The Solar System Craft: Threads

29/05/2008 (Thursday)

a) Blocks and Individual Assessment
In the morning, I brought the blocks for the kids' corner playing. Assembling is one of their favourite games. I was surprised to see YP, ZY and JN played together. This is good because most of the times, they preferred colouring and drawing. I saw how LX wore the scarf around her neck and how J constructed a building. I thought that they were pretty innovative!
Meanwhile, I called the kids to do Individual Assessment. Today, I managed to call ZY, Zyg, JH, YZ, WY and YW.

b) Revision: shapes
After tidying the classroom, we did some revisions on “shapes”. They included: oval, circle, rectangle, square, oval and triangle. Then, I drew some animal pictures using the shapes. They revise on these words: lion / singa, giraffe / zirafah, zebra / kuda belang, snake / ular, elephant / gajah. Then, I randomly pointed the words and they read aloud. At times, I read the Bahasa words and they need to immediately read the English. They like the game.

c) The Space Song
We sang “Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars”, and then looking at the written words, they sang “The Space” song to this tune. They sang slowly and then quickly. They sang with actions and even noted the chorus which I didn't write on the board. That was intentionally; so as to encourage more action movements.

d) Length of threads
Next, I drew The Solar System as to recap the planets' names in sequence. They learnt that the orbit becomes longer as they go farther from the Sun. Thus, they learnt the word, “long”. When they started comparing, they learnt “longer than” and “the longest”. Thus, Mercury's orbit is long. However, the earth's orbit is longer than the Mercury's. Finally, the Neptune's orbit is the longest. Next, the kids cut a long thread into 8 different lengths. These thread would be used for The Solar System Craft in the next lesson.