Year 1 Update – Wk 20
Welcome back after the Chinese New Year holiday. We hope you and your families have all had a wonderful and restful break. This week the children have been busy getting back into the swing of school and we have been pleased with how well they have settled back into class routines and lessons.
Boxes Next week the children will be designing and creating an historical artefact that shows a change that has happened in History. They will be given the choice of how they would like to create this artefact, however, we are anticipating that many of them will want to make a model using recyclable materials. To ensure that we have enough materials for the children please could each child bring at least 2 junk boxes into school next week.
Sleep
After the busy and exciting CNY holidays some of the children have seemed very tired this week. Please make sure that they are getting back into normal routines at home and are getting enough sleep each night. It is recommended by the Sleep Foundation in the U.S that Children of Year One age should be getting between 9 – 11 hours of sleep a night.
100 Days of School
Next Tuesday the Year One children will be celebrating 100 Days of School. To mark this occasion the children will be experiencing different learning engagements linked to the number 100. On Tuesday we would like the children to bring in a ziplock bag of 100 small items. Please encourage the children to choose the objects themselves and be involved in counting out the correct number of each object to go into the bag. We have discussed this with the children in class and there was a message in the Home-School Diary before Chinese New Year. Thank you for your support with this.
Central Idea: Exploring artefacts helps our understanding of people’s histories.
This week the children have been carrying out a group inquiry into an area of history that they are interested in. The topics the children have chosen range from transport through the ages, schools, old toys, how writing has changed throughout history and the Stone Age. They have been exploring how things have changed over time and why they think these changes have taken place. Next week we will be creating a class museum and the children will be making an artefact that will show what they have learnt. They will be expected to create the artefact and talk about the changes that have happened to this item and why.
This week Ms Jeves has been teaching Information Literacy skills with all of the Year One classes. She has been focusing on questioning and has helped the children to generate and categorise questions about historical artefacts. Next week Ms Jeves will continue to work with the children on questioning using a text linked to our next unit.
Phonics
This week we have introduced our Set 4 phonemes: ll, ff, ss, zz
Camera Words: you play this come my have
The Set 4 bookmark has come home today so please continue to support our work in school by playing the suggested games at home.
1F- Ava Yeung
1W – Anaya Balani
1L – Sharon Gurung
Home Activity
Following on from our trip to the History Museum many of the Year One children expressed an interest in the history of Hong Kong transport. From our discussions with the classes it emerged that many children have not experienced travelling on some of the famous forms of transport in Hong Kong such as, the tram or the Star Ferry. A nice activity for the weekend would be to see how many different types of Hong Kong transport you and your child can travel on. To foster independence and practice their speaking and listening and Maths skills the children should be given the opportunity to ask for a ticket at the ticket booth and pay using coins or notes. If you do manage to do this in the next few weeks we would love to see photos and hear all about the children’s experiences.
Interviewing Grandparents
Throughout this unit the children have shown enthusiasm and curiosity when we have been talking about Hong Kong in the past and how life is different now. It would be really nice if the children could have the opportunity to interview their grandparents so that they could find out more about what life was like when they were growing up.
