Art - Personal Portraits

Art work related to Stories

Art is often used to tell a story. Our personal portraits tell us about ourselves and how we perceive our place in the world.

Direct modelling of some techniques using soft pastels.

Using smudging to blend colours

Children from next door visited to see what all the fuss was about.

Story Pattern

Stories Have Patterns

We investigated a selection of stories that had similar patterns. We read one as a class then created a story map to help our memory. A story map is a map of the key events in pictures and words.

Story maps

Reading the stories together promotes collaboration and responsibility.

We can all join in.

We had different versions of traditional tales.

Questioning

We summarised the key problems, the setting, the characters, the pattern and then reported back to the group.

Sharing our summaries

Ready to share

Sharing Personal History

Our Past is a Story

We shared our precious objects with some friends then we wrote captions to go with our displays.

Learning to listen is an important language skill.

Sharing in a group is an important group skill.

Students wanted to investigate how to use the pipette.

These objects are all special to us in different ways.

Maths - Doubling

Doubling numbers is a key mental computation strategy. Children investigated the patterns when we built doubling models. They then recorded these in their workbooks. If they don't know a double we encourage breaking numbers into known parts. For example, double 7 is the same as double 5 plus double 2. 

Can anyone see a pattern?

Collaborating to build the models.

We can learn from each other.

Patterns become real when we build them with tiles.

Recording understanding is a vital process in learning.

Our First Unit of Inquiry: Stories Are Everywhere

Our First Unit of Inquiry: Stories Are Everywhere

Putting together our puzzle

Over the coming weeks we will be inquiring into the following Transdisciplinary Theme:

How We Express Ourselves

This is an inquiry into the ways in which we discover and express ideas, feelings, nature, culture, beliefs and values; the ways in which we reflect on, extend and enjoy our creativity; our appreciation of the aesthetic.

The central idea is that : People share stories for different reasons

Our first task is to investigate and discuss the MEANING of the central idea. We work together to place the puzzle pieces together to construct the statement. We will continually revisit the central idea as we demonstrate our learning about stories; their origin and features.

Key concepts to be studied are: causation, perspective

The related concepts are: genres, inspiration, culture, character, role play, performance

The following lines of inquiry will define the scope of the inquiry into the central idea:

• How stories are created
• Different ways to share a story
• Why we might create stories and share
• Patterns in story

Discussing the meaning of the Central Idea

In other areas of the curriculum we are focused very much on developing children's ability to solve simple addition problems using a variety of strategies that develop mental computation skills. We strive to build understanding by using concrete materials wherever possible.
In language we have begun identifying patterns in stories and then will be using our understanding of that to create storymaps. These will allow us to write our own versions.

Recording the Central Idea