Week 10 Final Week!

Warm, fuzzy thoughts, teary eyes, big hugs…that's to sum up what the day has been like today. It has been a fantastic year! K2PTh has been a such a special place to be and Rose and I loved spending our days with your children. Thank you to all of you for your enthusiasm, positivity and support throughout the year...it makes such a difference and has been a huge part of the success of our little community. A special thank you for your cards, gifts and lovely emails...we will treasure them. A special mention to Madhu, Nandini and Vidhya for being such wonderful Class Reps.

Cora, Ethan and Aarya move on to different countries and we wish them all the best in their new adventures. They will forever be a part of our K2PTh family, no matter where they are.
Have a safe and restful break wherever you may be. Do drop by if you come to G1 because Rose and I would love to catch up.

Here is a screen capture of our children’s thoughts as we leave K2PTh….

Happy holidays and stay safe.

- Poonam and Rose

Week 10 Term 3

Dear Parents
Our children have completed creating and recording their EBooks on Animal Adaptations.
To down load a copy of the book, click here

If you'd like to view the EBook on your computer, here is a video that takes you through the steps...

To view the EBook on your iPad, here are the steps...

Week 9 Term 3

Dear Mummies and Daddies

Have a look at our Hand Puppets…we're very proud of them!

Reminders for the final week of K2:

• Monday, 16 June - Friend's Rock! (A PA organised event)
• Tuesday, 17 June - ANIMAL PATTERN DAY (K2's come dressed in Animal Prints)
•                           - Class Party 12.30pm to 1.30pm
•                           - K2 Service Assembly from 10.10am onwards
• Wednesday, 18 June - Portfolios come home
• Friday, 20 June - Final Assembly 8.30am to 9.20am
•                        - End of School 11.00am (buses depart at 11.00am)

Please return ALL Library Books.

Thank you for all your support and encouragement…you've been wonderful!!

- Poonam and Ms. Mary Fernandez (who supported us immensely as Ms Rose has not been well this week).

Week 8 Term 3

A big congratulations to our Service Ambassadors - Nanaki, Sarah and Asher - who did us all proud last weekend. We really enjoyed hearing about your visits and look forward to finding out more at the last K2 Assembly of the year. It has also been great to hear from you, the parents, who went on the trips and, by all accounts, it was a meaningful, emotional and eye-opening experience for everyone involved. 

The children are evidently thinking and talking a lot about Service at the moment and it is heartening to hear stories of children taking the initiative to help others outside of school, such as Derya, Samuel, Oliver and Laila, who decided to hold a bake sale for supporting KUMA, Cambodia. 

Thank you to everyone who returned the Service Diaries this morning. It has clearly been a worthwhile experience for many of you and the children who have been helping out in all sorts of areas at home.

In our current unit on Animal Adaptations, we have been exploring animals, their characteristics and habitats and we have also been discussing what animals need to survive in the environment. Our students have been engaged in meaningful play with their classmates. They have been using iPads to draw animals in their natural habitats. The children have also been using Lego blocks to create animals! 

In Mathematics, the children are becoming experts at inventing more and more complex growing patterns. This week, the children have created their patterns using musical instruments in the music room, inch grid paper, wooden shapes and tiles. They have even been creating growing patterns using Lego! 

Cooking: Michelle (Ethan’s mum) taught our children to make delicious, healthy  Dirt Cups. I find it’s a great thing to include in your child’s parties!

Mystery Readers: Thank you to Belinda and Joshua for being the story tellers to a group of eager, wide-eyed K2PTh children. They love being read to!

Have a great weekend!

Week 7, Term 3

We bid a grand styled farewell to our friends who have gone on a Service trip to KUMA School in Cambodia as well as to the local schools in Bintan, Indonesia. 

  In Reading Workshop, we are well into our “Non-fiction” unit. This links perfectly with “Animal Adaptations” as the children are able to transfer a number of their reading skills as they research animals. The children are exploring a wide range of non-fiction texts and identifying features of information books, such as a Contents Page, Glossaries, Diagrams and Photographs, Labels and Index and so on. Over the coming weeks, we will explore how to use these features to access information from non-fiction texts in an efficient manner. This week, children formed ‘Reading Clubs’ with a partner, based on their interest. They are encouraged to delve deeper into topics that interest them and then share information with their classmates.

In Writing Workshop, our current unit, “All About Books,” allows for meaningful links across the curriculum. We are discussing ways to select topics to write about, planning ideas across the pages to make sure we are really “experts” before committing pencil to paper. Over the coming weeks, we will look at how we can sort everything we know about a specific topic into sections of a book so that they are not just a jumble of facts. 

In Mathematics, we continue to explore Repeating Patterns as well as Growing Patterns in our environment and looking at the differences between the two. Some of the questions children will be looking at are...

• What makes a pattern?

• Where do we experience patterns?

• Why are patterns important?

• What are similarities and differences between patterns?

• How can patterns change?

We have also been classifying, sorting and graphing animals based on their characteristics and habitats.



This Wednesday, we accompanied our G3 Buddies to create a mural using coins. The event called ‘Coins for Change’ was organised by the Bali Bridges committee to help the children of Bali Bridges. 


Thank you to Joaquin's dad for reading books to us this Tuesday!

Infant Aquatics Day
We had a brilliant day at the swimming complex! It was lovely to see the children showing their in-water skills and having a great, great time! I am so sorry I am unable to bring the pictures to you this week…as some of you may know, my iPhone dropped into the pool! I'm relying on Ms. Roses' camera so as soon as she is able to share the photos, I shall share them with you.

I am off to Bintan today with 22 of our K2 and G1 students and their parents. Really looking forward to this Service trip! Nanaki left for KUMA, Cambodia this Thursday and Sarah and Asher are leaving this afternoon to go to Bintan. We will have lots of stories to share with you once we come back. 

Have a great weekend!

Week 6 Term 3

We started tuning-in to our final Unit of Study for this year, “Animal Adaptations.” The children have been sharing lots of important information and it’s surprising to see how much they already know about animals! In this unit, the children will explore animals from around the world and investigate the features that allow them to adapt to life in specific regions and survive in their environment. 

In pairs, the children explored non-fiction animal books and created lists of recognisable physical features. We discussed any similarities and differences we discovered and tried to group the animals accordingly.

As our pre-assessment task, we selected two animals that we feel we already know a lot about and drew them, focusing primarily on their physical characteristics. Then, we interviewed the children about the animals and asked the following questions:

• How are the two animals similar?
• How are they different?
• How do their physical features help them to survive in their habitat?

We also introduced the idea of camouflage through cut out butterfly silhouettes using newspaper. We spread these silhouettes on newspaper and ask children to pick as many as they could in 10 seconds! This game led to the discussion of how this is relevant in the real world. How and why do animals use camouflage?

In Mathematics, the children are greatly enjoying our “Patterns” unit. The children have been creating their own repeating patterns using a variety of media, including oral, rhythm, number and shape patterns. From here, the children moved onto Growing Patterns and, again, explored this idea through a variety of media, focusing on shapes.

We made animal shape cookies with Ms. Rose today! They were absolutely delicious!

Drum roll please…the results are in for the K2Athlon! Together, K2 covered 555 laps! Each lap was a 30m swim, 120m run and a 90m cycle. So, in total, K2 covered 16.65km in the water, 66.6km on foot and 49.95km on the bikes - for a grand total of 133.2km. Not sure if we reached Cambodia but what a fantastic effort!

Reminders: 

• Infant Aquatics Day next Wednesday 28th May from 9.00-9.50am at Bedok Swimming Complex. Please come along and enjoy it with us. 
• Please continue to encourage your child to complete some/all of their Service Diary and, remember, raising awareness is more important than raising funds...although every little bit helps.

Lastly, a big thank you to all our swimming volunteers who have helped us this season!

A big thank you to our mystery reader, Ananya's dad, who read a pirate story to our children…his treasure chest was filled with chocolates!

Have a great weekend!

Week 5 - Service Week

SERVICE WEEK
We have been celebrating a fantastic Service Week across the Infant School! The children familiarised themselves with the different Services initiatives we support within our grades (K1, K2 and G1)...both here in Singapore and overseas. The main objective was to raise awareness of these initiatives both within the grade and across the Primary School. Through an intensive week filled with interactions and activities, we believe the children have started to think a fair deal about Service, what it means and how it impacts all of us. 

On Monday, we visited the Grade One classes to find out all about the residents at Happy Lodge, why we visit them and what to expect. This helped us to focus on Service within our local community. We discussed ideas on the kinds of activities we might enjoy with residents and how to deal with some of the situations that often arise during the visits. In line with our current Reading Workshop unit, we created character studies of ourselves which we presented to the residents this Friday. 

On Wednesday, we found out more about The Island Foundation in Indonesia and the Kuma School in Cambodia. Ms. Nora and Ms. Naylor made a presentation for the respective Services. We visited a number of classes to deliver “Kuddles for Kuma,” This was a lovely way to raise awareness of KUMA within our school community. Linking to our Writing Workshop unit, the children wrote persuasive letters to the Kuma children some real-life problems they face each day, namely litter in their villages and the importance of going to school every day. Our Kuma ambassadors will deliver these on their upcoming trip.

The highlight of the week was Wednesday’s “K2Athlon” where we wanted to see how many “Ks for Kuma” we could clock up as a grade team and see if, together, we could reach the Kuma School in Cambodia! The children did themselves proud and displayed great commitment, resilience and a real team ethic. I am not sure how many Ks we achieved but watch this space...and thank you to our parents who came down to cheer us on. 

On Thursday, we concentrated on Service at school. We invited our G3 buddies to help write promises for ‘The Tree of Promises’ in the pod, pledging something we could do to be of Service to others at school. We also went up to the Grade One classrooms at lunchtime and enjoyed a shared lunch together.

Today, we visited the Happy Lodge residents with our G1 buddies. It was such a delight to watch our children interact with the senior residents...they were confident, thoughtful and caring and definitely brought a smile on the faces of the residents. 

We finished the week by thinking about how ‘Service Starts with Me.’ We introduced the idea of a Service Diary which the children all took home in their blue folders this afternoon. We will let them explain these to you but, please be reminded, these are completely optional. The main purpose of the diaries is to encourage the children to engage in Service initiatives in and around their homes as they begin to appreciate the importance of thinking about other people and, hopefully, helping out whenever and wherever they can. If they raise any money, that is an added bonus but the main aim of the project is to raise awareness not funds. We also enjoyed another shared lunch, this time the Grade One children came down to our classrooms. 

Lastly, Miss Imogen has uploaded Fazree’s Arts Festival photos onto each class page on the Primary Music Site. They can be accessed directly by clicking on the 'Music' tab link at the top of this page.

Have a great weekend!