Andy Ant - like you've never imagined!

Kids having fun in SK Jerantut Jaya. Thanks Fara, for a fun class!

TPR (total physical response); Teacher Fara got the pupils to come to the front in small groups in order to act out the ant who sat on a mat from the Year 1 text book.

Stephen-Peter Jinks (ELC Jerantut)

Teachers Rising to the Paper Plate Challenge

... at SK Teh

The Year 2 class at SKT are halfway through Unit 3 Where Am I? The teacher used the paper plates as a warmer to review phonics and vocabulary from earlier in the Unit. Teacher Sim also used the vocabulary review to prepare the students for the story the children would read later.The paper plate warm-up was a real life version of the activity shown on page 20. The phonic sounds represented by 'oa' and 'igh' were pasted on the plates along with other sounds that made up the targeted words in the Unit (boat, goat, high, right etc.). The teacher used both sides of the plates and colour coded the target language according to the phonic. The children took it in turns to move the plates around the whiteboard to make and say the words.

Everyone say 'oa'

Make and say the words

Sounds and vocabulary

The story

Reading together

Just like any resource the teacher makes, the paper plates can be re-used in future lessons as review, or as a familiar vehicle for introducing new vocab and phonic sounds.

After the warm-up, the children were ready to read the story. Everyone read together, and after we all read, the teacher split the class into KSSR and LINUS groups (roughly the same size). Teacher Sim sent the KSSR pupils to the mentor for a re-telling of the story without the book while she worked on literacy with the LINUS pupils.
Stephen-Peter Jinks (ELC Jerantut)

Triceratops Vs. Tyrannosaurus Rex

At SJK(C) Sungai Jan

The Year 2 teacher engaged the children with a story about a naughty dinosaur who wandered from home and got into trouble. The story is pitched well at the children's interest levels, but in order to draw them in more, teacher Tan made simple masks to depict the characters in the story (the naughty young triceratops, the triceratops parent and the scary tyrannosaurus rex). The children used the masks to role play the story, and everyone enjoyed themselves.
Language Arts are meant to be fun and creative, and the children's creativity will often take them outside the lesson plan. This is a good thing! In Tan's class, the children cut out the story board in the activity book and folded the paper into a xylophone-shaped book; she also asked them to make a book cover. Most children were happy doing this, but some got distracted by the hole left on the page of their activity book and used the space to frame their own faces. On a very submerged level, the children are putting themselves inside books (the unit topic is story time); isn't this what we want in the language arts section of the unit? On the surface, these boys seem distracted and off topic, but deep down they are totally involved in the lesson. Teacher Tan did a good job letting these boys have the freedom to explore the topic for a few minutes in a way that interested them.
Stephen-Peter Jinks (ELC Jerantut)

Filling the gaps.

The T, Rex was very fierce.