Reflecting on Changes, Jive Time and Football

 This week began our busy season of special events as we had open day on Tuesday and celebrated America’s 250th Anniversary on Thursday with some special guests from the American embassy, an American football session with Mr Davis, and a Rockabilly Jive dance session with Ms Daria Rashidova. 

The Busy Bees enjoyed chasing after the football to carry it back for a touchdown and of course learned how to do a touchdown dance!

After football, the Bees joined the EY students for a Jive Dance session! They had a lot of fun dancing with their brothers and sisters!

In PE, we practiced some of the games that might be included in our upcoming Sports Day on November 23. The games and activities are team based and depend on cooperation from the team members, but the teams will also be competing against each other so we have been emphasizing the importance of trying our best, working together and not giving up when mishaps occur. 

We also did some of our regular classwork this week. 

In math, we began learning about how to tell the time, focusing on the hour and half hour, learning the difference between the minute and hour hands and how to read the clock as 8 o’clock or half past 8.

In language, Mr Jolly made his daily appearance to teach the new sound of the day. 

Finally, our focus in unit this week was on how we have changed from when we were babies to now by comparing what we did then to what we can do now. The Busy Bees drew pictures and wrote down details to show how they have changed. 

Such amazing changes are happening right now as they learn to express themselves in writing!

Next week, our busy event schedule continues the St Martin on the evening of Wednesday, November 11th as the DSKI students will parade around Rokko Island with their lanterns from 16:45 until the end of the event at 18:00. We are looking forward to seeing you there. Please note that there are no clubs scheduled on this day so please pick up your child at 15:30. 

Sign up here for childcare during St. Martin's from 3.30pm - 4.45pm

Yoga Babies Racing to Halloween

 The Busy Bees lived up to their name in our first week back after the Autumn Break.

On Tuesday, we enjoyed doing some yoga together with our guest yoga teacher. It was a nice little workout and the students enjoyed trying out all of the different poses.

We also began our second unit of the year this week under the trans-disciplinary theme of Where We Are in Place and Time. In this unit, our central idea is Personal histories allow us to reflect on and celebrate growth and change. To help us tune it to the unit, we looked at all of our baby photos and the students did a great job guessing which baby photo belonged to each of their classmates. We also discussed how they have changed and they commented on how they have grown, with their hands and feet getting bigger, they have grown taller, and they have more teeth. It was also noted that they know more about things now.

In PE, we started practicing some relay races in preparation for Sports Day coming up on November 23. 

In math, we finished up our unit on directions and patterns and used some classroom objects to create their own repeating pattern.

In science, we continued learning about properties of materials such as being flexible, rigid (or stiff), hard or soft, smooth or bumpy and the students were able to show their understanding by finding some objects for each of the categories.

Despite all of the fun throughout the week, the highlight was dressing up for Halloween today! Everyone looked great in their costumes and we had some fun with Halloween activities throughout the day. We did some Halloween themed yogo, dancing with Danny Go, played some zombie tag during PE and practiced writing some Halloween words.

Rolling to an End of Community Roles and Responsibilities

 This week, the Busy Bees rolled to an end of our first unit of the year by showing what they know and understand about various members of the community by matching tools and items with the people who use them.

After finding out more about a community member of their choice, each student imagined themselves in that role and made a poster to show where that person works, what they wear, and some tools or other things that they use or need to carry our their responsibilities. You can see their finished posters and hear some of their explanations on Seesaw.

During PE on Wednesday, the students helped create a race track, which they used for individual races and races with a partner. They cooperated well with their partners, making sure that they took responsibility for rolling safely around the track!

On Thursday, during PE the students took on different roles, either as a crab or octopus on the rollerboards as they tried to be the first team to collect all of the colored balls or ‘octopus eggs’ for their team without getting caught by the octopuses long arms!

In our weekly science lesson, we went further into learning about materials as we started identifying different properties of materials by observing how they look, feel, sound, smell or taste (actually we didn’t go as far as to taste anything!) Students worked with a partner and had to find materials that were soft or squishy like the cushions, or smooth like the whiteboard, etc.

During language time, Mr Jolly replaced Ms Jolly for the daily letter writing and phonics time and we had some epic duals as students defeated Mr. Jolly by properly writing the letter of the day on his belly with a whiteboard marker “sword!” 

Fortunately, Mr Jolly’s death was only temporary as he came back from the dead to teach and challenge the Busy Bees again and again!