This was our first week back after having two weeks off. I loved being back. I had such a productive/relaxing holiday that it was awesome getting back into work and seeing my little preppies.
-two-
It was a three day work week! With the Easter Monday public holiday and the ANZAC Day public holiday we were only at school Tuesday-Thursday. We still crammed a lot in to the week (but I didn't take any photos...).
-three-
I started reading groups with my preppies this week. They loved it! I thought they would. My students do two activities a day and we will be doing reading groups twice a week. It was awesome to sit with a small group and work on their reading, and some of my kiddoes really blew me away with how far they've come along in their reading. One of the activities used my coloured rice - I had put Scrabble tiles, plastic letter tiles and magnetic letters in amongst the rice, and they had to fish around for the letters then sort the letters into lower case and upper case. They loved it, and worked really hard not to make a mess with the rice. I will take a photo when I'm at school and post it, totally forgot!
-four-
This week our maths focus has been on skip counting by 10s. My class has done a super job. We recited counting to 100 many times, and they just keep on joining in and trying their best. We have used our fingers to show ten, we have clapped with each number, we have marched around in a circle as we counted, we have taken fairy steps as we counted, we made a poster with 10 fingers on a card that shows the numbers we say when counting by 10s starting with 10, and on Thursday each child had an abacus and we practiced moving 10 beads at a time across the bar as we counted to 100.
-five-
I did the first lesson of a new Science unit with my kids today. I had the help of my Science coach which was awesome. This term our topic is called "What is it made of?" For the first lesson the focus was on starting a TWLH chart. We focused on the questions "What do we think we know?" and "What do we want to know?". My kids pretty much amazed me. They have such awesome inquisitive minds! I'll have to take a photo of our two charts, because they had some pretty awesome ideas. I will definitely write some follow up posts about our Science unit, because I am totally enjoying teaching Science in such a structured/regular/consistent way!
3 day work week?! That would have been nice! Although I can't complain- I had a great week. I have to ask, what does TWLH stand for? Here is the states we do KWL charts- Know, Want to Know, and Learn. Just curious. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteHeather
The Land of I Can
Hi Heather, thanks for visiting my blog.
DeleteA TWLH is basically the same as a KWL chart. We just use:
- What we "think" we know
- What we "want" to know
- What we have "learned"
- "How" we know
We follow a program called Primary Connections for our Science curriculum which has an inquiry-based approach to Science. They want to focus on the fact that the first brainstorm about a topic will be things that we "think" be know, but they may not necessarily be correct. They also added the "how" because they encourage justification and reasoning.