November 17-21, 2014

Welcome to trimester 2. Trimester 1 report cards will be sent home on Tuesday and I am so looking forward to seeing all the parents to discuss the progress that the kids have achieved by far. We survived the first Friday at school and the kids seemed to enjoy the idea of 5 days school ;)

Welcome to the 4-year old club, sweetheart. Hoping this year's birthday is the very best for super 4 year old - like you - can ever have.

Human has so many bones

Doctor Ade helped us to weigh ourselves

'This is the room for kids vaccination.' said nurse Erica

This is the pharmacy

Doctor Sam checked the heartbeat

Cheese...!

We had a great opportunity to visit Chevron clinic as part of our community workers unit. We met people working at hospital or clinic such as doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. Doctor Sam, doctor Ade and nurse Erica were so generous spending their time to take the kids on a tour around the clinic and explained what they usually do in their jobs. The kids paid good attention at every explanation and they were so curious about the tools they saw at the clinic and kept asking questions about them. Being very good listeners, nurse Erica gave the kids rubber bracelets. Thank you very much for every single person in Chevron clinic for their support in kids world of exploration.

Inspired by our visit to Chevron clinic, we set up a little clinic in our class. Taking turns, the kids tried to be doctors and patients. I was once being the patient and the six doctors gave me all of the treatments, all at once! I was a bit overwhelmed, yet happy when one doctor checked my heartbeat, one doctor checked my blood pressure, one doctor checked my temperature, one doctor gave me a shot, one doctor put band aid on my forehead, and the last doctor nicely called my father to let him know that I was in a very good care in their clinic :)

We really love The Skeleton Dance by Super Simple Song. The lyric is very informative and the video is very funny. We danced along with all the skeletons on the video. After that, using white crayons, we traced around our arms. Then we used white glue to stick all the q-tips as our arm and hand bones.

To practice our number recognition and writing, we used thermometer to check each other's temperature. We wrote the temperature showing on the thermometer on the chart. Who's got the highest temperature?

Expressing our love to band aid, we made some band aid wafers using wafers, white fondant, and strawberry jam. It was so easy to make them. Most of the kids loved having a little bit of 'blood' on their band aid wafers, but one kid preferred to have the clean ones.

Endless ABC app was introduced to the kids this week. We let them explore this new app after doing their Wet-Dry-Try project. The kids really love this new app. This app is really great to reinforce letter recognition and phonic sound introduction. It's highly recommended to be downloaded to your family iPad.

Using Community Helpers app, we chose the photo shoot activity to have fun taking each other pictures and attached that to the community helpers bodies. Using Community Helpers and Explain Everything apps, we put together a video presentation to be shared on Monday assembly. Don't miss it!

Look who came to our class on our first Friday. Yup, that is Mr. Craig, our tech master. Mr. Craig will come to our class, not exclusively on Fridays, to help us learning more about how to use technology to make our learning and exploration more fun and more cool!

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

Revisiting our Eric Carle unit a few weeks ago, we managed to put together the photos taken by the kids on our ridge walk on a video using Explain Everything app. Enjoy!

November 10-13, 2014

Yay! We survived the first trimester. It's a wrap! Starting from next week, we will have a full week school, five days a week, no more long weekends for Pre-K 3 :)

We had quite a busy week this week with the field trip to Pizza Hut as the main highlights. The kids had great experiences, not only to meet the people working at a restaurant but also the opportunity to make their own meat lovers pizza. They were very excited waiting for all the pizza pans came out of the huge oven.

Other than that, we also had a lot of activities about 'restaurant' theme in our classroom. The kids really love having a 'restaurant' in the classroom with them being the chefs and bakers in the kitchen. I had non stop offers of various food, drinks and desserts from the chefs and bakers. Lucky me!

Welcome to our restaurant!

What would you like to order?

We make the best cookies in town.

Here you are...

He designed his apron carefully

They also enjoyed every step taken to make their own play dough such as measuring, mixing, kneading and shaping the dough. They got even more excited to know that they could bring the play dough home to play it with their siblings.

Beside learning about jobs at a restaurant, we also learned about another job which is an artist with Piet Mondrian chosen as our artist study. They recreated Mondrian's Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow. Carefully, they put some glue on the black strips then laid them down on the white paper. After that they chose some spaces to be painted in red, blue and yellow using tempera paint. 

And here are some other fun activities we did in our class.

C for Carrot

Sorting food and drink

Good teamwork in putting back together all the jigsaw puzzle pieces

PRE-K 3 CLASS FIELD TRIP TO PIZZA HUT

Wednesday, 12 November 2014.

As part of our community workers unit, we learn about jobs at a restaurant. To give the kids real life experience, we did a field trip to Pizza Hut Balikpapan this morning. Prior to that, we discussed about jobs in a restaurant and what their duties and responsibilities are. When we were at Pizza Hut, we met some chefs, waiters, cashier and also the restaurant manager. We did simple conversation asking about what do they usually do everyday at the restaurant.

We were also so lucky to have the opportunity to make our own Meat Lovers pizzas. Chef Gober was so patient guiding us to make the pizzas. Now, we know that Meat Lovers pizza needs tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, burger beef, ground beef, chicken sausage and beef sausage as the toppings. When we finished adding all the toppings to the pizzas, we saw how chef Gober put all the pizza pans into a very big oven. It only took about 10 minutes to have our pizzas ready. They smelled so good. Then chef Gober sliced the pizzas using a gigantic knife and put them into the boxes.

Before we took the pizzas back to school, we paid the pizzas at the cashier. The cashier asked us our names and each of us got our own receipt. She also gave us some balloons. Yay! It was a great experience and we were so happy to have pizzas that we made for our lunch.

We wore plastic gloves before cooking

Topping Station

We added tomato sauce to the pizza dough

We added some toppings to the pizza dough

More toppings

... and some more toppings

Our pizzas before baking

Chef Gober put them into the big oven

They smelled so good

He sliced them into 4 slices

'How much is my pizza?'

Thank you

The receipts with our names printed on them

We were ready to go back to school

Yumm!

November 3-6, 2014

It's only one week away from the end of trimester 1. It has always been my proud moments to see their progress started from the beginning of the school year up to now. I can't wait to share that during parent-teacher conference in a couple of weeks.  

We started our community workers unit this week. We discussed any jobs that they know, tools and vehicles used for each job and also duties and responsibilities for each job. Most of them share various opinions on some jobs' duties and responsibilities, but when it came to the discussion on what a teacher does, they all agreed that a teacher's job is to tell student what to do. I couldn't help myself not to giggle on this as well as I couldn't argue with them considering how many instructional words, phrases and sentences I use everyday in class. I think they know if I do that in the name of love and care, just the same as you guys do at home :)

Look! Who has just joined the 4 year old club last weekend. Happy birthday, my dear. Wish you all the best.

This is the highlight of this week activities. The kids were so thrilled knowing that they were able to talk to a real pilot on skype. Robert Marcel Gutierrez, an Uruguayan pilot who works for Garuda Indonesia, was so generous sharing his time to chat with the kids about airplane and pilot. The kids were super excited when he showed them Dusty and friends. They started to have their own conversation about the movie and left the pilot alone on the screen.

We were also lucky to have our visiting authors (and poets), Sara Holbrook and Michael Salinger came to our school to share their expertise. It was so fun to know that it is not as hard as we thought it was to write a poem and to memorize it. The kids enjoyed the poem reading which included some expressive movements.

Other than those activities that we did above, we also made some popsicle sticks airplanes; we did some community workers patterns for math; we tried some community workers app; we made our own community workers memory game and simple puzzle; and we practice to do some puppet show using community workers puppets.

Last but not least, we did some activities related to our letter of the week 'B'.