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 ...

Research Skills This week we have been working well on developing research skills. These skills will support us in all of our lifelong learning. We are now familiar with the following ways to research: 1. speak to someone who knows about the topic   2. read a book (Epic online books) 3. Look at Kiddle.com   4. Look at Google images of the thing you want to know about   5. Search for a short documentary   When we have the information in front of us, the next step is to use it wisely. Previously, we tended to copy, but we have been talking about why that is unacceptable. Everything we write now is expressed in our own words.  The information we researched was then presented in an information report.  Presenting the work as a Google document was interesting because we had a chance to use 'voice typing'. It is thrilling to speak to the screen and see spoken words appearing as text! It has been particularly i...

Rites of passage Continuing with our unit of inquiry on culture, we have been looking into the rites of passage of various cultures. Here is the video we began with. Whatever culture we belong to there will be rites of passage that we all experience. As you probably seen, the classroom has many colourful images relating to culture. This week, we all chose one and researched the rites of passage of that culture. We have been learning that Kiddle is a good place to research from because the results are child friendly. Epic books also has good resources to read.  A key point of our learning this week has been looking into the features of an information report. Indeed there are several kinds of writing, all with different purposes, and so during the course of the year we are spending time with each of them. An, Epic books was helpful because it provided a beautiful explanation of how to write an information report. As an example of what ours might look like, the teac...

Rosh Hashanah - what is that? Well, at the beginning of the week we didn't know either! It all came about when we began looking at people whose values and beliefs led them to take action. Each of us chose a from a list of: Princess Diana, Maalala Yousef, Nelson Mandela, Mother Tresesa, Anne Frank Some other names came up to. We looked briefly at what cultural backgrounds they came from and the significant contributions they had made in the world. Anne Frank particularly interested us because the word 'Jewish'  kept coming up in the readings. As we had little idea of what the word meant, we decided to research together. To our surprise we found that this week is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year! All of this was good exercise in reading for information and keeping notes, and so we talked about how best to do that. This is something we have to keep working on. We also enjoyed a video interview with a friend from Ghana. He talked about the traditional culture of th...

This week we've been learning about the fact that South East Asia has many minority ethnic groups. Each of these has its own language, traditions and clothes. We especially learned a lot about the fact that some of these minority groups are forgetting their language and traditions. This became an opportunity for us to think about our own culture and for each of us to feel proud of who we are. This was tied into our English lessons too. As we looked at fascinating photographs of people from South East Asian ethnic groups we naturally had many questions to ask. The focus of the lessons was how to form effective questions. This was a valuable exercise because students really did have good questions, and so they learned how to phrase them correctly and use key words to make them more effective. There has also been a focus on vocabulary extension too. Children naturally enjoy talking, but there is an ongoing need to broaden the scope of the language they are able to use correctly...