Monday and Tuesday December 5/6th

We are working this week to finish our stop motion animations before the end of term. Most of the groups are at least half way through so hopefully we can make it before next Friday! They still have some editing and voiceovers to do once they have finished filming this week.

In maths we are continuing to look at multiplication, and these two days the students made 'fortune 'teller' times table crafts to practice with. It was great to see so many people willing to practice their times tables when lining up after school! After the break, we will be moving on to some geometry in maths class now that we have a good grounding in basic calculation skills.

We are also continuing to work on adjectives which is a precursor to our next literacy topic of writing adventure stories. I was really impressed with the receptive knowledge of adjectives that the students had (lots of reading!) but we do need to work on using them in our speech and writing.

Finally, many of the students have already reached level 20 of the spelling tests. From spelling 20 onward, every other spelling test will be a vocabulary test too. That means that I won't dictate the word, but instead say the meaning of the word I want them to write. It isn't easy, but all the spelling tests are available to practice in advance here. This isn't cheating. The most important thing is that they learn the spelling and meaning, the test is merely a check for that. From spelling 37 onward, every other spelling test will require the students to make sentences with the words.  We have made great progress with the spelling tests, and most students are ahead of the typical CE1 progress point (spelling 16 at Christmas) so now I want to ensure that we are learning words fully.

Week of November 28th

It has been a very busy week for us this week. We are preparing for the Christmas show in CE1.2, we had a wonderful outing to Yingge on Tuesday and we have been working on filming our stop motion animations in both classes.

The animations are starting to come along, and it has been interesting to watch the groups grow and improve their skills during the filming. Not only are they becoming better animators, but they are also improving their communicative and collaborative skills in the process. I won't post any unedited versions on Seesaw so you will have to wait a little bit longer to see the final videos.

We have also been keeping up our work in both maths and English classes despite our busy schedule. this week in English class we began to look at adjectives, and next week we will differentiating and taking this topic further. In maths we are continuing to introduce multiplication with arrays and the 'not Pokemon' balls. Next week we will continue this with a look at the grouping method of multiplication and some times tables.

Some photo and videos from our trip to Yingge can be found here.