Holiday Season

As the winter holidays are approaching, please can you send back any readers (books) that you have at home. We will resume sending home readers after the break. Please continue reading and playing word games with your child.

There are many activities that you can be doing with your child over the break:

• Go to the weebly and play one many of the games that Mr Potts has posted. http://www.gwapyp.weebly.com/.
• If you have an iPad download one of the many apps we use in the classroom. You can find the list here



• Keep a journal/diary of all the fun things you get up to over the break.
• Practice your sight words. This is list one by now most of the children have either mastered or started working on: was, to, in, of, and, a, that, he, I, the, is, it.
• Have your child help you with the shopping; writing lists, adding up prices etc.
• Cook together - let them help you with the measuring and stirring.

But above have fun play and relax 

Hope you and your family have a great break.

See you in the New Year!

Measurement

We are currently measuring using non-standard measurements. Measuring with non-standard units means measuring things with blocks, pencils, hands, feet, etc. As long as the items used to measure with are all the same size, e.g. identical blocks or brand new pencils, they are suitable to use.

We have been working on estimating, measuring, recording, and comparing our height and length both now and when we were a baby. Some of the activities that we have been doing are:

• Measuring each other using unifix cubes, paper strips, string and creating a class graph
• Measuring various things around the classroom and recording the results
• “Size hunt” around the classroom, searching for objects that are bigger or smaller than a given object.
• Measuring a single item with different units then exploring/discussing why the results are different. Estimating, then measuring and recording the results.

Some ideas to link in learning at home are:

• Count how many feet long a room or hallway is.
• Play size “I Spy”. For example, “I spy something that is taller than a chair but shorter than a house.”
• Use hands, feet, paper clips anything as long as they are all the same size to measure anything in the house - just let the kids loose :)

                                        

UAE National Day

On Wednesday we had a wonderful day celebrating the 40th anniversary of the UAE. The children came to school dressed in the national costumes of the UAE: Abayas and Kandouras

We discovered the meaning behind the UAE flag, what Dubai looked like in the past. Tried traditional Arabic bread and got to meet a falcon, camel and horse.

Human Flag

On Tuesday morning the entire school including all the staff put together an 1100-person human flag to celebrate the UAE’s birthday. Watch the video below to see it all come together in just a minute and a half!
See if you can spot us? we are holding black about a third of the way in.

Personal Histories

 

We’ve recently started our new unit into personal histories. Can you guess who’s personal history these pictures belong to?

                                                      

What is light?

Today we became detectives. We read a book where the characters were trying to solve the mystery of how rainbows are made. We then had to see if we could make a rainbow ourselves. We had tables set up with torches, paper, glasses, mirrors and cd’s. We quickly set to work trying out different hypotheses and techniques to make a rainbow. Some of us were more successful than others but after a few modifications and even more hints, we had rainbows covering the walls of our room:

     

                 

                               

One of the most important experiments on light was made by Sir Isaac Newton. He discovered that sunshine (white light) is made up of many colours. Sir Isaac Newton passed a beam of white light through a prism, which allows light to spread out into a band of six colours.

Children's City

We had a great day  today exploring and experimenting with light and sound at children's city. We discovered more about how shadows are made, how our ear looks - we even got the chance to listen to our own soundwaves.

After a picnic and play in the park, we headed back to school with a bus full of tierd children and teachers!

Celebrations & Festivals

 

Thursday was a jam packed day of celebrations and festivals.

• We all wore pink to show our support for breast cancer awareness
• We participated in a flash mob dance to say goodbye to our wonderful secretary Ms Michelle. If you missed it check out the you tube link: http://www.youtube.com/user/gwadubai
• We visited the fall festival and saw the different festivals that will happen around the world this month. Halloween, Chinese Moon Festival, Diwali, Bonfire night and Remembrance Day.                            

 

and

• We celebrated a classmates birthday

A very busy end to a busy week!

Planetarium

We had our first visit of the year to the planetarium today. I thought we had taken the wrong class upstairs at one point because they were so quiet.

We had many questions for Mr Gregory.

• Why do the stars move?
• How does the moon give us light?
• How does the sun give us light?
• What are stars?

Mr Gregory showed us many amazing pictures of the sky. We learnt that the sun is a ball of fire and that all stars are suns and that all suns are stars.

Did you know that the moon doesn’t give us light, it is the sun shining on the moon. We also learnt that there are no aliens on the moon because we have already explored it!

        

How does light and sound travel?

This week we were investigating how light and sound travels. We discovered that light travels in a straight line, where as sound is a vibration/wave.
We had lots of fun experimenting with torches and tuning forks. We even an made our own discovery that you can feel your own sound vibrations if you hold your hand to your windpipe.
                                    
After discovering that light only travels in a straight line we asked if it is possible to make that line change direction? After exploring with different materials we discovered that it is possible to bounce light of smooth shiny materials - mirrors and cd’s work the best. We had a lot of fun up in the peace garden trying to get the sunlight to bounce.