NTSIS PYP Preschool Newsletter (9th September– 13th September 2019)
Transdisciplinary Theme: Who we are
As a community of learners, we value feedback from parents. We made adjustments so that everyone can be involved in the children’s learning, in come Parents Rock! Parents Rock! reveals what we are going to do in the classroom in the following week. Parents will be kept abreast of the latest happenings and help to support over the weekend. Without further ado, let’s look at the exciting activities over the week.
What a busy week…
Nursery:
Central idea:
Getting to know about myself
Line of inquiry 1: Our body functions
Line of inquiry 2: Our abilities
Line of inquiry 3: Likes and dislikes
Students tried tasting different kinds of snacks, food and fruits, and learned to identified the different taste such as sweet, sour, salty and spicy. They also talked about what our mouth can do ~ talk, eat, taste. Children also listened to animal sounds from “sound books” and tried to identify the different animals. They also learned to listen to the beats of the tambourine and moved their bodies to the beats.
This week, children will be introduced to the National Day of China, and the symbols on the flag of China. Activities such as picture talk will be discussed, to show students how people celebrate National Day in China.
What a busy week…
Kindergarten 1:
Central idea:
Senses help us experience the world
Line of inquiry 1: The senses
Line of inquiry 2: Functions of senses
Line of inquiry 3: Experiencing with senses
We continued our inquiring into sight and experiencing on Visual Discrimination and Visual Perception. The children through ‘Spot the Difference’ games practised to identify likenesses and differences between specific images; and examining ‘What do you see’ pictures to make sense of images seen with their eyes. For Language, we practised vowels ‘n’ ‘h’ aeiou, and handwriting practice o, a and ‘g’. In addition, we get to foster our cutting and pasting skills while examining the different fonts of 2, 5, a, g, h. For Maths, we practised counting aloud 1 ~ 40, number writing 1 ~ 10 and worksheet within 10.
Subsequently, we will inquire into taste and experiencing how sight influences our ability to taste foods.
What a busy week…
Kindergarten 2:
Central idea:
Everyone is different
Line of inquiry 1: Physical characteristics
Line of inquiry 2: Personal characteristics
Line of inquiry 3: Learning through experiences
The week’s UOI focused on reviewing the different flavors of taste and our favorite foods. We followed a rubric to assess if we could apply our vocabulary to a casual dialogue. Everyone did great!
In circle time, we learned a song about opposites and used it to discuss who is taller and who is shorter. We measured our heights on our space ship chart and learned how to say our height in centimeters.
In the golden afternoon sun shine we looked to Nature to answer the question, can we find any two things that are exactly the same? Children were eager to examine the smallest detail of plants, from the color graduation of little wild flowers to the veins of leaves.
In Math, we applied skip counting by 2’s to addition, adding by 2’s on our fingers and in our numbers. We followed a counting by 5’s dance work out and identified the pattern on our own white board number grids. We then applied this knowledge to find out how many fingers there are on each hand, recognizing hands as sets of five. We made hand prints using our favorite paint colors. It was a beautiful mess!
This week, we feature specialist subject: Art
For PYP Nursery, K1 and K2 classes, the focus in ART has been to learn and understand all of the PYP Learner Profile: Risk Taker, Inquirer, Open-Minded, Knowledgeable, Principled, Balanced, Communicator, Reflective Thinker, and Caring! The students have made handheld props to hold up as they are feeling or displaying that specific Learner Profile attribute. So far, the students have made props for Inquirer, Communicator, and Thinker. And we have just started on Open-Minded and Reflective! The students are having great fun learning these new words and visualizing the meaning of the PYP Learner Profile!
Reminders:
27th September 2019, Friday @3:40pm: Celebrating National Day @assembly
