific to the book they are reading. For instance: (Fiction) How would you describe Mr. Gum as a character? What do you think was the lesson/moral of the story? How do we know that the author was trying to show that good always prevails? (Non-fiction) What is the main point of this text about insects? What is the author's purpose in writing about simple machines? While our students have lots of great ideas, it is often a difficult skill to summarize and structure ideas and supporting evidence with fluency. Later this week, we will begin our book study of The Iron Man. The Iron Man is a short children’s novel by the poet Ted Hughes. Written forty years ago, this modern fairy tale has become a children’s classic. Hughes instantly engages the reader with a dramatic opening and memorable language. The novel tells the story of a mysterious iron giant whose destructive quest for food alarms the local farming community. During the novel The Iron Man turns from villain to hero in the eyes of the public as the world faces a bigger threat, the arrival of a colossal space monster. The story unfolds through the eyes of a young boy, Hogarth, who forms a friendship with the Iron Man. The sequence aims to engage the reader through exploration of this powerfully written story. Children learn to empathise with the feelings of the characters through drama approaches and writing in role. They develop their abilities to form and give opinions through taking part in discussions about the central dilemma; what to do with The Iron Man. Children will develop their own ability to use language creatively through listening to the strongly patterned and descriptive language read aloud, re reading, shared poetry writing and performance. Our book study of the Iron Man will unravel over a few weeks, each week having a different language focus. More on this next week! In Math, we are using capacity experiments to consolidate a few different skills: adding (while concocting imaginary potions with measurement parameters), comparing numbers, looking at data and ordering results from smallest to greatest, explaining how different attributes (shape, size, height, width) contribute to estimates, etc. We will also extend these skills into our investigation on mass using grams and kilograms. As we approach approach the end of our unit, students will spend this week tackling a real-life situation faced by a farmer in Nepal. Students will be faced with a transport challenge and will be given time to design a solution for the farmer, keeping in mind the pros and cons of using certain simple machines and looking for ways to create compound/complex machines. If you have recyclable materials at home for construction, please send them in. Students will eventually build their "solutions" using resources brought in from home and available in our learning space. Announcements/Reminders:
As always, thank you for your continued support. Warm regards, Bhavna Dear Parents,
Thank you for your participation in our Student-Led Conferences. The next day in class, each student was able to share something positive their parents said to them with beaming faces. This week, we will continue building our simple machines with Tech Cards. We are also creating a book of simple machines found in our school and home environments, thinking about how little things we take for granted really do make jobs easier for us. We will also begin to look at the evolution of machines. How have things changed since the time of ancient civilizations? What do we have now that perhaps were already in use thousands of years ago? What inventions/discoveries have revolutionized the way we build machines today? As we look into this, we will be thinking about building our own machines in class using recycled materials. If you have resources at home that you can collect for us, we would be very grateful. These include items such as: toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, tissue/cereal boxes, plastic bottles, foam, bubble wrap, boxes, straws, plastic, sticks, string/spools, etc. - basically anything that can be used for construction. You are welcome to drop them off in class or send them in with your child. For additional exploration at home, please find interesting home invention ideas at the following site: https://jam.com/courses/8/invent-your-own-machines In language, as we continue to develop comprehension skills from explanation texts, our writing focus will shift back to some basics of writing. How do we form paragraphs? How do we know when an opportunity for paragraphing exists? Our math focus for the week is on Capacity. Students will be exposed to U.S. and Imperial Metrics. Today, we learnt to manipulate numbers using the following equivalence: 1 pint = 2 cups 1 quart = 2 pints = 4 cups 1 gallong = 4 quarts = 8 pints We will spend the rest of the week on liters and milliliters. We will also be making predictions and testing our predictions with containers of different shapes and sizes. Can we order the containers from the least to greatest capacity accurately simply by looking at them? Students will test their predictions using water buckets to check for accuracy. Announcements/Reminders:
As always, thank you for your support at home. Warm regards, Bhavna |
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June 2017
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