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!

Exploring the Rokko Island Community Helpers

 This week the Busy Bees started going further with our unit by heading out to explore the Rokko Island Community to see which community helpers they could find.

As soon as we headed out the school gate we came across the first one!

We also searched for items that community helpers might use in their daily life to help us out, such as the Japan Post box just past the Rokkoliner!

We found a couple more hard at work near the station and stopped to ask them a couple questions and learnt that they were digging up the bricks in order to add a new rest spot near the open plaza near Island Center Station.

We spotted many more as well, and the students were able to share their knowledge about what their roles and responsibilities were.

It was a fun walk, and afterwards we spent our PE time running, climbing, and balancing at the park.

During our other PE lessons this week, Preschool worked with a partner or small group as we continued our unit on rolling, gliding and sliding by using the roller boards to have some cooperative races and learn a new game called Capture the Pirate Treasure!

We also had a special visit from some of our school community members as Ms Faye and the Grade Two students paid us a visit to share stories that they wrote.

The Busy Bees began researching one community helper that they are interested in becoming an expert on by watching a short video about their chosen professional on “Can You Imagine That” and will continue working on their own posters next week to show what they have learned about that community member’s role and responsibilities as we will conclude our first unit of the year.