Starting the Year in Middle Pre-Primary

Welcome to our Middle Pre-Primary blog!  I am excited to share little bits and pieces of our daily classroom learning with you.

First of all, I would like to warmly welcome our four new students: Laura, Aurora, Rakan, and Raghav.  We are so happy to have you here at ISG, and the four of you have already made our community a brighter place! We are also welcoming Miss Nadia, an Erasmus intern from Greece, who has been such a wonderful help in our classroom.

We spent the first few weeks of school adjusting to our classroom routines and expectations.  The children have really taken ownership of their new space and are eager to keep it beautiful and peaceful.  At ISG, each classroom studies one personal value every month, and this month we have been talking about respect.  The children brainstormed their very own rules to keep their space a safe, kind, and fun place to learn.  You can see the Classroom Rules tree that the children made in the photos below, or by visiting the classroom and looking at our bathroom door.

We started our first International Primary Curriculum (IPC) unit, All About Me, with a very fun party where we danced, sang, and played with our pre-primary friends.  We learned all about each other and especially loved singing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” as fast as we could! So far we have explored what we look like by using mirrors to make self-portraits and chalk to draw our outlines.  We are also becoming familiar with our own names and the names of our friends through games with nametags.

We have just begun to dive into our Jolly Phonics curriculum, which we will be using to learn the sounds that letters make.  You may have noticed a small little keychain in your child’s backpack—we will be adding to this keychain every time we learn a new letter, so please keep it in your child’s backpack!  You can use this keychain to help your child learn the letter sounds by practicing them at home, too. We are working hard with chalkboards, sandpaper letters, a special blue sand tray, and our nametags to practice letter recognition and formation. 

The children are very eager to count how many friends are in the classroom every day.  We count forwards, backwards, and sometimes even skip counting by twos (2, 4, 6, 8…).  The children showed a fascination with dice, and they invented their very own dice game where they take turns rolling two large dice against one of our doors and recording their results.  As part of our All About Me curriculum, we also measured how tall everyone is and marked it on our closet door.  We have been excited to explore concepts of quantity together!

We performed a special song, “Grey Squirrel”, in front of the whole school during an assembly.  The children created squirrel ears for their big day, and they had fun sharing one of their favourite songs with their ISG community.  We especially love this song because it helps us create and enjoy silence.

On 21 September we celebrated the International Day of Peace.  We’ve been learning three songs about peace and we sang them all together.  The children especially love singing “Peace Like a River”.  We spent some time talking about what makes us feel peaceful and we learned that everyone can be a peacemaker by sharing their feelings, listening to others, and problem solving when we have disagreements.  Then we created a very long school-wide peace chain!

It truly is such a joy to work with this group of children and get to know the warm, welcoming community of ISG.  I can’t wait to see where this school year will take us!

Best,

Miss Sophie