UDIS Year 5/6

We are very happy to welcome three new students into our class.  Gafee and Geoff are excited to have Aum, another boy to join them. The two new girls are called Anfield and Bua. This brings the class to a total of ten students. This week we began inquiring in migration. Firstly, we considered the reasons why people have to migrate. We are beginning to see that this is often because of challenges they face in their home country. We've already begun to talk about some countries we've heard of, but want to find out more about. These include Afghanistan, Honduras,  Syria, Myanmar,  The Philippines, Mexico, Nigeria and Brazil. All of these are interesting places to study in terms of what it happening in terms of migration. Most of them are mentioned in news stories too, and so please encourage your child to watch such stories with you. On Thursday we had a very interesting time in the clock tower. The students learned a little about how it feels to...

This week we came to the end of our unit of inquiry on cultural beliefs and values. Back in August we had very little understanding about how culture impacts beliefs and values. However, as the weeks went by we engaged in many learning activities. The first of these was interviewing teachers to ask for their input on a definition of culture. We went on to watch mini-documentaries, read several information books and speak to people who could teach us about their culture. As a concluding activity, we came together as a class to produce a joint video which describes some essential points of cultures which we are interested in. This was an exercise in collaborating on a project and exercising social skills. As you can imagine, there was a lot of research to do, and so we had a good opportunity to put into practice all we have been learning about how to conduct research. We now have no reason to use 'copy & paste' ! Heres a link to our work: The highlight of this week h...

Developing Our Inquiry Skills This week a lot of attention has been given to conducting research on a culture of our own choice. This involved a good amount of reading from reference books and informative websites. The information gathered was presented as an information report. This is the genre of writing we have worked a lot on in recent weeks. All of the finding out we have been doing on cultural values is going to be presented digitally too. This is something we are presently working on. It will be ready next week and we'll share it with this blog. We also continued with the very touching story of 'Red Bird', the native American girl who suffered through years of having to deny her own culture and live another life. We made lots of connections with the character through considering her feelings. This helped us develop in the area of empathy. The other area attribute we developed in is tolerance. The characters in the story did not show tolerance ...