Firstly, warmest greetings to our new Savanna student and his family. Welcome to Japan and ISN! Spot our charming addition to the community!

In the new IB unit on Community Helpers, we explored the idea of a ‘community’. We figured that a community is a group of people living, working or learning together. We brainstormed the many different jobs that community helpers do.

We also worked out a Bubble Map showing the many helpers in our school community! We went to the office, the classrooms, and talked to the people who help us learn and play in school. Savanna made inquiries and suggested good answers. What is your job? Why are the teachers in the office? You are having a meeting? What is Canyon learning? Our teachers, office administrator, bus driver, and the lunch company too all work together. This is how we organise ourselves

Savanna said: “Not just teachers… students, we can help too! I can help clean the table. I can help my friend keep the toys.” Indeed. Savanna has been helping one another learn to read too!

We have started reading and writing High-Frequency Words (HFW) like “the, you, and, are, was…” that appear frequently in our speech or in sentences that we read. These HFW include sight words which are not decodable (cannot be read by sounding out the letters) and have to be read by sight like “you, was”. We are learning these words as Jump Out Words with the catchy Jack Hartman songs, and by reading our guided readers, RAZ books. We also made minibooks for ‘the’ and ‘you’.

We took a walk around the neighbourhood to explore our larger community – Shimauchi. We saw “so many community helpers” – farmers, garbage truck, food delivery, bike shop, furniture shop, pizza restaurant and more. We will continue our inquiry when we visit more local community helpers in our upcoming field trips. Till next week, have a wonderful weekend!