Introducing Our First Unit of Inquiry
After focusing on settling in to the new environment over the first few weeks of school, we decided we were ready to start our first unit of inquiry of the year. Across the next few weeks we will be taking a dip into our year long inquiry, Who We Are. For this unit, children will learn about a range of important topics like identity, values, beliefs, physical and mental health, relationships, cultures, communities and families. This topic looks at everything that makes us human, and children will explore who we are and how we interact with each other.
As part of the unit, we are continuing to work on our self-help skills as a part of learning how to care for ourselves. Through these independent tasks we are taking personal responsibility for our own wellbeing alongside learning how to ask for help when we need it. In our Circle Times we continue to discuss our physical health when it comes to drinking water, eating snack, personal hygiene and going to the toilet when we feel the need.
Our class focus this week has been 'our bodies'. We explored the playground for the first time, testing out our balance and coordination on the equipment and our hand-eye coordination when throwing beanbags into boxes. In the classroom we took off our socks and shoes and explored the feeling under our feet. We wiggled our toes and showed them off before counting how many we had. We soon found that everyone in Dolphin class has 10 toes, and 10 fingers. We all have skin, the same number of eyes, ears and mouth. When we started to look closer we found that although we have a lot of similiarities, we are not all the same. Some of us have short hair, some of us long, some of us had brown or black eyes, whilst a few of us had blue or green. We talked about who we looked the most like in our family and which of our friends had similar features to us. We then got moving, stretching out our arms and legs as far as they could go. On Monday we will continue with this exploration by having a closer look at our heights during Circle Time. Measuring the height of each Dolphin child, and seeing how far we can reach up above our heads.
Hydration Station
Some of our dolphins have been struggling to drink enough water at school. We had a big chat about the importance of drinking water and how our bodies lose water everytime we sweat or wee wee. We talked about how we may feel tired, or achey or unwell if we don't drink water and that we might need a few more classroom reminders. We now know that if we drink lots of water at school, we can go and find our name on the class chart, take it over to the hydration station and put it alongside the reset of our hydrated friends. As we progress through the year, this act of drinking water should become more natural. Until then, if you are noticing your child is not drinking any water, an idea would be to place a sticker on a clear bottle and to ask your little one to try to drink down to the level of the sticker as many of the dolphins will have a quick sip and say they are done!
Art Focus
This week, we started a new art project at school. Our aim was to follow a multi-step process to create a finished product with a number of elements. As we are the dolphin class, we decided to inject ourselves into an underwater picture. Following several steps over two days (allowing time for our paint to dry before continuing) required a level of focus and patience, as we had to listen closely to and then follow a specific set of instructions to create our pieces.
First up was painting. Our goal was to try to cover our entire piece of paper with paint, using our pre-decided watery colours, blue and green. We could choose to use just one colour or combine both to make our waterscape.
Once dry, we could move onto the next stage. Here we had to pick our our own printed photo, stick ourselves in the painting and add a mask and snorkel by choosing our favourite colour and applying a pipe cleaner using double sided tape.
Our final stage saw us using paper cupcake cases to make our fish. We used glue to stick down the body before attempting the tail. For the tail we had to fold another cupcake case in half, apply glue, and fold it again into a quarter before sticking it on the body. This really put our concentration and fine motor skills to the test!
Once our final product was complete, we wanted to show our pride for our work by putting it up on display in the classroom. This works towards building our sense of ownership of our learning space, and is particularly helped by having our own photos in our art. This has also sparked a renewed interest in learning our classmates names as we excitedly point out different pieces of art as we navigate around the classroom.
Google Photo Albums
We started a new photo album this week and will continue to add to them as we progress through the unit, Who We Are
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