Friday February 4th

Thank you to all of you that came to the Parent-Teacher conferences yesterday. It was good to meet with you to discuss your child's progress.

This week the children have continued with their inquiries and are currently synthesising their knowledge and ideas gained through the inquiry. Next week they will begin to work on their action plans. The focus of the action plans will be to think about how they can help to solve the issues raised in their inquiries.

We have spent some time on fractions this week and in developing quick recall skills when handling fractions, decimals and percentages. The children have spent a short amount of time each day (short but useful) working on Mathletics to develop and practise these skills. Next week we will move on with addition of fractions.

In Literacy, the children spent some time re-reading the narrative report written by me in their report cards. Using the headings in the report card they wrote a report on either myself or Mrs. Nicholson. It was great fun and the children were able to practise writing in the passive sense, checking sentence structure and spellings. The reports were written in a positive manner and we learned a great deal about how the children perceive us!

Today we had our class meeting, which is chaired, run and minuted by the children. The children discuss real-life issues that matter to them such as recycling in the classroom, school lunches and lining up after recess. The aim is to try to find a solution to these issues, some of which continue to be ongoing, of course. Formulating, explaining and justifying opinions, discussing the different perspectives and collaborating to produce solutions are essential to our meetings and, of course, to real life. Each class meeting allows the children to practise these skills, intending to make transference of these skills into their lives easier going forward. Many of these skills will be useful in the PYP exhibition process which begins on February 21st.

Have a good long weekend. Best wishes!