The 2018 Global Read Aloud begins in a few weeks and we’ll be joining hundreds of classes around the world to read Amal Unbound, a novel by Aisha Saeed. The story takes place in a Pakistani village, so we’ve been building our background knowledge about life in Pakistan before we get started on the story. After taking a look at several photos of Pakistan, many of us realized that we had incorrect assumptions about the country. There are several different geographic regions – two of those regions are mountainous and are often cold and snowy (and not dry and desert-like as expected). We also learned that Pakistan is the 6th largest country in the world by population and that there are several different languages spoken there (including Urdu, Punjabi, and several others). We’ll continue building our background knowledge next week as we learn more about the culture and traditions of Pakistan. One of this week’s activities included a story about Norbert the pig, whose dream is to swim the English Channel. Norbert dedicates his time to training, but then realizes that he has a problem: he doesn’t know where the English Channel is! He is ready to give up, but his friends help by pointing him in the direction of “Norbert’s Channel,” a stream on their farm. Was Norbert done dreaming? Nope! The story ends with a picture of Norbert at the peak of a mountain. It was a great picture book that led to a discussion about how, like Norbert, we can also set goals, what we can do when we encounter challenges and the importance of persevering. We also talked about goals needing to be realistic (how can we swim the English Channel if we don’t know where it is?), specific and measurable. It was a great story that led us to setting term one goals for ourselves. Like Norbert, all of us will face challenges so we need to remember to persevere and to rely on the support of those around us. (On a side note, the author of Norbert's Big Dream saw our tweet and responded! A Skype visit? Yes please!) We’ve also been building our Social Emotional skills, thinking critically and learning how to be reflective thinkers with activities focused on our identity. One of those activities involved us exploring the significance of our names. Another activity involved celebrating one of our physical characteristics and a part of our personality. We used our critical thinking by making connections to the stories, but also by reflecting on our learning afterwards with prompts such as “what did you learn?” or “how has your thinking changed?” It was a busy week with lots of great learning in divisions 6 & 7!
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March 2020
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