On Sunday, June 1 Axel will celebrate his 5th birthday...same day as Ms. Alison except she's not turning 5! :) Yesterday we celebrated Axel's birthday in class with some yummy chocolate chip cookies with whipped cream. Some friends in the class made cards for Axel which they presented to him before we sang Happy Birthday. Have a fun birthday weekend Axel!
0 Comments
Then we recorded ourselves retelling The Three Little Pigs through music...this time with no words. What do you think? If you didn't see the pictures and only heard our instruments playing would you know the story?
What a fun day! And how lucky were we that the rain waited until we were out of the pool? Thanks to all the mums and dads (and baby brothers!) who came out to support us at our very first swim gala. We had a great time playing games at nine different stations. Before we left school, we also had fun following along with what the older children were doing at swim gala through Twitter. Thank you Mr. Nathan and Mr. Dino for organizing! On Monday, we visited the'Big Eyes, Big Minds' Singapore International Children's Film Festival as part of our current unit of inquiry about storytelling. We viewed the programme 'Magic Symphony' which had 12 short films. We loved the films and were able to retell them, describe our favourite parts and explain how they made us feel. We documented the story of our visit using the new Adobe Voice app: The films also inspired us to ask some questions about films and their connections to stories. We weren't sure how to answer our questions, so we collected ideas about some experts we could ask. Since Ms. Mabel was the host of the film festival we thought she would be our best option. We prepared this AudioBoo recording for her and emailed it. Hopefully we are able to get some answers to our inquiries soon!
We have been having so much fun in our swimming lessons and are excited to show off our skills this Friday at the Elementary School Swim Gala. Last week, Denzil's mum kindly took some videos to document the progress we are making. Enjoy! This week we continued exploring how to retell stories in different ways. We are particularly passionate about retelling through drama because it allows us to pretend we are the different characters and act out scenes with our friends. On Monday, Wilma suggested that we perform our Rapunzel show for Ms. Alden. We invited her to come and she also stayed to watch us retell Where the Wild Things Are. On Thursday, our buddies came to visit to see our shows. At the last minute, we decided that we wanted to show them some new stories, so a few of us quickly created and practiced retells of Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. What do you think of our retells? Can you recognize the stories and characters? For the last two weeks Johnny has been our Star Name. His first letter, 'J' was a new one to many of us and we were able to think of many other words that start with that letter and sound thanks to our Sesame Street podcasts. As we inquired into Johnny's name we also got to know two other people whose names start with that letter...Jack and Jill! Do you know them? We read the poem 'Jack and Jill' to practice our emergent reading and hunted for the letters J, H, D and C. One of the things we've been working on in Kindergarten 1 as part of math is identifying number sequences and the numbers that come before and after a given number. This week we each participated in different activities to help us consolidate and extend our knowledge. Can you notice what other skills we're working on at the same time? When we reflected on the activities we noticed that when we were working in pairs we had to cooperate and when we had to write down numbers we had to work on holding the pens and writing with control. Can you think of anything else we were developing? This week we've been practicing retelling stories. To practice, we focused in on two of our favourite stories: Rapunzel and Where the Wild Things Are. We started out by re-reading the stories and analyzing what the important parts were. We all had ideas and through a class discussion, we figured out that there are three really important things in stories: people, a place and things that happen (characters, setting, events). Then we chose our favourite of the two stories and drew pictures of the main characters, settings and main event (from our own perspective) using retell flip-books that we cut out by ourselves. Finally, it was time for us to retell the stories in small groups in two different ways: acting and the iPad app Puppet Pals. Our retells are not perfect, but they did show us how stories can be told and retold in different ways. During the drama retells the audience also had a lot of fun making suggestions about what should come next when our actors couldn't remember. Here are some examples of our work. The rest of our retells are available on our personal portfolio pages. We hope you enjoy them! |