Merry Christmas Market

 The final whirlwind of a week is over and the winter holidays are here! Thank you to all the grade 2 families for your support and care over the first half of the school year. This week was one of the busiest but also most fun of the year. Here’s a video with all of the highlights:

During language time, apart from practicing for this week’s spelling tests, the students created their own Christmas trees and then decorated it by colouring different ornaments. The language and unit connection here was that instead of decorating their own ornaments, they decorated ornaments to hang on their classmates trees and wrote kind messages and compliments to their friends.

On Tuesday, we had a wonderful time making gingerbread cookies and reindeer poo treats together with Mathieu’s grandmere and Gabriel’s mom. The treats were a lot of work, but they were worth it as they turned out super tasty! We even made another batch of reindeer poo on Wednesday just to make sure that we would have enough! Then we made some nice “one-of -a-kind” reindeer cups to sell them in, and on Thursday, the students helped sort the cookies into baggies for the market.

We also had a special visitor on Thursday and the students each got a book as a gift.

Then finally, today was the big day for the Christmas market and lower primary concert! The grade 2 students did an excellent job of running our shop and we managed to sell all 57 cups of reindeer poo and 41 packs of gingerbread cookies! We raised just over 15000yen for charity! Thank you to everyone for your support.

To end the year, we played one last Kahoot quiz that was all about Christmas!

Now that the holidays are here, they can enjoy a couple weeks of family time! We wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and look forward to seeing everyone back in the new year on January 9th. For homework over the holidays, the students are encouraged to do a lot of reading, finish up work on Seesaw (especially adding things to their portfolio on Seesaw - 3 unit activities and 2 specialist class activities for both unit 1 and 2) and they can also practice their math or language skills at Prodigy.com.

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to all!

Invention Convention

 This week we officially ended our Where We Are in place and Time unit about how people create things to solve a problem or meet a need by sharing the students creations and ideas at our Invention Convention. The students were fantastic communicators and were so happy to host so many parents as well as some students and teachers on Wednesday and Thursday. For any parents who were not able to attend, the models and displays have been moved into the STEM room and entrance area so please feel free to check them out!

We also began our third unit of the year under the trans disciplinary theme of Who We Are. The students worked together in groups to unscramble the lines of inquiry and discussed their initial thoughts about what they meant and what the unit will be about. 

During language time, we focused on paragraph writing and learnt that a paragraph is a lot like a hamburger! Then the students began brainstorming ideas about a topic that interests them and will expand their ideas into a hamburger…I mean into a paragraph next week. 

Speaking of next week, it will be a busy last week of the year!

Monday - Swimming

Tuesday - 10:45 - 12:25 Grade 2 Cookie Baking (Volunteers needed!)

For our Christmas Market booth (Santa’s Sweets Shop) the students and I will be baking some cookies on Tuesday morning and I would love it if some parent volunteers could come and help us out. Please let me know if you would like to join.

Wednesday - Packaging cookies

Thursday - Grade 1 Assembly and a Special Visitor

Friday - Xmas Market & 1pm Finish 

Advent, Invent and Adventure at Kawasaki World

 On Monday we had the Christmas tree lighting ceremony and received our beautiful advent calendar from the PTA.

Also on Monday, the students presented their invention timeline slideshows with each other in small groups.

Throughout the week the Grade 2s were hard at work on inventing their own wonderful inventions to help people meet different needs or solve our day to day problems. They demonstrated a lot of creativity and we would like to hold an Invention Convention this coming Wednesday, December 6. Students will have their projects and design plans on display and will be on hand to talk about and explain their inventions. We would like to invite all class parents who can make it to join us from 14:50 until 15:30 to check it out. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the students working on their projects. Those who haven’t finished up have been asked to work on it over the weekend so that they will be ready for the upcoming Invention Convention.

We have been focusing on addition and subtraction skills in class lately, but in preparation for our unit test on 2D and 3D shapes coming up next week we did some revision on geometry with a fun game of Kahoot!

Finally, our biggest event of the past week was our field trip to Kobe Maritime Museum and Kawasaki World on Tuesday. Thank you so much to Ms Huang, Ms Healy and Ms Carter for joining us! It was great having the three of you along! The students also seemed to have a lot of fun with all of the interactive exhibits! I put together the following video to highlight all the things we saw and did there!

Upcoming Event Reminders;

Swimming for Grade 2 will begin on Monday, December 4th please don’t forget to pack your swim bags!

Music Concert - Tuesday, December 5th, 3pm

G2 Invention Convention - December 6th, 2:50 - 3:30

Parent Cafe - December 6th

Christmas Market / Last Day - December 15th