Saturday, 14 February 2015

Semester 2, Weeks 4&5

During these past two weeks we have delved more deeply into different civilisations and written reports on a selected ancient civilisation that we researched.  We also looked at where the six of civilisations studied were placed in time and created a timeline to show the periods covered by each. This helped us to understand how each of the civilisations was able to function and survive completely separately from the others. Throughout the unit we have constantly made links to between the past and the present and the changes from earlier models to present day items that we use. It is not easy to say what things will be like in the future, however, by considering connections they have already made the students have also been thinking about what life will be like in the future; the things people will use, things that will no longer be required and advances that may have been made in different areas. Though very fictional and hard to imagine the students put their ideas to good use and enjoyed using Minecraft to create what houses or classrooms could look like 200 years from now.

We completed our stories for the short story competition. These were fictional tales based in Sudan. The children were given three titles to choose between. Many had good ideas for the start of their narratives but it was clear that more thought about how to build up a story and develop ideas further is a skill that needs developing. We have been reading myths and legends as part of our unit and students are currently working in pairs in 4B to develop their own myth. We plan to publish these as graphic stories using Comic Life 3.

Recently we have been looking at time in maths. Understanding and reading time are important skills to have throughout life. By helping the children, at home, to read both digital and analogue time, as well as working out elapsed time (e.g. the time between an event starting and finishing) would be very beneficial. In numeracy we have continued to work on division and multiplication. Earlier on we learned strategies to help us with these and now we are able to apply the understanding to the more traditional formats.

We were lucky to have visiting Artist and Calligrapher, Hassan Musa, teach us the basics of calligraphy in art this week. It was very interesting to experiment with the effects that can be created using just a strip of cardboard and black ink. We're hoping that the tiles we create for the new cafeteria will be a good reflection of what we have learned.

Now we are looking forward to Celebrate Sudan Week, visiting author Sam Osman teaching us how to write myths and fables and Open Campus Day. There's never a dull moment at KICS!

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