Fun Run

What a packed day! Somehow we managed to fit the fun run, crazy hair day and the picnic into one day today.

Bicicletta LC wore red.

The fun run was a great success. The kids really pushed themselves and took great pride in their achievement. Everyone in our L.C. completed at least two laps, and some people ran as many as nine! This is really a fantastic effort for Preps, although those of you who agreed to sponsor your children a set amount per lap may be feeling a slight twinge in the hip pocket as a result.  

Unpacking the data: How many laps did most people run?  What was the greatest number of laps that anyone in our  L.C. ran?  What was the least?  

We are extremely proud of the way that the children challenged themselves, and how many of them achieved their goal number of laps.  

Today was also crazy hair day of course, and we had some wonderfully inventive hairstyles and colours in the room. A few needed some re-styling after the run, but all things considered they held up wonderfully well after being squashed under the hats.  

Just a reminder that hats are compulsory for all outdoor events during terms 1 and 4, regardless of weather conditions on the day. Many hats and other items have gone missing over the course of the term, most of which have turned up again, however there are still several items in our lost property looking for homes. We will be going through the lost property carefully tomorrow and trying to send all items home with their owners.  Most of the clothing has been collected and displayed in the pit, so this is a good place to look for missing jumpers and hats. We also urge you to have double check the lunch box trolleys at the end of the day to make sure that you take all your lunch boxes and water bottles home for the holidays.  

See you for our last day tomorrow, remember that school finishes at 2.30. 

Movement Stimulus

Over the last few weeks many students have shown an interest in movement in their projects. Today we shared our observations with the students and introduced some movement stimulus through videos and experiments.   

Here is the outline of our second experiment, as well as a few thoughts on the experience.

Magic Movement Experience 2

Stand in a doorway with your arms down. Raise your arms up and out until they touch the door frame and then press them against the door frame for 2 minutes. When the 2 minutes is up, step forward out of the door holding your arms still in the same position.  Think about what your arms feel like. Do they stay still?  Do they want to move?

People observing are the scientists who predict and hypothesise about what is going to happen. Carefully watch the experimenter’s hands when they step out of the door frame.  What happened? Was your prediction correct? 

Before the experiment - making predictions

"I think I’m going to move my hands out of the right shape...they might go like this"

"I was thinking that if you pushed down then your hands would like to go out and then at some time they might like to go down again." 

(using a past experience to make a prediction)

"I think they’ll just float that way (up).  I think they’ll just float to the side and up at the same time."

After the experiment - sharing observations

"Your arms went up and up and you couldn't let them down"

"When I was pushing I felt really strong" 

How did you feel when you stopped pushing?  What happened to your arms? 

"They went up."

            

"They moved themselves." 

Going further - hypothesising and making inferences

"I think their arms went up is when you kept pushing all the air went up into your arms and when you stopped you felt like the air was still in your arms."

"I just did it really strong... after 2 minutes I quickly stepped forward, I got tired and so my arms go down."

Cafe

Our cafe has been making exciting progress over the last couple of weeks. The premises has grown, there is talk of introducing a live show once it officially opens and several students have been involved in preparing extra components, including signs and price lists which are being prepared and edited into usable menus for the customers.  

We encourage students to be 'brave writers' and have a go when they are unsure of the spelling or numerals in their piece of writing.  Here several students have first spelled the sounds they could hear in the word, and then referred to an exemplar to compare with and edit their own work.  

Construction

A problem occurred on the Terrace last week. A soccer stadium was built next to the cafe, which naturally needed seating, and we discovered that there were not enough chairs to go around for both venues.

The children decided that the best solution was to build extra chairs out of the big blocks, but soon discovered that they were a little unstable for spectators to sit on.  

Both groups combined for the rest of the session to solve the design problem of how to stabilise the seat. We discovered that the base was the first thing that needed to "feel safe", and that when the orientation of big blocks was changed to an overlapping pattern it made a more stable base than when all the blocks were vertically aligned.

The next problem was the back rest. Even once the seat base had been built up sufficiently the back still felt unstable when someone sat and leaned back slightly to test it. To solve this we added more blocks in varying orientations to the back of the chair.  


We experimented with adding more blocks to "build it up" but found that adding them in different directions did not always result in a more stable chair. Specifically, building it up vertically made it feel less stable than a design with a lower back, and that adding support at the back of the chair to make that section thicker helped considerably.  

Tips for reading at home

There are so many reasons why we read and so many strategies that we use. Keep these in mind when reading with your children. They don’t need to do everything at once! It will all come in time. The most important thing though is to ensure that we all, children included, are reading for meaning – comprehension is vital!

Below are some ideas for you to use to support children in developing their reading. 

• Make predictions: read the title and look at the front cover, then make predictions of what the book will be about; stop part way through the story and predict what will happen next. You can also draw or write about your predictions. 
• Remind them to point to each word as they read. 
• Look at the picture and make a prediction – what will this page be about? Choose an important word from this prediction and see if you can find it in the text – the child doesn’t have to read the whole page if it is too much for them. 
• Celebrate their reading behaviours - following print in the right direction, using the pictures to gain meaning, etc. Tell the child that they can read, that by looking at the pictures they are already readers. 
• If the child still needs to learn some letters and sounds, find letters and sounds in the world around you - go on a letter walk, listening to sounds from words represented in the world around you, eg. b in bin. Always teach the child letters, sounds and frequently used words in context so it is meaningful. 
• Be word detectives and find out all the interesting things you can about letter/sound blends and combinations (eg sh, ch, ing, ou) and new words.  
• What was the book about? Summarise and retell. 
• Make a connection with your own life.  
• Find a word you don’t know the meaning of then work out what it could mean together. 
• What is your opinion of the book? Explain. 
• What did you learn that was new? What did you already know? 
• How did this book make you feel? What was the mood of the book?  
• What do you think would have happened next in the story if it had kept going?

Tips for writing at home and using the children’s diaries

Get the child to re-read their sentence to you. Encourage them to point to the words as they read. If they haven’t drawn the picture yet, get them to do this.

Further ideas of activities you can do include:

• write another sentence. 
• if the teacher or a family helper wrote the sentence, then at home the children could re-write the sentence. 
• practice re-writing the sentence to improve writing, ie view the first time or two as drafts and then do a good copy, working on leaving spaces, forming letters the right way around (if some were back to front initially), using capitals and lower case letters correctly etc.  
• think about other words that have similar letters and sounds. 

The readers can be stored in the boxes on the entrance table with the purple tablecloth in the morning so they are ready for our next diary writing session.  

Most importantly, have fun! Reading and writing at home should be an enjoyable time for everyone. 

Parent helpers

Thank you to all the parents who have come in to help us and run sessions so far.  We really appreciated the time that some of you put in to help us name and organise resources, and we were lucky enough to have a wonderful bracelet-making workshop in project time as well last week. If you have any special interests that you would like to share, or an activity that you would like to have a go at with the children please let us know and we will let you know a good time to come in.   

As well as project groups we really appreciate help with day-to-day classroom tasks such as helping organise our stationary, going through children’s readers with them and emptying the recycling. 

We would love it if someone could come in and help us with some laminating this week.  We have finished the children’s individual P.O. boxes and would like to have them laminated and up and running as soon as possible. If you are able to help us with this please let us know. 

We also need someone to help us empty our paper and cardboard recycling.  If you have a few minutes this week please drop in and we will show you where the recycling stations are. This is a job that needs doing on a regular basis – our Preps are too small to reach the big bins that ours get emptied into.

Week 4 Update

Café Excursion

On Thursday 1^st March a group of students from our room who have been building and running a café on the terrace went on an excursion with a group of Triciclo students to visit a real café to their enrich their experience. 

We observed all the different fixtures and elements that make up a working café.  Some of the things that we noticed in particular were the sugar pots on the tables, the lights, television, cake stand and the all-important coffee machine!  We were able to ask the owner questions about how the café runs, and he told us how important it is to keep everything clean, where he buys the ingredients for the food, and what he does during the day to keep the café running smoothly. 

We recorded our observations with drawings, and a few students were brave writers who had a go at taking notes as well. 

We will be running more excursions as well as community walks over the next few weeks.  Each excursion is planned in response to the specific interests of the children, therefore often only a small group from our learning community will attend each excursion.   As you have already signed a permission form for local excursions, we will let you know via email the day before if your child will be attending a local excursion – no notes are necessary.

Readers

Readers have started this week!  We know that you’re all very excited, and the children have been eager for some time.   It’s wonderful to see the excitement that the children have for this activity and also to see that you all share and celebrate this enthusiasm with them. This is an exciting time and a positive attitude to simple routines like this makes for a great start to kids’ reading lives. 

You can change the reader in the morning between 8:45 and 9:00 or in the afternoon before you go home.  Children should put their reading folder straight back into their bag once they have changed it.  If they don’t get a chance to change it in the morning, they can leave their folder in the tub under the reading table in case a family helper is able to change it with them during learning time. If you would like to read a book that you have at home with your child instead of one from the reader boxes that’s fine, just remember to record it in the reading sheet on the inside left cover of the folder. 

At the start of the year, the books were sorted into the coloured boxes that correspond with the coloured dot on the back of each book. Please help the children to put books back in the right box to make choosing books of various levels easier.

Some ideas on how to support your child reading at home will be posted soon.

If you want to help out with the readers during the day, just let us know. You can read take-home books with children so they feel familiar and confident with them by the time they take them home. You can also help children whose folders are in the tubs under the tables to choose new books to take home that night, remembering to get them to put their folders in their bags once they have chosen a new book and read it with you.

We ask you to keep the number of books that you borrow to a maximum of two, including weekends – we are so glad that you are enthusiastic and that you love books, and encourage you to borrow books from your local library if two isn’t enough.

Daily Diaries

We have started our individual daily diaries this week as well.  We aim to draw and write something that we did at school in our diaries each day. At this stage we are largely scribing for the children, and although we do try to get through each child’s diary with them it’s not always possible. You can use these diaries as a sentence starter with your children.

Some ideas on how to support your with the diary at home will be posted soon.

How parents can help

We greatly appreciate your help in the classroom. We would love for you to come in and help us with a variety of activities. 


We are particularly looking for parents to come in to:

• help set up the readers,
• do individual reading with children to give them confidence with their take home readers, and
• run workshops with the kids during project time.

We know that many of you have particular skills that you would like to share with the kids, such as gardening, languages and philosophy. You may also have a particular interest that you would like to explore with the children, or something that you are working on at home with your own child that you would like to introduce to the group. If so, please let us know when you would like to come in and lead a small group of children in this area. It doesn't have to be anything complicated, even reading a story to a small group, discussing and retelling it is a really worthwhile activity and we would love to have you here to share it with us.