Spring has arrived at Forest International School of Paris and Maple class was ready to go out and explore the many ways in which new life starts during this season.
We went to the orchid to make daisy chains and met Gringo the horse. We planted flowers at the school and helped prepared the vegetable patch. In class we planted and with patience watered our sunflowers seeds, seeing them grow into small plants ready for our garden. We painted our own spring garden patches and created 3 D flowers from waste materials, using all of this to make a large new display in the entrance area to the school. Come and have a look, we hope you will like it as much it as we do and find it inspiring!
Maples loves math and seeing how we can use this is our everyday lives around us. Whether this is through observation of patterns and shapes and identifying them in the world around us or finding out for ourselves how math’s impact us practically daily, from mixing green cookie dough for St Patrick’s day to addition by one to celebrate our next birthday. Playing with the number mats continues to be one of our favourite activities as it is so easy to take what we have been learning inside class to the outside. This term we focused a lot on skip counting, encouraged by one of the books we read, Eggs and legs. Building of puzzles continues to be a daily part of our routine. Some of the benefits of building puzzles are learning about the concept of a “whole” and that each piece is a fraction of the bigger picture. It also helps develop skills such as shape recognition, concentration, goal setting, patience, and a sense of achievement. Two new areas for focus for Maples during this term was starting to tell the time by the hour on the clock face and learning about the four seasons in a year. We will continue to explore these two areas into more depth in the next term.
A key part of literacy is our daily interaction with books. We just love reading books, learning new stories, and sharing the treasures of old stories. Maples are very creative and always looking for ways to interact and act out stories we have read. This term they choose the book After the fall by Dan Santat to explore in more depth and use for our book to represent by an art project. This book tells the story of what happens to Humpy Dumpty after he had the fall. It explains why he fell and the first place and how through perseverance he achieved what he really aspired to. A truly uplifting ending for an old nursery rhyme. Making it both inspiring and fresh. We continue learning our first sight words and some of has started our journey on independent reading. Congratulations maples! Reading books aloud to children are very important as it stimulates their imagination and expands their understanding of the world. It helps them to develop language and listening skills and prepares them to understand the written word. Reading at an early age is very important to learn to understand and use language to express our ideas, thoughts, and feelings, and to communicate to others.
With a new season arriving, arrived the opportunity to explore the orchard and forest in different ways. This term we did a lot of races, balancing, climbing, rope jumping and other physical exercise while on our daily outings into the forest or orchid.
