week 15 Weekly letter

It was good to back after the Easter break. The students have been full of energy and focus which helped us get through a lot of work over the week. We started the week with  new units of Maths and writing and a moved focus in our Inquiry. we also took advantage of the great weather and had some open air lessons.

This week in reading groups we all started on new books, we will be spending the next few weeks focusing on novels and getting lost in a good book. This change has been welcomed by the students who were getting tired of reading non fiction books. In writing we have moved from report writing to essay writing (which we will need for our coming POI project). We were introduced to essay writing by us making a statement and then backed it up with three strong points. One of the statements that we had to make was to say if Little Bo Peep should of gone and looked for her sheep (why or Why not?). At the moment we have now started to develop our essay skills further and we have all have began to write an essay about fat - good and bad fats from foods. One we have written down our thoughts and ideas we will look at how to construct our introduction, body and conclusion (week 16).

Learning how to do breaststroke on your chair

To finish up our focus on report writing (we will be continuing to write reports between now and the end of the year) homework was to teach a skill to the class. This was done with some great success with the class not only getting some report writing practice but also learning some fun skills as well. We learnt how to; play a song with a cup, make a paper aeroplane, magic and swimming.

see more here: http://photo.net/no-words-forum/007jbW

In maths we have started our unit on geometry. During the introduction of the unit the class reflected about geometric shapes and where we find them. We also spent time reconnecting to how mathematics and geometry is always around us. we learnt a bit about the golden ratio and golden spiral (find examples here, here and here). We spent time learning the relationships of shapes and generally getting reconnected to shapes and the relationships between each shape

(I will be putting the scope and sequence outline for Geometry soon in a different post)

The spring show will soon be upon us (15th May) so the class sat down to decide what they wanted to do for the night. After some discussion we decided that we wanted to do something that involved dancing, bright colour and having fun. From this we worked out that we will be doing an interesting number that during the main part we will be dancing as a group to LMAO's Party rock anthem. Below is a link to the song on YouTube and as well as a link to the dance moves that we will (if we can get it down) doing. I have asked the students to start looking through their clothes to find things that are bright and colourful, parents think 1989.

 

We continued with our unit on the human body with our focus being on what we should be putting into it. We started writing an essay after we learnt that our body needs certain types of fats. We also learnt how important water is and what signs to look out for if we start to get dehydrated.



Michelle explaining the different colours in relation to dehydration


making an experiment to show what the different colours of urine will look like

optimum hydration--------hydrated--------dehydrated------------seek medical help

Just slightly off topic: a while ago the class was doing persuasive writing. During the unit we had the task of retelling a fairy tale from a different point of view. Last night I found this, it's not exactly what we did but I found it very interesting in the retelling of a classic tale.



This video was found on a website called http://dreamdogsart.typepad.com/

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.