Ms McClellan - 2024/25

It’s hard to believe, but we’re nearly at the end of the year—just one week to go! We have an exciting final stretch ahead, with lots to look forward to. As of now, our Gyeongju World trip is still scheduled for Tuesday. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the weather and will update you if anything changes.

In the classroom, things are wrapping up beautifully. In IEYC, we’ve been engaging in lots of hands-on, experiential learning as we explore and reflect on the world around us. It’s been a lovely way to round out our year together.

Phonics has been a huge achievement—we’ve officially finished Set 2 sounds! The children have worked so hard, and their progress is truly something to celebrate.

In Maths, we’ve returned to shapes, diving deeper into how we can manipulate, compose, and decompose them. It’s been exciting to see the children explore familiar concepts in new ways with growing confidence.

We’ve also been having wonderful experiences with our ABC Countdown! Everyone had an absolute blast getting wet on Water Day. On T for Teamwork Day, we created a beautiful piece of collaborative art with Mrs. Sim’s class—such a special moment of creativity and connection. And today, for U is for Unwind, we let go of our stress with a relaxing Moana yoga session. What a fun and meaningful way to count down to summer!

Looking ahead to Friday, we’ll be having a whole-school assembly with a small graduation ceremony for our students. Afterward, there will be a chance to take pictures in a cap and gown—don’t forget your cameras! Then it’s time for our end-of-year potluck, and we hope to see you all there to celebrate together.

Let’s make this final week a joyful one!

It’s been another exciting and engaging week in Ms. M’s Class. With focused attention and lots of hands-on activities, your children are making amazing progress and having fun along the way!

🧮 Maths Moments
This week, we continued building our understanding of simple addition and subtraction. It’s been wonderful to see the confidence growing as these concepts start to click. 

🌍 IEYC Explorations
In our IEYC unit, we dove into the world of rocks. We examined their different textures, colors, and shapes, and even created our own pet rocks to take home! These creative companions sparked great conversations about nature and storytelling.

🍓 Smoothie Creations
During independent tablet time, we explored how smoothies are made—from selecting fruits to blending them up in a Maths game no less! Later, we brought this learning to life by making our very own smoothies together. A perfect mix of learning and delicious fun!

💡 Neon Day Highlights
While our classroom is a cozy space, we had the joy of joining the whole school for Neon Day! The glow-in-the-dark dance party was a big hit. It was such a fun way to connect with the larger school community and celebrate in style!

📬 Important Reminders

• Gyeongju World Trip 🚌
  Don’t forget to sign up for our upcoming trip to Gyeongju World! The cost is 21,000₩ for students and 28,000₩ for parents. I would absolutely love for parents to join us—it will be a day full of adventure and shared memories. The sign-up form can be found in the latest newsletter from Mr. Green.
  
• Report Cards
  Report cards went home today. Please take some time to look over your child’s progress and accomplishments—we are so proud of all the growth we’ve seen!
  
• Parent-Teacher Conferences
  Conferences are scheduled for next week. I’ll be sending an email soon with available time slots. I look forward to connecting with you to discuss your child’s learning journey.
• ABC Countdown – Ready Steady Splash!
  Our Wet Wet Water Day is Tuesday!
  Please bring:
  * Swim suit or clothes to get wet in.
  * Towel
  * Change of clothes including underpants and socks
  * A water gun if you have one
  * Wear shoes that can get wet and send dry shoes
  
  

That’s it for this week! We’re on the homeward stretch!

It’s been a fun and busy couple of weeks in Ms M’s Class! We’re moving full steam ahead as we near the end of the school year, and there’s so much to celebrate.

Phonics
Our phonics time has been full of excitement as we read our second Ditty book and continued reviewing past sounds. We also learned the sounds “ow” and both the short and long “oo”. The children have been doing a fantastic job applying these in their reading – great work, everyone!

Math
In math, we wrapped up counting to 20 and beyond – and I’m so proud of how well the children did on their recent assessments. It’s been wonderful watching their confidence grow! We’ve now started exploring simple addition within 10 and will continue with that as we begin to learn subtraction this week.

IEYC (International Early Years Curriculum)
We’ve been learning all about the world around us! The children especially enjoyed retelling Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen – except this time, it was with a cute bunny as our main character! Imagination and storytelling were at their finest.

Science and Nature
A very special moment in our classroom: our caterpillars finally transformed into beautiful butterflies! We released them into the world and gave them a big send-off – what a magical experience.

Special Events
We’ve had some very exciting days recently!

• Field Trip to Pony Land: We had an amazing time riding ponies, visiting the animals, and feeding the sheep. The children loved it, and we made some lovely memories together.
• Sports Day: What a fun and active day! Thank you to everyone who came to cheer us on. It was wonderful to see the teamwork, smiles, and energy from all the children.

Upcoming Events

🎨 Art Exhibition – Friday, June 13th at 2:00 PM
Please join us as we share our creative work alongside Mrs. Sim’s class. The children are proud of what they’ve made, and we’d love for you to come see it.

🎢 Gyeongju World Field Trip – Tuesday, June 24th
We’re looking forward to a thrilling day at Gyeongju World! To help make the day smooth and special, we ask that one parent accompany each child. A permission slip will be coming home soon from Mr. Green. The cost for children is 21,000 won. I’ll update you soon with the cost for parents.

As we enter our final three weeks, let’s keep the excitement going and make these last days together truly memorable.

What a wonderful week we’ve had in our classroom!

We wrapped up our 3D shapes unit with an assessment, and I’m so proud of how well the children did. It’s been amazing to see them confidently identifying spheres, cubes, cones, and cylinders in our classroom and beyond! We began studying numbers above 10 and I’m pleased to say everyone is confident in numbers 10-13 as we begin this journey.

In phonics, we reached an exciting milestone—moving from reading Ditty pages to full Ditty books! What an accomplishment for our early readers! Red Ditty 1 went home in backpacks today and should be practiced throughout the week. Please return it with library books on Friday.

We also finished our Weather Watchers unit with a snowy twist! We read a fun story about Jack Frost and talked about snowy weather. To celebrate, we made animal biscuits. While they weren’t all snowland animals, we had so much fun baking and decorating them together.

Tomorrow is our big field trip to Pony Land!
Please remember to:
🐴 Pack food that does not need to be microwaved
👕 Wear your HFS shirt
💧Bring your water bottle

We’re also in full swing with our ABC Countdown! On Wednesday, we’ll be celebrating both C and D Day—so don’t forget to send your child with their Cuddly Toy and help them Dress Up in something fun!

Thank you for all your support at home. We’re having a blast learning and growing together every day!

What a busy and exciting week it has been here in Ms. M’s Class. We’ve been engaging in all sorts of fascinating explorations and discoveries.

This week in Maths, we continued learning about the wonderful world of 3D shapes! The children enjoyed identifying cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders, and we had fun building towers and sorting them into different groups. We also challenged our brains with complex patterns, creating sequences with different colours, shapes, and even actions. It was fantastic to see their problem-solving skills in action!

A big milestone this week in Phonics! Our amazing learners have officially completed their Set 1 sounds! We are so incredibly proud of their hard work and progress in recognizing these initial sounds. Get ready for the next exciting step as we prepare to move on to Set 2 sounds and the Red Ditty Books. These short, decodable books will help build their confidence and fluency in reading.

Our IEYC unit “Weather Wonders” continued with a focus on the dramatic power of storms. We read a touching storybook about animals who sadly lost their home in a storm. To help the children understand and process this, we recreated the story in our water table, using toy animals and creating our own mini-stormy conditions. It was a wonderful way for them to engage with the narrative in a sensory and imaginative way. We also explored the sounds of storms using musical instruments, making loud crashes, gentle rain sounds, and howling wind.

Our exploration in the water table was a huge success! To ensure we can continue to offer these engaging and sometimes messy learning opportunities freely, we would be very grateful if you could send in an extra change of clothes for your child’s locker. This will allow them to fully participate without any worries. Thank you for your understanding and support!

We’ve also had lots of fun watching our caterpillar grow. It plays hide and seek and we’re never sure where on the plant it’s going to be. We also had a great time Friday making pink zucchini muffins! Cooking is such a great way to learn all kinds of valuable skills. We watched a video experiment where someone picked up pepper using static on a balloon. We didn’t have any pepper but we recreated this experiment using oregano!

Mark your calendars! We have a very exciting field trip to Pony Land coming up on Monday, May 27th! Get ready for a fun-filled day of meeting ponies and enjoying the outdoors. A permission form with more detailed information will be sent home via email very soon, so please keep an eye on your inbox. Additionally our ABC countdown starts Friday and a full schedule for that will be going home Tuesday.

Keep on Learning!

Well we’ve been up to a lot in our class these last few weeks. We’ve explored wind by making paper bag kites. We’ve explored shadows by making Shadow Art with Mrs Sim’s class. We explored the sun and proper clothes to wear by making a sun visor and painting not one, but two beautiful t-shirts which we will show off in our fashion show when we get back next week.

Speaking of next week, we are taking school photos on Thursday, May 8. Please come dressed in uniform.

We started exploring some minibeasts as well! Our butterfly kit arrived and our caterpillar eggs have hatched this morning. Ms M will have to make a couple trips to school over the break to make sure our little friends survive. We’ve also got a wormery going in one of the cupboards.

We’ve been hard at work in Maths learning 9 and 10 these past 2 weeks, including our end-of-unit assessment yesterday. On Monday we’ll begin our new unit about 3D shapes!

Literacy had us looking at rhymes and sounding out words. We’re getting to be great readers!

Phonics this week has the sight words “the” and “of”. We’re learning lots with Ms. Jiyu!

That’s all for this update! Do enjoy the break. Children’s Day is also Buddha’s Birthday so along with finding activities to go to, you may want to check out a temple!

We’re settling in to old, familiar routines and we’re really enjoying our learning.

Thanks so much for sending homework photos! We really enjoyed looking at them and discussing them in class today. Please continue to send them! It’s a great opportunity to practice speaking.

In Maths this week we looked at the numbers 9 and 10. We did some subitizing, some comparing sets, and started working on “one more”.

In Literacy we began our book Gigantosaurus and we found a special delivery of dino eggs to start us off. It was exciting to open the eggs and find some of the dinosaurs in the story. We also practiced writing a sentence about a character. We’re in a unique situation where this isn’t entirely a new story as it’s an animation that’s been watched at home!

In IEYC we continued to explore weather. We’re tracking the weather every day and we also did some rain experiments. We dripped paint to look like rain running down a window. Also, we used shaving foam and coloured water to simulate clouds and rain in a bottle. When the coloured water got too heavy for the shaving foam, it dripped through like rain in a cloud!

In Phonics we looked at the letter X and the digraphs CH and QU. We also read two ditties and one had the red word “I”.

That’s it for this week. I hear rain is in the forecast for this weekend so stay dry. Why not try one of the rainy day activities in the homework pack?

See you on Monday!

Well here we are, back at it in Term 3! Can you belive we’ve made it so far. There’s still a full term of great learning to go here in FS 1/2.

We’ve got a new friend joining us just for Maths class and it’s wonderful to have a new face in the mix. As such, our timetable has changed some. We have the same number of classes they’re just at a different time and sometimes on different days. Please refer to the screenshot below:

Speaking of Maths, we learned about Taller and Shorter and also a bit about time and days of the week this week. Next week we’ll start numbers 9 and 10 and doing some addition to 10!

The Weather Fairy visisted us in IEYC and brought us a Weather Waver. Whatever could this mean. She left us a note that said she was tired of making the weather and it’s up to us now. She’s on vacation in the mountains!

In Phonics we’re reading ditties and working on letters and digraphs. This week’s digraph was “TH” like “THank you”.

I’m sure worn out from all the excitement this week so I imagine you are too. Enjoy the weekend and come back refreshed on Monday! Don’t forget, you can always send pictures of your homework adventures or any adventure you’d like to mariemcclellan@hyundaiforeignschool.com for us to look at in class!

What an amazing week we’ve had! Phonics! Maths! IEYC! Oh My!

We went on a field trip to the Busan Science Museum and made paper automata. What great fun that was! We also played on their playground and enjoyed the zip line. In the Children’s Museum we explored many things including a hall of mirrors!

We finished our IEYC unit with a visit from none other than the Robot Scientist! What a treat that was. We made a mission for him using his own sound buttons to find his robot that we had improved upon weeks ago. It’s been incredible having such a fun partner in our learning.

We continued learning letter sounds in phonics and length in Maths.

There’s no homework this week so please enjoy your holiday to the fullest!

My appologies for falling behind on these updates. I assure you, we’ve been up to all sorts of great learning!

The Robot Scientist keeps sending us messages and missions in IEYC, in Maths we’ve been learning about the numbers 6-8 and some simple addition. We’re cementing our knowledge of letter sounds and words in Phonics. And there’s lots of reading going on in literacy. With the weather getting warmer, we’re doing more and more outdoor learning as well.

Please enjoy a catch-up in the form of many photos!