NTSIS PYP Primary Newsletter (21st October– 25th October 2019)
Transdisciplinary Theme: Where we are in place and time
Unit 2 is well underway. Lessons are starting to get exciting. Here are some of the highlights.
What a busy week…
Grade 1:
Central idea:
A city is a place where people work and live
Line of inquiry 1: Things that make a city
Line of inquiry 2: Differences and similarities of cities
Line of inquiry 3: People influence the development of their cities
We explored the things that make a city. The students talked about the different places in cities they have visited as well as places in Nantong. They built some of these places using LEGO blocks. In Language Arts, we learned about the silent E or magic E and how it changes vowel sounds and we also started looking at action verbs. Meanwhile, our Math focus was about ordinal numbers. We wrapped up the week with the festivities of Diwali and the children made their own “diyas” or lamps.
Please get your costumes ready as we look forward to the Halloween celebrations next Thursday, October 31st.
What a busy week!
Grade 2:
Central idea:
Connections between people are necessary for personal growth
Line of inquiry 1: How travel has changed the way we connect
Line of inquiry 2: Social connections
Line of inquiry 3: Opportunities to connect
In class this week we started our new Unit and have been working on Line of Inquiry 1: how travel has changed the way we connect. We have inquired and explored flight from an investigative and self-discovery point of view, by building a variety of paper planes and testing out their flight performance. We have since moved on to our project which is to research the history and advances travel has taken. Groups have been created and everyone is using a variety of means (Home research, tablet research, mac lab research and books from the library) to understand a means of travel and how it has made us more connected in the world. Group work allows for everyone to share ideas and to develop their communication skills, social skills and leadership skills, more. In Math, we have worked on weight, multiplication and 2D shapes.
What a busy week!
Grade 3/4:
Central idea:
A sense of interconnectedness and cultural awareness develops through analysing other cultures
Line of inquiry 1: Choices are influenced by geographical location
Line of inquiry 2: Difference between home culture and other cultures
Line of inquiry 3: Ways to be international-minded
For the next 6 weeks we will be inquiring about different cultures as well as analysing differences between home culture and other cultures. This week we focused on geography by doing some research on continents and identifying their distinguishing features. As a learning experience related to our unit of inquiry, students found out how to cook Italian pasta and then we enjoyed our classroom meal together. We also held a Diwali assembly for all PYP students talking about this beautiful Hindu festival of lights and teaching them how to make diyas- small Diwali lamps. In Math lessons, we did reading and writing numbers in numerals and in words. We also enhance our understanding of place values (thousands, hundreds, tens and ones). In language inquiry, students discovered about the word order in a sentence.
What a busy week!
Grade 5/6:
Central idea:
We are who we are because of immigration.
Line of inquiry 1: Migration changes cities
Line of inquiry 2: People of different cultures assimilate
Line of inquiry 3: Migration affects social and environmental conditions
Students did share their experiences of someone or themselves reasons for migration. We also looked and listed out the various reasons why people migrate to other places or countries by identifying the push and pull factors. We studied some photos and pictures that are linked to key words such as globalization, trade, capital and movement. We practiced on how to divide a fraction by a whole number and proper fraction by a proper fraction. We did a close study on direct and indirect speech as to how tense, pronouns and adverbs have changed in indirect speech. We studied the importance of the water cycle and how water is also important to humans and plants. We looked at the impact of pollution on the Earth’s water and compare the Singapore River in the past and present. We were busy preparing and decorating for the coming Halloween event on 31stOctober and looking forward to it.
This week, we feature specialist subject: Chinese
Grade 1:
Grade 2:
A poem about mum
Grade 3/4:
We discussed what the sky looked like, learned the fable story of China, such as ‘Shou Zhu dai tu ‘,‘Dui Niu Tan Qin’,and learned new words from this stories, we also played a game called idiom catch-up dragon, and made storybooks by themselves.
Grade 5/6:
Practicing Chinese characters on the board
We celebrated Diwali @assembly (25th October 2019)
