Chinese New Year

We have been making comic strips to tell the story of Nian.

 And we have been having a go at writing our names in Chinese.

Celebrations posters in our home languages

Last week's homework was to have a discussion at home around the word ‘celebrations’ from our central idea. The task was to make a poster in their home language on the theme celebrations. Some children who speak English at home decided to make their poster in French. Back in class we shared the posters and learnt from each other.

Sorting our Christmas and New Year photos

We shared the photos that we brought in from our holiday celebrations. There was lots of discussion and it was easy to pick out some similarities between the things we did. These connections became the starting point for sorting and grouping the photos. Most groups managed to sort twice. The first sort used labels such as tree, decoration, Father Christmas, lights etc. Then came the challenged to find different/new criteria for grouping. There were some imaginative approaches with categories such as, inside/outside, pairs, people, fun. Sometimes groups did not agree about the different categories for sorting - this resulted in some interesting persuasive discussion before the group was able to reach a conclusion.

See, Think, Wonder

We understand and value our culture and celebrations and those from around the world.'

To help us to 'tune in' to the central idea in our first program of inquiry we examined a selection of artefacts laid out by the teachers. There were photos and objects. For each one we explored what we could see, what we thought and our questions or wonderings. 

  

Smarties and maths

The Smarties maths challenge was good fun and the Y2s use good questioning and thinking skills as they brainstormed questions and then worked in pairs to find the answers.  Some example questions were: how many Smarites in our box? Is there the same number in each box? Are there always the same number of each colour? If not, which colour do we have the most of? Can my Smarites be shared equally into two groups, 3 groups etc. How much does one Smartie weigh? 

Once they had answered lots of their  questions they made a bar graph of their results and then we recorded everyones findings in a table. We found out that the colour we all had the most of was pink. That the number of Smarites in each box does seem to vary. The smallest number was 39 and the biggest 47 (are we sure all the eating happened at the end?!). It was great to see lots of discussion about what makes an interesting question and many examples of good cooperation to find the answers.

PYP of first unit of inquiry

Cilck here to see the details of our inquiry