Weekly Update :25th -29th September

What a fabulous week of learning we have had! We began our new unit of inquiry 'How the World Works'.
During this unit we will develop our understanding that:

• 'Plants require specific environments and conditions for growth'

We will be exploring;

• Cycles and characteristics of plants
• Factors that influence plant growth
• Ways plants adapt to their environment

We have been leading up to this unit for a while...after planting our own vegetable garden a few weeks ago. We enjoyed going down this week to weed the garden bed and were amazed by the growth of our bok choy and ochre (ladyfinger) over the Pchum Ben break. Here are some pictures that show this process so far;

Planting:

Weeding before the holiday:

These plants are now nearly knee high!

Before we started the unit, we completed a diagram of a plant...demonstrating our prior knowledge. This helped our teacher see what understandings we already had so that she can plan activities to support us. 

We worked in small groups to translate the parts of a plant into our mother tongues (home languages). children were excited about creating posters in Japanese, Khmer, English, Korean, Mandarin, Swedish, Norwegian, French and Hindi.

During the week, we watched videos and read books to support our understanding of parts of a plant and their functions.

In literacy, we are looking at non fiction texts. This fits in well with our current unit as we will need to read a variety of information texts  to inquire into in order to find out about plants features, needs and environments. Ms Petra and Ms Karyn have been working with us to understand some of the features of NF books. In reading, we have explored a variety of books and made our own flip books of non fiction features to use as references. some of the features we explored were;

• Glossary and index 
• Table of contents
• Labels and captions
• Photographs and illustrations
• Page numbers
• Graphs and diagrams
• Titles and headings

Three mornings a week we have a literacy rotation that specifically targets the students individual needs. During this time, learners work on a variety of tasks designed to reinforce their spelling, high frequency word recognition, letter formation and handwriting. Here are some pictures of us working during this weeks sessions.

In the middle of the week, we were surprised to find that it rained during lunch recess! This does not happen very often in Cambodia. We enjoyed the novelty of going back to our classrooms and being allowed to play indoors.

We reflected on our class environment and discussed what changes we wanted to make to our learning space. They already liked many aspects of our room but wanted to plan how we could make our space even better. The class went for a walk around other classrooms in the school for ideas before deciding that they would like our class to have;

• A comfortable area to read books - maybe a reading fort or tent
• Some lamps or different lighting
• Some larger group tables and some smaller quieter spaces to work
• More plants
• Colorful work displayed
• A place to stand and work
• A science corner - with things to look at and experiment with

That afternoon, Ms Karyn and Ms Yin started to rearrange our learning space. Over the next few weeks we will continue to adapt and reflect on how the classroom arrangement is working.

Two of our students were really motivated by this and brought in homemade artworks and plants to school the next day to make our class more interesting - What fabulous action!

We ended the week by meeting with our grade 5 buddy class. They taught us how to make slime! It was really enjoyable. I hope you all have a happy weekend!