NUACHTÁN ELEMENTARY | May 2021
Welcome to this new edition in which we share information regarding the academic and socio-emotional areas.
During the Children’s Day celebration, our kids enjoyed the activities that we prepared for them. Whilst these activities have as their main objective just to have fun, at the same time, they develop skills of all kinds. They were able to choose the activities that interested them most by developing autonomy in decision-making, they convey with friends, but also with classmates of other grade levels promoting the use of those social skills that they have already been consolidating, organizing time, schedules, and the necessary materials showed self-management skills. As we can see there are a variety of skills that they applied through fun activities.
Celebration time: Happy Mother´s Day! We would like to congratulate all Celtic moms. Hugs and kisses hoping that you will enjoy in the company of your families this special day.
ESTABLISH ROUTINES AT HOME
By Consuelo Zamudio
Just as we establish the first routines of eating, sleeping, and hygiene with our children to create an internal scheme of order and acquire habits, it is necessary that from the beginning of school life we establish routines that promote responsibility and help their academic training.
For children, routines are the way they are organized over time, adults, model and teach these routines through established schedules that become habits, that is, through an activity that is done every day in the same way and by repeating it daily in a short period of time it becomes a habit.
Here are some activities I recommend that are done daily to promote responsibility, care, autonomy, and generosity among other attributes:
- Have an age-appropriate house task, such as helping to set the table or pick up dishes at the end of the meal, feeding the pet, watering the garden, etc.
- Do schoolwork at a specific time and in a prepared environment to give formality and importance to this situation. Have 15 minutes to read for pleasure of the theme and genre that they like the most.
- Devoting 15 minutes to the subject you consider he or she needs to improve: mathematics, geography, history, etc.
- Prepare the backpack, uniforms, and lunch for the next day with total autonomy.
Activities like the above will encourage the acquisition of attitudes, behaviors, skills, and learnings that will be useful for your child for other situations in daily life. It will also prove that they can do things with responsibility and autonomy.
Reference : http://www.guiainfantil.com/articulos/educacion/la-importancia-de-los-habitos-y-las-rutinas-para-los-ninos/
WHEN WE LEARN A LANGUAGE, SOMETIMES WRITING IS THE HARDEST PART… SO, WHAT SHOULD WE DO?
By Eli Jasso
As we have been discussing, learning a second language, is a manner of time and patience to acquire because we are developing whole new skills of communication. When we write, we must focus our attention on grammar conventions, punctuation, and a whole process of editing and correction, until we get a nice final product. However, to get this final product, you need to learn various tools, grammatical tools, and the learning process of the language, which starts when you are in Kindergarten.
Our students acquire the language through continuous use in class by reading, speaking, writing, and using it; trying to make it as natural as their mother tongue. Because if you just learn the grammar pattern and memorize it in a traditional way in a set context, it is very difficult that you transfer to a new context. Our teachers create situations that are normally linked with our units of inquiry that will help evaluate both, the unit concept and the grammar usage during the class, assuring the students have a comprehension of their writing. This is how we use our writing process, in which our students learn little by little how to get ideas, develop them, correct them, and get a beautiful final product. Having a pleasant feeling of pride in their own ideas! At the beginning, it seems that they write very short sentences but at the end of Elementary school, they get to produce long meaningful short essays, showing not only comprehension but also understanding of the convention of the language naturally.
LEARNING TO BUILD OUR HAPPINESS
By Psic. Gabriela García
«Happiness is not doing what you want but wanting what you do»
-Jean Paul Sartre-
Starting with the premises of the concept of happiness (Latin «felicitas», which derives from «felix» and means «fertile») we will realize that the proposals are many, for example, that it is a mental or emotional state that influences everything we do, a feeling that provokes our bodily reactions, an ability that a person possesses to solve issues related to his/her daily life or a satisfactory consequence between expectations and reality.
Although objective and subjective elements are involved in the concept. Sonja Lyubomirsky, doctor, teacher, scientist, and expert on the subject; mentions that happiness is not a goal but an emotional state to cultivate, so it involves a job and effort. Happiness is favored through several factors with a level of 50% Genetics, 10% depends on the situation and circumstances of life and the remaining 40% is subject to our control. So being kind, practicing gratitude, and maintaining the connection between people is one of the key elements of having a healthy mind, being and considering the other as part of our happiness.
In this matter, I share with you that in Psychology classes in Elementary; we continue to favor emotional balance and well-being. For example, during reflections students continue to value activities that, although they might seem simple to do at home, have allowed them to have fun differently. Activities they enjoy as a family and feel satisfied because they continue to be surprised at how creative they have managed to be and the harmony they have experienced by being resilient to the permanence of the current situation, valued from what they have or have had both in the personal and material aspect. We are confident that our children continue to develop self-control, social and communication skills, giving adults a great learning lesson and a real example because they have been genuine adaptive agents with simple and positive determinants every day.
I remind you that every day is a good start to…
- Decide to be happy.
- Thank, value, appreciate, honor, and enjoy every experience.
- Accept yourself as you are, accept people as they are and the world as it is.
- Evaluate what happens (action) without judging who did it (person).
- Raise awareness of what you want to change in yourself.
- Resolve conflicts with serenity.
- Build abundance by adapting to circumstances.
- Live with intensity.
Reference: Sonja Lyubomirsky: La ciencia de la felicidad: un método probado para conseguir el bienestar, Barcelona, Ediciones Urano, 2008, 408 pp., ISBN: 978-84-7953- 664-0
APPLYING THE PYP IN THE CLASSROOM
Impressionist picnic
Elementary’s first graders worked the Impressionist light through the unit of inquiry about nature’s cycles. Miss Susana organized an Impressionist picnic, where the children dressed according to the late nineteenth century, went out to their garden or terrace and painted the exterior, feeling the moment and reflecting in their works the light as Monet and impressionist painters did.
During Prefirst’s Triggering activity regarding teamwork, students watched a video of Mariachi and reflected on it. Mateo Bravo shares his drawing and reflection where he comments that music is best heard when more people came to play.
Third graders talked about what a conquest means and the attributes, skills, and attitudes you must have to achieve it. They expressed their previous knowledge of the conquests in any field, watched the film «Sing» and chose a character describing the achievements and how they carried them out. They reflected on the importance of being risk-takers in achieving and conquering a goal and represented it through a drawing.
Based on the Unit of Inquiry THE HUMAN BEING USES ART TO CAPTURE THE IDEOLOGY OF HIS TIME, 6th-grade students looked for images of what was researched from different eras and made their own memes based on each of the works.
DATES TO REMEMBER
• MAY 5th |Class Adjourn “Batalla de Puebla”
• MAY 7th |Mother´s Day Celebration
• MAY 10th | Mother´s Day | Facebook live | 9:00h
• MAY 17th | 6th Unit of Inquiry begins
• MAY 21st |Class Adjourn | CTE
• MAY 26th |Parents Making a Difference