Merry Christmas from Grade 1

We would like to thank all the moms who helped organize our class parties. The girls all had a fabulous time. We hope everyone has a wonderful and safe holiday. 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Sound Challenge

Although we finished our Light and Sound Unit last week, we needed more time for the sound component. 

For the summative assessment, the learners had to make their own instrument by brining materials into class.  You can see from this SOLO rubric below that after making their instrument that is similar to one of the instrument families (see the yellow part), the learners needed to describe how their instrument makes sounds and explain how the sound has been changed in terms of the dynamics, pitch and length. 

Ms Kampa worked with the students as they explained how their instruments worked. 

Here are some videos of the learners playing their instruments. We have a string section, percussion in the form of shakers and drum section. After the learners all played together!

EAL Christmas Stories

The grade one EAL students have been learning Christmas related vocabulary and writing Christmas stories the last few weeks.

Students listened to Christmas stories and then sorted vocabulary according to characters & objects!

After doing a group story plan students make their own story plans.
Then they start a rough draft and eventually do a final good copy.

Euginia is finishing the cover for her story.

Jian is cutting out her final copy.

Himeka proudly shows her finished Christmas story!

Christmas Around The World

In an effort to deepen our understanding of Christmas traditions, we are taking part in an online Christmas Around The World project. Through this project, we have connected with a number of different schools around the world, and have begun exchanging video messages. We invite you to view our video message and to follow our project at: http://padlet.com/dtowse/christmas

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Thinking, Talking, & Exploring Celebrations

We recently began our new, Celebrations, unit of inquiry by discussing whether or not different events are a cause for celebration. We recorded some of our discussions using the app, Voice Thread, which was introduced to us by our friends in grade six. Please take a moment to listen to some of our ideas, and feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.

After some debate and much discussion, the students carefully placed each event in the category they felt was most appropriate 

What do you think is a cause for celebration?
Leave us a comment below with your thoughts.

A Special Message for Ms. Kampa

The grade one girls have a very special message for Ms. Kampa, who worked so hard to help them prepare for Carol Night.

Shadow Makers

For their end of unit summative assessment, the girls in grade one were set the challenge of making a series of different shadows.

On and Jueun go to great heights to try and create a large shadow

Ellen and Saadatu think a larger object (Ellen) is the key to making a large shadow

Kaede and Katlego make a green coloured shadow

Sae and Mirai make a purple coloured shadow

The girls use their knowledge of light, and their understanding of causation to prepare a short written explanation about how they made each shadow.

Karen and Hanna prepare their light source

Erica and Mio use a dark surface to create a dark shadow

Shrisha and Tejal use the projector to create a small shadow

Learning to Write an Explanation Text!

We have been busy writing explanation texts. First we learned what an explanation was. We read about why popcorn pops! We learned that the audience for an explanation text is someone who wants to understand how something works.

Then we looked at examples of explanation texts that connected to light and sound like this:

Next we made a shared text in class. We wrote an explanation about how light and sound travels.

Then we choose a topic for our own explanation texts. Some chose reflection and some choose shadows.

We drafted our work and shared it with each other for feedback. We also got feedback from the teacher and then we revised our work further.

We have also been using checklists so we can see what we need to include in our work!

The Biggest Shadow on Earth

Using their newly acquired knowledge of shadows, the girls in 1A recently hypothesized about what the biggest shadow on earth is. 

Erica, Sae, On, Jueun, and Hanna all thought the biggest shadow was a country, continent or the world itself.

Ellen, Rika, Rina, Tejal, and Mio all thought an animal was the source of the biggest shadow on earth.

Kaede, Mirai, Katlego, Jian, Rio, Saadatu, Himeka, and Shrisha all had some very interesting ideas about what the biggest shadow could be.

Do you know what the biggest shadow on earth is? 

Leave us a comment below with your thoughts.

Learning About Sound Through Instruments

There are instruments all around us in the Activity Room.  Students have opportunities to play maracas, tambourines, finger cymbals, drums, and more!  To learn more about the instruments in our Carol Night song Zumba Zumba!, Grade One took a short trip to the Music Room.  There they discovered all of instruments they had been wondering about.

Zumba, Zumba! 

Zumba, Zumba!  Strike the cymbal.

Zumba, Zumba!  Strike the gong.

Zumba, Zumba!  Beat the timbal 

and the tambourine and drum.

 Playing the gong

Playing the timbal / timpani

Feeling the vibrations of the timbal/ timpani and cymbals

Listen to what we heard in the Music Room

Inquiring into reflection

Wow, how exciting! Today we went into the dark room to investigate what would happen in low level light when we wear a black or white t-shirt.

We discovered that the children wearing black t-shirts disappeared!!! The children wearing white t-shirts were visible because the little bit of light that was there was reflecting off their t-shirts.

Ask your daughter to tell you where she was standing in the photos!!!

The funny blue colour is actually the white shirts reflecting light. We used a special blue light that gives low level light! 

Believe it or not but there are actually girls standing next to the girls with white t-shirts who are not reflecting any light.

Look at Yua's hair. Why can't we see it? !!!!!!!

Inquiring into Light & Sound

For the last few weeks, the girls in Grade 1 have been busy learning the scientific method, and using it to conduct some very interesting light and sound investigations.

Ellen, Katlego and Saadatu investigate how light can be changed

Kaede discovers how light travels

Tejal and Rika experiment with different materials

1A out on a sound hunt

Kaede and Mirai busy observing and recording different sources of sound

Rio and Jian hard at work, recording the sounds they hear

Halloween Party

We would like to thank all the parents who helped organize and host our Halloween Parties today. The girls had a fabulous time and made some wonderful memories. We would also like to thank Mr. E in Grade 2, for taking time away from his Halloween Party to help us with our trick-or-treat parade. During the parade we encountered a lot of different characters. We saw ghosts, princesses, storybook characters, and mermaids, but our favourite character was by far, the Joker.

2-D Shape Wrap Up

This week in math, we concluded our unit on 2-D Shapes with a series of activities focused on estimating and measuring regular and irregular 2-D shapes.