Our Assembly

Thank you to everyone who was able to come to our assembly! It was a great chance for the children to have an experience of standing in front of a large audience and performing.

The story of the Creature, which the classes helped create, generated a lot of enthusiasm, and it was good to finish our unit by performing it. It allowed us to focus of various aspects of our unit of inquiry into survival, looking at what the needs of animals and plants are, within an imaginary context that the children helped to create, how medicines might contribute, how the divers might survive underwater and how the mountaineers can stay safe. There was a lot of discussion around what the creature needed and how it got exercise, and it was the children that decided that the creature was a good diver that would help the villagers with their diving!

medicine making

If you didn't get a paper copy of the book, we have a few spares; please ask. It would be a good book to read with your child, perhaps asking them to read a little of it; they know lots of the words already, which always helps!

Here are digital versions of the books:






The classes worked hard to produce the artwork too, in the style of Eric Carle. We created the papers first.

Then we made our images by collage:

Pyjama Day at IST

On Friday, the staff and children came to school in their pyjamas to help raise 259€ for a good cause.

Number of the day

Today is our 107th day at school. We made lots of 107s with materials that we chose.

We also, as usual, wrote different equations (and > and < relationships) involving 107:

The Creature in the Cave

As part of our unit of inquiry into survival, we've been looking at animals and plants and what they need. One way we've been doing this is through an imaginary scenario to which the children have contributed most of the information...

Our village is by a deep lake. Some of the people in our village dive down into the lake to get a plant that grows at the bottom; this plant is used in a medicine. They have described to us what the plant looks like.

There's a mountain by our village too. High up in the mountain is a cave. Recently, a creature has been seen going into the cave. Some of us went up the mountain, and looked in the cave. We saw what the creature looked like.

Here we are, discussing what is needed for the dive, how we make the medicine, and mapping out what's around the village. There are three groups that are experts on these three things:

After careful preparation, a group dived down into the lake to get the flower needed for the medicine. Another group carefully made the medicine. 

And a third group went up into the mountains to see the creature and its child. The story continues next week...

With thanks to Jenny Lewis for this 'Mantle of the Expert' unit.