Merry Christmas!

The last week of school before the winter break may have only been three days long, but it sure was a busy and exciting one! 

The Christmas Tree of Peace

The Grade 2s did a fantastic job delivering their performance of the Lower Primary play, The Christmas Tree of Peace. They spent two months practising and perfecting their parts, with Ms Azusa. We are so proud of our young actresses and actors. Even though there were some nerves and butterflies fluttering around in some tummies, they displayed great courage and did their best. And had so much fun, too!

Christmas Market

It was all hands on deck to design and create the games for our games stall, Christmas Minute-2-Win It! The students used their creativity and teamwork skills to make the Snowball Shooter and Reindeer Ring Toss games. The resources used for creating our games were recycled goods and items donated to us from our class families. This meant that we were mindful of protecting the environment and also because we had no expenses, all our profits could go to the chosen charity.

Congratulations to Endo-sensei for racking up the most points at our stall and therefore, took home the little prize of the day!

Visit from Santa Claus

The students were delighted to welcome Santa into our classroom and graciously accepted gifts from him. A handful of students quizzed Santa about his reindeer, what he likes to eat and his plans for the days leading up to Christmas Day! Thank you for the awesome gfits, Santa!

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Thank you to all the parents and extended families for supporting the students over the festive season events. Your support and encouragement is always appreciated and valued!

Wishing you all a joyous and Merry Christmas, and blessed New Year! 

Have a wonderful winter break, keep safe and see you all in 2025!

Your homeroom teacher,

Ms Theona 🎄

Friendships

"The only way to have a friend is to be one"

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

This week, the discussions and activities for our unit of Who We Are, focussed a lot on friendships. 

Relationship circles

We kicked off the week by making relationship circles. This was a lovely visual representation for the students to see while there may be many important relationships in our lives, there are some relationships that are more important to us, than others. 

Thoughts and actions

Our thoughts become our actions. Based on this idea, which they uncovered, in small groups the students discussed specific social-emotional scenarios between friends. The students were tasked with hypothesizing what the thoughts of the friends may have been to have resulted in the specific actions. They displayed an understanding of what is considered appropriate and inappropriate within a friendship, by being able to identify whether the scenario was a negative or positive one. They were able to delve even deeper, by being able to suggest what the appropriate response should have been.

Forest of Kindness

In an effort to nurture our friendships within our classroom, it was a shared opinion that it would be valuable to share positive words of affirmation and kindness with each other.  As a class, we discussed the various ways in which we can communicate with others, writing words being one of them. The students were tasked with writing a positive and kind message on a Christmas tree ornament for their friend to paste onto their tree. The students will add more ornaments of kindness next week.

The kind messages ranged from some of them thanking the person for being a good and helpful friend, to a few messages acknowledging their friend's superb soccer or basketball skills. Some messages even complimented the personality attributes of the friend. The students were intentional and proudly carried out the activity.

Stay tuned to see how the Forest of Kindness continues to grow! 🌲

Have an amazing weekend everyone, and see you at the Christmas Market!

Ms Theona 

P.S. Thanks to our Advent Calendar Christmas tree, our classroom looks festive and cheerful!

Connecting to relationships

 It has been a captivating week of diving deeper into our unit about Who We Are.

What is a relationship?

With a partner, students were tasked with coming up with a definition for 'relationship'. Using their knowledge of the concepts that we have been discussing over the last week, and their personal experiences, they came up with dynamic definitions. 

They made use of their research skills to find a photo or image online, that they felt best suited or complemented their definition. The students explained to the class why they chose their particular image and upon closer inspection, the students noticed a few similarities between the images:

- the presence of smiles and laughter

- holding or touching hands

- some symbolism of hearts

The students made the connection that these similarities are usually what happens within a happy or positive relationship.

This led us to our next activity. 

What does a positive relationship look like?

Thoughts and actions

The Grade 2s shared their ideas for what they think 'thoughts' and 'actions' are and they also provided some examples of these terms. During the discussion which followed, the students expressed that actions start off as thoughts. One student shared that not all thoughts become actions, or should become actions. Another student expressed that negative thoughts, will cause negative actions and that it will result in a negative relationship, or negative behaviour within a relationship. 

Some interesting and valuable ideas were shared in our discussion.

To be continued next week...

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The students relished the opportunity to enrich their relationships with their classmates by baking delicious cookies together! Thank you to Michel's mom, Ms Marie, for arranging this activity for us and to Jinnosuke's mom, Ms Midori, for helping the students with decorating the cookies. The students enjoyed listening to Christmas music as they made yummy cookies. 

The students were delighted to return to class from recess, to find that St. Nicholas brought them some mikans (tangerines)! In the spirit of St. Nicholas Day, we ate our mikans together, while enjoying each other's company. We were also very excited to enjoy a music concert at the end of the school day.

Have a wonderful weekend, 

Ms Theona 

🍊