Lower-Primary - Ms Julieta
Legends from around the world!
What a lovely and busy week we had!
During this week we worked very hard on our IPC project “The Stories People Tell”. The children were fascinated with some of the Legends we are studying. We learned about Siddhartha and how he became Buddha, and how he showed some of our very own ISG Personal Values, like respect, thoughtfulness, resilience, morality and adaptability. We are also reading other legends from different cultures like China (The Dragon Emperor) and England (Robin Hood).
On Thursday we had the most amazing time hearing the children stories about family members and their experiences. The stories were extremely profound and full of adventures. Thank you for sharing that with us. The children were very enthusiastic and they will be working on creating their very own legend inspired on their very special family member.
This week we also started looking at a new ISG Personal Value: Adaptability. During our class discussions we all agree that coming to a new country requires a lot of ADAPTABILITY. We all are doing our best in adapting to our new environment and are working very hard on making the best out of it. We talked about the things we miss the most from our home countries! Some miss the weather, the food and their friends. It was lovely to hear that one of the children’s favourite thing from Belgium was ISG!!!!
Here are some pictures of the children at work. Enjoy!
I wish you all a great weekend, take care and see you on Monday!
The Stories People Tell
It was a very busy week for Lower Primary. We had The Entry Point for our new IPC topic : The Stories People Tell. Together, the children made up their own imaginative stories. They planned, rehearsed and finally performed their stories to the whole class. We had some good laughs and were certainly very well entertained! Take a look at some pictures:
During our Knowledge Harvest, the children drew different characters from stories they know, some of them even wrote a small story as well! We had fun getting to know some characters from different countries!
As always we were very busy reviewing and learning new Numeracy topics. Here is a picture of Year 2 students counting money in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s .
The Year One students were very excited showing their Numeracy knowledge during a session with the Smart Board. Here, Year One is practicing counting in 10’s and finding patterns
Have a great weekend everyone! And see you next week!
Thoughtfulness
With Valentine's Day coming up, combined with our value of the month - 'thoughtfulness' - we decided to make something special for the mums and dads! The children worked hard to make a beautiful heart artwork. We discussed warm colours and cold colours and they all coloured in as carefully as possible. We hope you like them!
To accompany our artwork we wrote poems to say thank-you for all the things that the mums and dads do! It was lovely to read them, and the pupils were so excited to use an ink pen and their neatest handwriting.
I hope our gifts make your Valentine's Day extra special!
Have a great holiday break!
Think global, act local!
Today, for our IPC Exit Point, Lower Primary organised 'Healthy body, Healthy air day'! A lot of work went into preparing for today - the children made promotional posters, they prepared presentations to explain to the other classes why we were organising this event and they made certificates!
Here are Ivan, Chinmay and Luka confidently explaining to the Upper Primary class about why we were organising Healthy body, Healthy air day.
Here are Nanda, Shawn, Yashika and Diya explaining to Miss Mia's class about Healthy body, Healthy air day. The Upper Pre-Primary children had many questions to ask the organisers! The Lower Primary students were very excited to explain how they needed to come to school on Friday to get a prize and why!
Lastly, here are Gaya, Shubhan, Ansh and Avyukth explaining to the youngest ISG pupils about our event. Lower pre-primary pupils also had lots of questions and comments to share about different types of transport!
Today was the big day! All the school was involved and it was great to see as many people as possible coming to school by foot, bike or public transport. The Lower Primary students were very proud to hand out medals and their hand-made certificates congratulating everyone for reducing air pollution!
Here is Ivan, whose idea it was to organise today, arriving nice and early on his bike so he can start to hand out prizes!
Once everyone was back in their class, 3 students went around to collect data! Using a tally chart they recorded how students came to school today!
Yay! The Lower Primary students were so happy! Earlier in the unit when we found out the most common way for students to come to school it was by car - but not today! Most people came by walking or biking on Healthy body, Healthy air day. I introduced the saying 'Think global, act local' and we were all proud that we had a made a difference!
Have a good weekend everyone!
Thinking critically about transport!
We started our week with a small research task! For particular types of transport we looked at the good and bad points. We answered questions like "How fast does it go?" " How much does it cost?" "Does it pollute?" "Can you use this transport in all types of weather?" "Do we exercise when we use this transport?".
This created a lot of discussion about the impact different modes of transport have on our body and the enviroment. When I drew a picture of a bus with 20 people in it and then a picture of a line of cars with only 1 or 2 people in each car it really surprised the students about the impact of driving by car or by bus!
Using the ideas from our research we made a pictograph together which shows the positives and negatives of different transport.
Looking back at our survey about how students and teachers get to school, the most common way is by car! So the students in Lower Primary thought we better do something about it! We brainstormed some ideas and Ivan thought that we should organise a day where we give prizes to students and teachers if they come to school by bike, bus/tram or by walking! So, that is what we will do! We are going to call it the 'Healthy air, Healthy body day' and it will be next Friday 6th February! We have so much to organise now! We have to make posters advertising our day and tell everyone why we are organising it!
Our first task is to make posters for Healthy air, Healthy body day. So on Thursday we learnt how to draw a picture of a bus and a bike. We will then use these pictures for our posters! The pictures came out really well, you can see them on this slideshow!
Drawing bikes and buses! on PhotoPeach
Look out for our posters around the school next week and get prepared for Healthy body, Healthy air day!
Working with maps!
Following on from last week's work in IPC, we completed our International Task and discussed types of transport the children use in their home country. Many forms of transport were the same of course, but our students from India were very excited to talk about and show us pictures of a tuk tuk and an ox cart.
On Tuesday we started our next mapping activity. We were learning how to follow a simple map and locate and add features. We had a local map of the streets surrounding the school. As we walked, the children recorded on their maps where we were going and we practiced a lot of language to do with direction. Using a simple colour coded key we added features like the Citadel park, St Pieters church, a bakery etc. It was challenging, very cold, but fun!
So far we had worked with a local map of the area around ISG, a map of Ghent to discuss the way we come to school and our next map was of Belgium!
Looking at Google Earth we used symbols this time to add geographical features and also to indicate the 3 linguistic areas of Belgium!
The children are very excited about doing this same activity for homework next week about their home country!
For maths this week we have been focusing on measurement - weighing things using grams (Year 2's also did kilograms). The children loved doing a practical activity involving estimating how much something weighs before weighing it, and also finding items that were as a close as a possible to given weights.
We continue to read a lot in the Lower Primary class as well. This week we read Book 3 of the Magic Treehouse series which took us on an adventure to Ancient Egypt. It is great to see how excited and immersed the children are in the books and they are now interested to learn more about hieroglyph's, the pyramids, tombs and mummies! Here are some photos taken during our reading rotation time.
Have a good weekend everyone!
How we get to school!
First thing on Monday morning we celebrated Avyukth turning 6 years old! Happy birthday Avyukth!
We then finished off our Knowledge harvest from the week before. The children had cut out lots of pictures from magazines of different types of transport. We then classified them into land, air and water transport. The children also had fun drawing some of their own pictures of less traditional modes of transport like submarines, rockets and hot air balloons!
We then had a discussion about the different ways we all come to school, which naturally led us to the question - 'What is the most common mode of transport used to get to ISG?'. We first surveyed our own class, collecting our results on a tally chart. Students then went and surveyed the other classes and staff.
Our next step was to present our findings on a bar graph.
Our next Geography Learning target is to be able to use maps and locate the position of certain features. First of all we identified where ISG was and then all the students colour coded their own house.
The students loved looking at the map and finding their street! The next day, 3 students came to school to show a map they had worked on at home! It is great to see the students so enthusiastic about our topic that they continue their learning at home!
Next week we will continue to work with maps and writing a set of directions. This relates well to our learning in maths this week as we have been talking about words to describe position!
The Year 2's also learnt about right angles and practiced identifying angles that are smaller or larger than 90 degrees.
We also had a surprise visitor come into our class on Thursday! The children tried to predict who our surprise visitor was going to be - a Knight, an architect, a new student, a policeman? Then I gave them a clue - that it was not a human! Chinmay then guessed correctly - a robot!!
The children were very intrigued to see Zora the robot and what she could do!
She could even dance the Gangnam style!
Here is Ivan taking Zora for a walk!
After Zora left we all had so many questions about how she worked and what they use robots for. We quickly wrote them all down and gave them to Zora's owner who answered all of our questions for us. On Friday morning we also read a book about robots - so parents, ask your child if you would like to know anything about robots!
Have a great weekend everyone!
Kicking off our new unit!
It was lovely to see the students so happy and excited to come back to school after the Christmas break! On Monday morning we all shared what we had been up to, then the students wrote a recount about their holiday. The children's writing has really improved since the start of the year. They can now mostly write concise short and long sentences using the past tense. Now we will start to work on adding more description and using different sentence beginnings. This week they were also introduced to editing their own writing. I underlined some errors (spelling or punctuation) then the children had to try and correct it themselves.
On Tuesday and Wednesday we had the Entry Point to our new IPC unit called 'From A to B'. Upper Primary also have a transport and tourism IPC unit so together we played a suitcase relay, a lost luggage game and guide the blind-folded pilot!
Following on from our Entry Point we did our Knowledge harvest. The question that I posed the children was 'What is transport?'. They all shared their own ideas and then we looked up the dictionary definition of the word transport. We are now in the process of cutting out pictures of different types of transport, which we will classify together.
As well as talking about transport we have also had quite a few discussions about dinosaurs! This week I read to the class Book 1 of the Magic Treehouse series. It is fantastic to see how involved they are in the story! It is great for their imagination, listening and oral language skills to focus on a story that does not have many pictures. They are all excited to be listening to their first chapter book! Next week we aim to read Book 2!
Have a good weekend everyone.
A fun week before the Christmas break!
Christmas was definately the theme for the week! First we read the book the Grinch stole Christmas and then watched the movie together with Upper Primary.
Throughout the whole week the children also practiced their part of the Snowflake poem that we performed at the Christmas fair on Friday. To accompany our poetry recital we decided to cut snowflakes out of white paper. First we folded paper and then drew an intricate design. The children loved seeing the symmetrical pattern it made and it is was good cutting practice!
On Tuesday afternoon we had our Exit point for our IPC unit 'Look and listen'. Upper primary students presented to us what they learnt throughout the unit, then Lower Primary shared their new learning. Then to wrap up our Exit Point we had a jamming session together with the instruments we had made - drums, pan flutes and guitars!
Here is Isador conducting the Primary class band!!
Then on Wednesday we had games day! It was lovely to see the students sharing their games and playing so nicely with each other.
Then on Friday we had our much anticipated Chrismas Fair! What a lovely event it was with all the classes performing poems, songs and a dance, and to hear not only English, but also Flemish, French, German, Tamil and Hebrew! All the teachers and parents were very proud of the students - they did a fantastic job!
Parents can see more photos of our Christmas Fair here.
Have a lovely break everyone, and see you next year!