​It is my pleasure to meet and work with these students! In social studies, we talk about rules and being a good student. I work with the book, so that students become familiar with textbooks—which is a good skill for them to learn as soon as possible. Furthermore, I have the students use these rules for the real classroom and how they should behave at Er Xin. Lastly, I am teaching test-taking skills, and I am pleased at how Grade 1 is adapting. For now, they're working together on pictures that describe their community.
​I am so happy to get to know the Grade 2 students! They are eager to learn and they make some great efforts. We are working on what it means to be a responsible community member. I am also impressed at how well the students are working with reading fluency; Reading fluency is the ability to read as smoothly as possible. My students have done a good job in understanding this, and they're learning more about social studies.
​I have had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with Grade 5! I am always so happy that they speak in class. For the first part of class, we have talked about maps. For the second part, we are talking about culture, namely counterculture and how it fits in with mainstream culture. We will continue the discussion about counterculture, and we will watch The Addams Family, a classic movie about counterculture. Moreover, the students will learn more about pragmatics in English. Pragmatics are the uses of language in the right situation. Thanks for your time, and I always look forward to teaching these brilliant learners!
All About Maps With Teacher Betty!
​It's my pleasure to work with the Grade 3. We learned a lot of map skills such as map keys and scales. We also learned many concepts from an interesting song. It was easy to remember concepts this way for many of the students.
​This week, the grade 4 students in their social studies class learned a little bit about lithics (stone tools). We spent some time reviewing about the quiz they did and right after they finished, we watched a short video about a bonobo making and using a stone tool. The video was to give them an idea about how our early ancestors might have used rocks as tools. I took them up stairs where we have lots of space to do a little demo. I have prepared some rocks for this demo but please, DO NOT try this at home. I showed them the most basic form of tool making that was used by our ancestors millions of years ago. After I showed them an example of how sharp the tool I made could be, I let some students tried out for themselves.
​The finished product wasn't perfect because the rocks that I had prepared were not ideal for tool making but nonetheless, the students should have an idea of how hard it is to make stone tools and they should appreciate the difficulties that faced our ancestors long time ago.
Due to the graduation trip, only one grade 6 class had social studies class this week. They learned about the history of World War II and the reasons why the war happened. This lesson should give them some idea about what the world was like 80 years ago and the terror of Nazi Germany and why we should never repeat the mistakes of history.