Sharing our Home Learning

We have enjoyed hearing all about student's personal artifacts. They explained their chosen items and read their descriptions to the class over the past two days. Tomorrow we will finish displaying these in a creative way and will comment on how artifacts can give us an insight into the way people live.

Urban Environments

The week started with parents and caregivers coming in to look at our learning from our 'How We Express Ourselves' unit of inquiry. It was wonderful to see students proudly sharing their learning journeys. They shared their inspiration boards, finished artworks and artists statements, and their book creator journals.

I will add the book creator journals they made to their individual blog pages during the next few days. These were student's personal journals in which they created and reflected on artistic forms they experienced throughout the unit of inquiry. Here is a student example;


This week we began our new unit of inquiry 'Sharing the Planet.'

This is an inquiry into;

Rights and responsibilities in the struggle to share finite resources with other people and with other living things; communities and the relationships within and between them; access to equal opportunities; peace and conflict resolution.

The central idea for our unit is;
By developing an awareness of an urban environment, we can understand and modify the way we live within it.

We spend several sessions tuning into what we already understood about urban environments. Some of the activities we did this week included;

• Numbered heads together (a game to get groups discussing and using important vocabulary related to the unit). Students answered questions and came up with a group response that one group member had to feed back to the class.

• We completed an online survey to give us an overview of the Grade 2 student's prior knowledge.

• We built a city...demonstrating our initial understanding of how urban environments are organised. We then visited the other grade 2 cities and commented on ideas for change. We then had an opportunity to 'modify' our city based on the suggestions from our peers and our class reflections.

• We went to key spots within our school to view what is outside our gates! We recorded what we saw, what we thought, and what we wondered about the urban environment around us.
• We had a 'spiderweb' discussion reflecting our understanding of the city.
• 

MATHEMATICS
During mathematics we continued exploring our understanding of measurement. In class we have been looking at units of measurement for length, and have been solving problems using what we have learned. On Friday we took our learning outside. With our grade 5 buddies we made paper planes and recorded the distances we threw them in centimetres and metres using tape measures and trundle wheels.

WRITING
We worked on writing character descriptions about a special person or friend. Being able to describe a character in detail will help us when we write our narratives over the next few weeks.

Wrapping up Our Unit

We started the week with a wonderful opportunity to watch the grade 10 drama students in action. They created their own interpretation of the book 'Where The Wild things Are' by Maurice Sendack. 

The children loved the interactive drama and were very engaged and motivated by the show. 

In class we began drawing on our own inspiration to create an artwork. We wrote artist statements to accompany our work and displayed these in class. We would love you to come and look at our learning on Monday after the Water Festival. Class will be open between 7.30 and 8.00am, and 2.00 and 3.00pm. Above are some pictures of us working on our art forms. It was wonderful witnessing the children working together to assist each-other. They are very proud of their work.

Artist Statement

Sawyer

My artwork is called Super Carrier. It is a paper mache sculpture. I used cardboard boxes, tape, hot glue, paint, straws, red and black paint, old glue sticks, cans, a chip container, paper and glue.

I chose to do this because I love ships and construction. I’ve always been interested in how ships are built and made. My Mom showed me how to do paper mache and I really like getting messy.

I am proud of my work but I would still like to do more to finish it.

When they finished their work, they reflected and made connections to the attitudes and learner profiles they demonstrated throughout this unit of inquiry.

They also worked on completing their Book Creator creative journals...which reflect their learning and responses to art forms during the past six weeks. These will be uploaded to their individual blog pages.

Poetry
In written language, we learned how to choose words carefully to write a piece of poetry. Here are some student examples of personification poems.

The Star

The star lights up at night
She sings me songs
to make me go to sleep

She runs away from the sun
But is happy to see me

She dances 
to make the Moon happy

By Dita


The Wind

Wind whispers secrets to me.
When he is angry...
he shakes trees,
knocks over trash cans,
and howls.
Soon he calms down.
Touches me softly.



By Sawyer

The Moon

The Moon smiles at me with his big round mouth.
He sings a song
to the world below
to make them fall asleep.
The Moon decorates the sky with his beautiful light.
He makes the stars...
They are his babies.

By Fraya

Water Festival
This afternoon we learned about some of the history and traditions behind the Water Festival. Then we made Origami boats.
Happy Water Festival Everyone. I hope you enjoy your week off!

Creativity

Last week we explored an important aspect of our unit of inquiry - 'Creativity'. We looked at this through many lenses and across all areas of the curriculum.

We began the week with a visit to the elementary school art exhibit 'Colour'. While we were there we reflected on the forms of art we saw, and interpreted them using our personal perspectives. We wrote responses to a favourite artwork.

During our Lab visit this week, Mr Matt helped us learn how we can turn ordinary images into art using photo editing. We explored how to take an image and make it more emotive using pic monkey. We will follow this up next week.

In mathematics, we looked at the 'Telling time' aspect of measurement, and reviewed our understanding of reading analogue and digital time.


In literacy, we continued with poetry. We learned what personification is and added ideas from this into our poets toolbox.

We also continued with guided reading and Readers Theatre. We are learning to read aloud with expression and present our plays to an audience in an animated way.

Children loved the opportunity to explore different art-forms during grade two's Community Development session this week. They chose from;

• pointillism
• origami
• puppetry
• nature art

Puppetry

Nature Art

Origami

 Pointillism

For home learning, children have been choosing from a choice board of tasks centered around the concepts;

• Imagination
• Creation

And our attitudes of;

• Appreciation
• Creativity
• Confidence

I really enjoyed seeing what the children came up with this week. They loved sharing their ideas with the class and via email. Well done team!

To end the week we connected with our grade 5 buddies. We completed an activity looking at how how perspectives differ, then go stuck into building stuff using the construction equipment.

Weekly Update

We had a busy week and managed to cram plenty of learning into our four day week.

Mathematics: We continued our learning in geometry, exploring the attributes of 2d and 3d shapes. We explored the features that defined quadrilaterals and polygons, and participated in a variety of activities to support our understanding. We also explored nets for 3d shapes. We used these songs to help reinforce our knowledge;

Polygon song

Shape Song

Art and Music: G2 began investigating into their new Unit of Inquiry this week. 

Students INVESTIGATED examples of public art around Phnom Penh and other countries in both music and art.  In art they created 'fortune tellers'.  They looked closely and thought critically about 4 examples of public art.  Students wrote sentences using sentence starters like, "I wonder...It makes me feel...This reminds me of...".  After folding their fortune tellers, students shared their artworks, thoughts and questions about one another's public art images. 

You can find out more about our learning in art, music, PE, and Foreign Languages by viewing the single subject blogs listed on the top of this page. Ms Dana and Ms Leigh have recently added examples of student learning onto the children's individual pages in the sidebar of this blog.

Literacy: We continued learning how to respond to different art forms in a structured way. We wrote responses to books, films, dances and artworks in our books, and recorded our ideas on our book creator creations on the ipads. In reading we responded to text and some groups began Reader's Theatre...presenting plays to an audience.

Unit of Inquiry:

We painted our inspiration boards this week. We will begin adding drawings, cutouts, photographs, words and natural elements to these next week. These boards will become the motivation for our final summative assessment - guiding the choices we will make when we select, create, and reflect on our own art piece. 

This week in community development we had the opportunity to learn more about artforms. We had inspiring visitors share their passions with us and had a chance to experience our choice of two workshops;

• Drama (with Angela Ascher)
• Paper Mache (with Srisuna Stelzig)
• Songwriting (with Mr Jon)
• Photography (with Ms Paula)
• Poetry (with Ms Rachel)
• Apsara Dance (with our teacher assistants)

PE: Over the past 5 weeks we have been working on invasion games in PE. Our skills have really developed!

Wrapping up our Unit!

On Friday we wrapped up our unit of inquiry 'Who We Are'. We celebrated our learning by having a healthy snack party. Children were encouraged to make a healthy snack and explain to the class what nutritional benefits it had and how it was made. We had a variety of foods that represented our cultures and many of the food groups. Children confidently presented these and then we tucked in!

We have been working hard on researching the answers to our individual unit of inquiry questions. After we came up with our questions, we had a session with the librarian on how to use key words to search information online. We also learned how to navigate our way through the Kids Health website.

It took a while to find the information we needed and complete our mind maps. We then had to synthesise our information and write a statement that answered our question. When we made our posters, we thought about where to place pictures and how to set our information out so that it was eye catching and interesting. We had an opportunity to present these to the class and our grade 5 buddies in the afternoon. The children will record their statements and upload these to their individual blog pages when they return to school.

I see, I think, I wonder

I see / I think / I wonder is a visible thinking routine we use with learners to encourage them to make careful observations and thoughtful interpretations. Today we looked at all of the photos students had shared of their 'family meals'. We moved around looking at the images and wrote notes to answer the questions;

• What do you see?
  
• What do you think about that?
  
• What does it make you wonder?

We then reflected on what a healthy food plate looks like, and what it means to eat a 'balanced' diet.

Teamwork in Action

We are integrating with PE during our 'Who We Are' unit of inquiry. Today we put into action two of the key attitudes from this UOI - Commitment and Cooperation! What fabulous teamwork kids!

Buddy Reading

Today we met with our grade five buddies for buddy reading. We were also taught a great song by them that they performed at today's assembly.

This week in PE

We continued to focus on one of our unit's attitudes 'Cooperation' in PE. Ask your child about what the objectives were in this game and see if they can reflect on how their team cooperated and problem solved.