The new academic session began with a lots of learning, growing, making new friends, interactive learning engagements and social emotional development.
Students easily settled into their new classes and enjoyed the first two days by introducing, interacting and sharing their vacation stories with their peers. They participated in many ice-breaking activities. They worked on formulating essential agreements and revisited the Learner Profile attributes, the inquiry cycle, concepts, skills and the importance of action in a Unit Of Inquiry.
Leading a balanced lifestyle can help us stay healthy was the central idea that motivated students to undertake inquiry within and outside the classrooms.
Tuning into the unit was done through a mystery box game, where the students used their senses to touch, feel, taste and smell the objects placed inside the mystery box. The objects were related to health and wellbeing for maintaining a balanced lifestyle.
Students connected the word ‘balanced’ with the learner profile attribute. They further shared their understanding of a healthy lifestyle by emphasizing the five factors that promote good health e.g. recreation, hygiene, rest, food and exercise.
The students created a mind map by illustrating ” What healthy means to them ?” in their journals.
During their English classes, students were welcomed with a fun ice-breaking activity ‘colored gems’ in which they shared information about their favorite friend/family member/cuisine/hobby/place etc.
They further enjoyed creating photo frames by sketching themselves on a coloured sheet and pasted the photo frames in their respective cubby holes to get a sense of belongingness.
Students played the game about their name where they identifying letter cut outs to form spellings for their names. They used their name cut outs to make name plates.
Students watched an online story ‘sharing a shell’ and shared their understanding of the importance of sharing with their friends.
Letter recognition was done through a task sheet about a ‘secret message from their teacher.’ Their understanding of phonic sound & letter formation was done through a ‘fish bowl activity’. Students wrote upper and lower-case letters in their process journals. Their prior knowledge of blending sounds was assessed through looping back sheet. They attempted to make CVC words using the medial sound of vowels (a,e,i ,o,u) . Each group shared their words through a presentation.
During their Math classes, students engaged themselves in various ice breaking activities where students counted and introduced themselves on every odd number by saying fizz buzz
A looping back sheet as used to assess prior knowledge of number recognition, and quantity association using manipulative. Students also practiced arranging numbers in ascending and descending order.
During their Hindi lessons, students watched the story ‘ Aalsee Brahmin’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-nagMCHrzs) and related different learner profile attributes from the same. They formulated essential agreements for maintaining an interactive learning environment in class. Students also revisited a few vernacular swar and vyanjans words through a bus stop activity.
Students were welcomed into the ICT lessons post the summer with great interest .Essential agreements were made during the introductory class in which they were made comfortable with their surrounding and taught to handle the I Pad and laptop devices. Students were shown the input-output and all the other physical components of the computer.
Students have begun doing basic warm up, stretching and embarked on practicing hand & feet position as a regular dance routine.
Students discussed warm and cool colours. They then observed front and profile faces and learned how to draw proportionate portraits .
Students developed their loco motor, non-locomotors skills by doing flexibility and strength building exercises.
Students were excited to visit the library after the long summer break. They were made aware of the fact that from grade 1 year, they would be choosing their books independently though teachers would assist in guiding them to make age appropriate choices.
The summer reading log was assessed during library time to check the understanding of the books that each child had read during vacation time.
‘Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn’ Benjamin Franklin