Ms Courtney's Class

Dear Parents,  We have started our How We Organize Ourselves unit. The Central Idea is: "Humans prepare and respond to changes in the Earth."  If either yourself or someone you know has any experience with working for organizations who do this type of work or you have personally experienced an Earthquake, Landslide, Volcano or Tsunami and would like to be a guest speaker in our class please let me know. Students love the opportunity to listen to guest speakers and can learn so much from them.  Provocation We started our new unit on Wednesday with a provocation. While the students were at Foreign Language or Mother Tongue lesson we messed up the classroom and their bags. There was paper, books, pencils and furniture everywhere. We recorded the students as they returned to class and wanted to see how their felt and what their response to the situation was. Once the classroom was cleaned up we talked about the emotions we felt and how we responded. A...

We completed our unit last Friday. The students have shown an amazing understanding of the conditions and requirements for plant growth, They have completed non-fiction books they will be sharing with the Kindergarten students next week. On Friday the students were fantastic in assembly. Here are a few photos of it. It has been great hearing about how the plants for homework have grown. Thanks Eric for bringing his plant to school last week. Last Wednesday we watched the Grade 10 children's theatre production. Each in the year Grade 10 students observed Grade 2 and 3 students and interviewed them about their favourite books, TV shows interests and what was important to them. With this information the Grade 10 students created a play for us. There was a slightly scary element to the play with the underlying message of friendship. Math Next week we will begin module 4 in Math. This will focus on Addition and Subtraction of numbers to 200 and worded number...

Watch some of the videos and leave a comment on at least two different videos using the sentence starters: This video helped me to understand …. From this video I know know ….. http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/help-your-local-bees-plant-a-bee-friendly-garden

It is amazing what can happen in a week. We completed our science experiments on Friday and the students have been busy writing their scientific reports explaining the resutlts. Math We spent time this week on data handling and creating bar graphs. We started graphing the height of our maize and will continue this until the water festival break.

This was a another successful week of learning. Please read on to find out what happened. Minecraft What possibly could be the highlight of the year began on Tuesday. Minecraft!! Mr Matt has created a Minecraft world with different environments for plant growth. Students are working in groups and each have their own land to plant and grow plants on. The need to recreate the right environments for the plants to grow and care for them. To find seeds students need to travel to the different environments in the world like the dessert, rainforest and cave to find seeds. This was the first of three weeks we will be using Minecraft to help develop our understanding of the central idea and lines of inquiry. Plant Experiments We began our scientific experiments on Wednesday. In pairs students created a question and hypothesis and conducted the experiment. We are observing results each day and very excited to see what happens next. We will feature on Monday's episode of ISPP TV. I ...

We started our second unit of inquiry this week. The students were very engaged in their learning and looking forward to the rest of the unit. Central Idea:  Plants require specific environments and conditions for growth.  Lines of Inquiry: Cycles and characteristics of plants Factor that influence plant growth Ways plants adapt to their environment Key Concepts:  Form Function Causation Related Concepts: Appreciation Curiosity  Prior Knowledge assessment: On Monday students were asked to draw and label a plant. After they had completed this they wrote what plants need to grow. We started looking at the form of a plant. Students label each part of the plant in their mother tongue and this has been displayed in the classroom. The students enjoyed learning the parts of a plant in different languages. We have been tracking and with the help of Mr Ben caring for the maize we planted in August. On Friday we measured the maize and it...