Literacy Week and Celebration of Learning

This was the busiest week of the year so far. The students had many inquiry tasks to finish, Literacy Week activities, and the Celebration of Learning on Friday.

Bushra showed outstanding creativity and courage by making her Cleopatra costume and then walking up Takeshitadori to the Harajuku library in her costume! We were very proud of her winning the costume competition.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we all worked frantically to prepare for the Celebration of Learning. A productive planning meeting and materials was all we needed to show off our learning, and I was happy to see everyone applying time to their serious inquiry learning as well as the fun carnival.

Please visit their Summative Assessment Task blog posts by clicking on their names below:

Bushra | IT'S NOT FAIR!

Miray | Everybody's Rights

Suheda | Go Equal Rights!

Sule | The Belief of Religion

It would be ideal if you would leave a comment as a guest on your child's post.

 

Each one of the 'Uniters' had a major role in hosting the Celebration of Learning. They did an excellent job. I look forward to seeing how they all grow and thrive as public speakers this year.

Finally, on Friday, we partied! The Celebration of Learning was a huge success and the younger students loved playing our carnival games.

I wish everyone a lovely midterm break. See you in November!

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Wrapping up inquiries

This week, we started the process of finishing our inquiries for the first unit, Who we are. We have been exploring Rights & Responsibilities in depth, including collaborating to create a Human Rights Awareness Survey to learn about people's understandings and beliefs about human rights. Please click on the link below to complete the survey and participate in our inquiry.

CLICK HERE: https://docs.google.com/a/jies.jp/forms/d/1Esv0Ed3N7NGgEr9xSyz_MnfcEg67K6BISG6pYP8Gr7A/viewform

To support our inquiry, we have also been studying data handling. I was very impressed by everyone's careful attention to detail and creative graphs!

We're ecstatic to (finally) start our musical keyboard inquiries again. Each student will work at their own pace through our piano method book and develop their own compositions. Suheda and Bushra began to work together on a piece, which including a lesson on music notation!

Next week, we will put on a classroom carnival for the younger students. It's a great way to have fun learning about probability and economics! On Friday, we took a shopping trip to Daiso to purchase essential materials.

Next week is Literacy Week, and also the final week of our unit. I'm very excited to see the students' presentation and exhibition at the Celebration of Learning on Family Fun Day!

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Kanji review

At the beginning of this year, everyone decided how many pages they want to  practice every week. They are trying so hard not to break the promise and gave me the Kanji notebook every Thursday.
This week, they practiced Kanji on the smart board while considering the balance of character, such as stroke order.

Grade 5 students have been learning some classical stories.
"Taketori monogatari" (The tale of the bamboo cutter).
"Makura no soushi"(The pillow book)
"Heike monogatari"(The tale of the Heike)
They really enjoy the old style of Japanese stories.

Grade 6 students are now getting ready for a debate.
They came up with some topics they want to talk about.

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Making, creating, cocreating

This week has been very special for me because I am seeing the students grow closer to our motto for the year, 'Inspired and Independent'. They have started more challenging inquiries by themselves, often finishing their snacks quickly to have more time to work.

Another important goal in the beginning of the school year is to build a sense of team, and they are doing just that. By choosing to inquire, make, and learn together, they are practicing valuable social and communication skills. Just as importantly, they are having fun.

This week, I introduced our Carnival Games Tycoon Probability Challenge:

The goal is to design and build carnival games for the younger students to play, but the challenge is to test the games to ensure that the tycoons (Grade 5/6 students) get back all of their tokens.

It will be a great chance for them to use their mathematical thinking skills, data collection, and perform probability experiments. I suppose, however, that they are more excited about the artistic design elements at the moment!

Bushra thought that the key to getting students excited to pay tokens to play games is having great prizes, so she went to work right away on those.

She also designed and built a magnetic claw hand for her carnival game!

We also started building a token machine. Sule and Miray are planning to play 'junken' to get more tokens from the ticket machine. It's hard to explain in a blog post, so you'd better visit the carnival to see how it works!

The students are also busy working on essay blog posts about human rights. Because expository writing is so important, we will devote a lot of effort to becoming fluent essayists and bloggers this year. I look forward to publishing their major work soon!

For now, please enjoy their journals and other posts on our blog, 'Uniters' JIES Grade 5/6.

Early in the school year, I sent all parents a link to their child's grade sheet. It has been updated regularly with scores for homework completion, spelling tests, reading comprehension quizzes, and math tests. Please find the link in your email and have a look at your child's grades!

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Smile Week

This was a busy and exciting week for engaging with our school and local communities. First, we began receiving Peace Cranes and Peace Doves from other classes. Our first package arrived from Massachussets, USA. It was strong motivation for us to pack our own envelopes and send them around the world!

To share with the Shibuya Ward Office about what we did for Peace Day, the students created a fantastic poster describing the project. We entrusted our work to the Grade 4 class to deliver to the Mayor of Shibuya.

In Tuesday's school assembly, Suheda told everyone that Friday was Smile Day. I had an idea to put little smiley faces all around the school. This led to the class making necklaces with smiley face pendants on Friday for everyone at school.

For one inquiry period, they became a smiley face factory!

Because of the caring action of the Grade 5/6 students, this Friday truly was Smile Day at JIES.

The students have also been busy collaborating on our Class Rights and Responsibilities.

There are still a few details to sort out, and I'm very proud of how they worked together, both in face to face discussion and on Google Docs, to synthesize their ideas into meaningful essential agreements for our expectations for the school year.

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Learning from Newspaper

This week, Grade 5 and 6 students read Yomiuri Kodomo shimbun.
They are so curious about what is happening around us and around the world.
They were exchanging their ideas what they think about the news.

Grade 5 students also read a story "Mitateru" and  Grade 6 students read a story "Kanjo(feelings)" written by Kenichiro Mogi.

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