Kickstarting the first Unit of Inquiry: Making healthy choices about daily routines enables us to have a balanced lifestyle.

What a week and where to start? I think the best place to start is celebrating Preschool's achievement this morning as they wrote their first six words, putting to use the letter sounds learnt this week (s, a, t, i). It was tough but they succeeded and were extremely principled in their approach to learning! Well done!

This week we launched the Unit of Inquiry based on the transdisciplinary theme, Who we are, exploring the Central Idea; Making healthy choices about daily routines enables us to have a balanced lifestyle. A lot of great ideas have already started making their way into the classroom and the students are clearly eager to learn more. The initial focus this week was on exploring their prior knowledge on the unit. Each student was equipped with a paper plate and was given total freedom of picking what food to put on it. As a class we discussed their various food choices and an interesting discussion ensued. Observations included:

• "If people don't eat, they die."
• "If you eat too much you get full."
• "When you're not hungry, you don't eat food." 
• "We need food for energy."
• "If you only eat a little bit, you'll be more hungry."

In maths, we started looking at the concept of time, which ties into the UOI. We will begin by focussing on daily routines as well as trying to come to grips with which activities take a longer/shorter time to complete. In the next weeks, we will also begin looking at telling the time but those are challenges for another point in time. 

Looking back at the week, highlights included swimming (on that note please remember to pack your child's swimming kit for Monday). Another highlight was their first cooking lesson, where they created healthy vegetable face sandwiches, practicing spreading cream cheese with a knife, cutting some fresh vegetables as well as proper kitchen etiquette. More cooking lessons in line with this UOI are definitely on the agenda. I would really appreciate it, if you could give your child a plastic container in which to bring their food home in, on Wednesdays. 

Before I sign off and leave you with some pictures depicting their wonderful and exciting week, I would like to remind you that we have Show&Tell on Tuesday. As we will be looking at routines, I would like the children to bring in something related to their routines at home (e.g. their toothbrush, their pyjamas, favourite drinking cup etc.). I would like them to talk about one routine they do at home, so by bringing something in, it will make it more concrete for them.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact me anytime. I will try my best to get back to you as soon as possible. 

Enjoy the beautiful weather and have a lovely weekend. 

Starting the week with Show&Tell

Deciding what to put on our plates

Assessing the contents on our plates

Did we make a healthy choice?

Using the interactive whiteboard to do some fruit and vegetable sorting

Practicing spreading cheese on crackers. 

Concentrating on being neat cooks.

More concentrated cooks.

Ready to cut and add the vegetables.