Week 39 (continued)

Today, I will continue on from yesterdays post and talk about what we will be doing in class this week. Last week as I mentioned yesterday we finished writing our friendly letters and posted them to a special someone. In the second half of the week we started writing a story about where we come from, from the view point of our family history. We hope by doing this we will be able to better understand our own personal beliefs and values. We will continue to work on these stories this week and hopefully have them finished by this Thursday.  Everyone has approached their personal story in a positive manner and we all have been very interested in hearing others read out parts of their story to the class.

Some of the jewelry that my mothers side wore on the boat trip to Australia 

This week is our last of our first Program of Inquiry and it will be finish with the class presenting their projects on Monday 1st. The students have been very open to talking and learning about their own and others values and beliefs over the last five weeks. If the students only take away one thing from this unit it should be the fact that we all, irrespective of our culture or religion have many things in common.

In maths we have started our mini unit which we will continue to work on this week. Before we continue further along our maths programme we needed to brush up and extend our knowledge of addition and subtraction. This year we will be working a lot with fractions and decimals, so we needed to introduce the concepts of adding and subtracting fractions and decimals. We will continue to revisit these concepts throughout the school year (especially when we start our units on fractions and decimals).

The two strands from the maths scope and sequence* (and their corresponding expansions) that we will be focusing on are;

·        Model addition and subtraction of fractions with related denominators

o   Add and subtract fractions with related denominators in real-life situations

·        Model addition and subtraction of decimals

o   Add and subtract decimals in real-life situations, including money

So far we have reviewed how to subtract and add up to four by four digit numbers, introduced adding and subtracting decimals in relation to money and length, adding and subtracting like fractions, and some have even started on mixed numbers. This week we will continue looking at these areas and expanding our own personal knowledge of these concepts.

I have been informed today that developmental talks will be held on October 10th (Wednesday, week 41). Unfortunately our class will not be able to have our talks on the same day as from October 2^nd I will be at home with my new born child for two weeks. I have been informed that we will be rescheduling our day to another date. I will write more about this at the end of the week as I do not have all the details about how it will work yet. I will also inform you all about who will be looking after the class in my absence and the work that they will be covering over weeks 40 and 41.

Here is another photo from Vida's mum from the World Culture Museum.

*I have tried to add the maths scope and sequence to the blog bit it keeps on getting rejected as the document is copy righted. I will try to find a solution to this problem.