Tanya's class

2008 Term 2
5 MAy 2008

Last week we welcomed Laura, our pre-service teacher who will be with us for four weeks. Laura has sent a note home requesting permission to photograph members of our group, in order for her to build up an interesting portfolio. Hopefully you are all okay with that and will sign and send back the forms as soon as possible so she can start doing it. The children have enjoyed some interesting maths sessions with her as they explore equivalent fractions via bingo! The children are also about to embark on their country projects and there has been a lot of preparation both from Cathy in the library, and Laura, on ways to research. I am hoping that you can visit the local library with your child and help them borrow a book on their particular country. We will of course be using the internet for some of our research, but I would like them all to have at least a couple of up to date references, and our library doesn’t have books on Fiji, Lebanon and modern day Egypt, for example, which are only three of our chosen countries. If parents have a problem with a library visit could you please contact me.

21 March 2008

My apologies yet again for not starting with the children at the beginning of term, however some family events are unavoidable. The children decided that they would like to choose a country to study this term, with some science experiments to follow on later. As a result I have added on a little basic world geography; structure of the earth, latitude, longitude and some general knowledge of oceans and continents. We are also going to explore a continent a week, trying to learn all the countries in that continent and their capitals. A tall order this is; I spent a few hours just trying to memorize all the ones in Europe! However there are some great computer games online and I encourage you to do them with your children of an evening. Just Google ‘maps games Europe’ and the lizardpoint site and also the sheppards site offer some great practice. You might even find some better ones. Designing a game with a health theme really captured the children’s imagination last term and some are still finishing this term. The brief was to make every single part of the game, including the box, dice and pieces so it has been a wonderful task incorporating language, technology, graphics and problem solving.