Ms Courtney's Class

Welcome Back! I hope you had a wonderful New Year. This week saw the start of our fourth unit of inquiry, Where we are in Place and Time. Central Idea: Artifacts help us to understand how societies have changed. Lines of Inquiry: The different sources we use as evidence Evidence of change over time Evidence helps us to understand where we live Concepts: Change, Function, Reflection, Discovery, History, Civilizations Provocation On Friday four teachers brought three artifacts to school that represented something about themselves. The students had to look at the artifacts and try and dedice which artifacts belonged to which teacher. Can you guess? The teachers are Mr Johnny, Ms Karyn, Ms Petra and Ms Courtney. As the students returned from languages on Wednesday they had found that the classroom had became an archaeology site. The students observed the artifacts they found, recorded where they found them and used the clues to understand the artifacts. ...

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...

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.

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...