biweekly newsletter
DESCRIPTION
January 25th to February 3rd, 2012TRANSCRIPT
Important Notices Parent Teacher Conferences February 24th. The Academy will
be closed. Please send in your replies by Monday February 6th.
Field Trip to the Yakult Factory is scheduled for February 17th. Look out for the permission slip this week.
Welcome to our new Reception 2 student Christopher Tey!
BIWEEKLY
NEWSLETTER January 25th — February 3rd, 2012
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Gross motor skills are important to develop during childhood. A lot of our gross motor skills are learnt through play. Gross motor skills are defined as the amount of control and coordination we have over the large muscle movements that our bodies make. These muscular movements include activities such as running, walk-ing, jumping and maintaining balance.
There are many ways to help improve gross motor skill development:
Playing “Simon Says” and doing movements like jumping jacks, hopping on one leg at a time and jumping with both feet. This will get the child moving and using their muscles.
Ask your child to shadow or mimic your actions. This will not only be fun for the child, but it also gets them moving around while having fun!
Imitate different animals with your child: Jump like a kangaroo, waddle like a penguin, crawl like a mouse, creep like a tiger, gallop like a horse. Activities like this encourage children to move their muscles in different ways from the way they normally move when doing activities such as running or walking.
Activities like swimming, riding a bike or tricycle, skipping or hopscotch help to increase muscle endurance and strength.
Playing catch! The larger the ball the easier it is so start with something big like a beach ball. Also, try rolling a ball or kicking it.
Walking on curbs and low barriers (sometimes found in parks) improves balance and coordination. However, if your child is walking on curbs, en-sure that it is in a safe environment!
Gross motor skill development is a fundamental part of growing up. By developing gross motor skills, children are able to increase their strength, endurance, coordi-nation and balance. This in turn helps children with their self-care, social skills, handwriting, postural stability, navigating through their environment safely, and their daily routines and activities.
- By Sirida Johnston (Occupational Therapy Student)
Notes from Therapy: GROSS MOTOR SKILL DEVELOPMENT
game with our own
rules. Today, we went
on a field trip to Little
Newton and built our
own magnetic car!
Two special visitors
The past 2 weeks have
flown by in Reception
2. Our new IPC Inquiry
theme has really taken
off and the boys seem
to be having plenty of
fun. We have made
origami spinning tops,
played a life size board
game (that was almost
as big as our class), and
created our own board
Page 2
Our Year One students have been experimenting, re-searching, moulding, “shuffling” and robot-dancing over the past two weeks. During Literacy, our bright students searched for adjec-tives in Mem Fox’s thought-inspiring & beautifully illus-trated book, Feathers and Fools. The students loved the adjective phrases “great strength”, “clear blue lake” and “magnificent peacocks”. We will be writing and ed-iting our own stories over the next few weeks.
Mass, volume and picture graphs were the topics for
came by this week.
Ms. Fides and baby
Seven came to see us!
We have also finished
our math unit on
measurement and
have begun classifica-
tion and sorting. We
are all quickly advanc-
ing with our reading
and writing so Mum's
and Dad's make sure
RECEPTION TWO , MS. ASHLEY ’S CLASS
Maths. We solved word prob-lems involving mass and lengths. We also interpreted different data presented in picture graphs.
A great mix of pop music was heard from our classroom in between classes to set the at-mosphere for brain breaks. We had some lively dance show-downs during Brain Breaks. Some of our talented students were ‘shuffling’ and the others were robot dancing. It was a
YEAR ONE , MS. KATRINA’S CLASS
to let them know how
proud you are of their
accomplishments!
Have a restful and en-
joyable weekend.
We ended the week with a field trip to Little Newton. We turned into car engineers as we connected the wiring and assembled the plastic materials to create a super F1 race car! We also welcomed Inigo Or-chard to our class this week. More fun and exciting learning experiences await in the next few weeks as we design our own inventions, write our own stories and solve mathematical problems and puzzles.
great way to relax our brains and muscles and prepare for the next class. For History, we brainstormed about the different inventions created over the years. Using air-drying clay, each student moulded the invention they think is the most important for mankind. Their creations in-volved mostly inventions in the fields of communication and transportation. We will be painting our creations next week and we will also be writing about them as part of cross-curricular link with Liter-acy. For Technology, our stu-dents participated in con-ducting the experiment ‘Potato Clock’, wherein we used pota-toes and lemons to power a digital clock. Imagine that! Po-tatoes can actually be used as an electrochemical cell. This cell can transform chemical energy to electric energy. Wow! Potatoes are nature’s tastiest batteries!
Page 3
RECEPTION TWO , MS. KARINA’S CLASS
RECEPTION ONE , MS. GETTY ’S CLASS
tween toys and inven-tions. Great job, chil-dren!
We also welcomed a new student, Christo-pher Tey, into our classroom this week. Welcome Christopher!
they felt about their toys. We have continued with our spelling in the mornings and we have started practicing sentence writing as well. Stu-dents are given words to start with and they form their own sentences using those words. In Literacy, the students are using finger spell and are read-ing assigned words (on the green wall) at speed and with less strain. In Maths, we are continuing with non-standard
everyone in the school next week. It was a great team effort!
In Maths, the children had a ‘shape hunt’ in and out of the school and learnt to sort different shapes based on their features. They did a fan-tastic job at spotting shapes around the school. In Literacy, the children enjoyed reading My Dog Ned as the dog in the story is very funny.
It has felt like a ‘blast from the past’ these past few weeks. In relation to the IPC unit “Toys”, we have been learning about different toys from the olden days. We viewed pictures of toys made during the era of our parents and grandparents. We noticed how basic some toys were designed during those years compared to how ad-vanced and high-tech toys are today. The kids also brought in pictures of some of their own favourite toys from their child-hood. They talked about them in the class and began to classi-fy the different toys according to how they are made, purpose and the materials used to make them. The students also wrote in their journals to express how
The past two weeks we have been researching our new IPC theme ‘TOYS’. The students have been busy browsing some websites to find out more about their favourite toys. They used search engines and typed in the keywords to find appro-priate sites. It was a great way to learn spelling and to learn how to turn on and off the laptops properly. The children also brain-stormed some questions that they will use for their survey on favourite toys. They collected the ques-tions and will create a class questionnaire for
units of measurements, this time using our body parts as units. We learned how to measure with our hand span, foot length and pace (walk). We measured our body and its parts using these units and also some objects around the room. We even used the
They learnt to read with expression and intona-tion and we incorpo-rated a bit of role play into the lesson.
This week has ended with a great learning ex-perience at Little New-ton. The children were so excited while enjoying hands-on experiments in the learning centre. It was a great way to build a mental connection be-
hallways, rooms and play-ground in school.
Ending the week, we went to Little Newton Learning Cen-tre for our field trip. We had so much fun learning how to design our own toys using simple materials and also trying to make our own toys out of the designs we learned and created. Toys bring out the best in everyone, children and adults alike! It has been a fun-filled two weeks!
Every child deserves the right to be taught in the way he or she learns best!