Happy New Year 2025! 🎇

Now that the winter holidays are over, let’s welcome back to school the Milky Way class who are full of energy on the first day of school this week. They really missed each other after not seeing each other for 12 days.🥰

Milky Way students started this week by sharing and drawing what they did during the holidays, especially in Christmas and New Year. One by one they explained how they celebrated Christmas and New Year. Just like what we learned about the Japanese Christmas traditions, they had cake and fried/roasted chicken for dinner. During the New Year, they enjoyed eating osechi, mochi, crabs, shrimps and udon. Some of them also got a money gift or otoshidama from their parents and grandparents. It’s good to hear their stories and experiences that we learned in our UOI lessons.🎄🎆

On Wednesday, we opened a new unit of inquiry with the prior knowledge assessment. We did a sorting activity of the pictures that show things or items that can be used again or not. Each student explained why they think we can use it again or not, and the class gave their comments to their friends’ answers. They also explained why they agree or not to their friends. In this activity, we practiced being open-minded by listening to each other’s opinions. The details of our unit is as follows:

Transdisciplinary Theme: Sharing the Planet

Unit Title: 3 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Central Idea: Using the 3 R’s improves our community

Lines of Inquiry:

LOI1: What are 3 R’s (Form, Function)

LOI2: Ways to help the community by using the 3 R’s (Responsibility, Change)

Learner Profiles: Thinkers, Principled, Caring

Approaches to Learning: Thinking Skills

In the Phonics lesson, we learned about the words with the long /u/ sound written in different spellings such as words with /ui/, /ue/, and /u_e/ magic e. They learned that these words have the same sound, but different spelling. They also discovered that we can hear the long /u/ sound in the middle of the word with /ui/ and at the end of the word with /ue/. After learning how to read the words, we played word scavenger hunt with the twist because they need to find the word that is being referred to in the meaning being read by the teacher.📝

In our reading lesson, we began reading small books with short stories that they read also at home, but they need to return it on Friday. So far, most of them can read the stories by themselves and next time we will provide a book with longer stories. Of course, we will still continue reading RAZ books at least twice a month.📖

Thank you for reading our blog! Have a fantastic long weekend everyone!😍