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.

Important things @ the MC

After reading The Important Book Miss Lea asked: What are the important things about the MC?

Here are our pictures:

 and you can click on the link to hear our ideas too!

Rhythms All Around Us!

Students in Grade One have been learning all about rhythms.  How have we been learning?

Rhythm Claps
We've been clapping and patting rhythms from the board.  Sometimes the rhythms disappear!  We clap out the rhythms to our songs and learn the names of the rhythms.

Songs
We've been learning songs about positive relationships and building peace.  Perhaps you've heard some of these songs at home.  I'll continue to update you on new songs through this blog.

Two, Four, Six, Eight  traditional
Two, four, six, eight, Meet me at the garden gate.
If I'm late, don't wait.
Two, four, six, eight.

Make New Friends traditional
Make new friends, but keep the old.
One is silver and the other is gold.
A circle is round.  It has no end.
That's how long I want to be your friend.

We've also sung other songs, such as Peace Soup by Jack Hartmann, It's So Good to See You by R. DeLelles, and Jelly In the Bowl.  We've enjoyed the traditional story of The Tortoise and The Hare.  

Sounds and Instruments
The students have learned about Body Percussion (stamp, pat, clap, snap) and the five different unpitched instrument groups (drums, woods, shakers, scrapers, metals).

Our Chants
Finally, students put together everything they learned about writing rhythms, playing instrument sounds, and writing their own silly chants.  Their goal was to have a pattern, write the rhythm, play it, and then perform it with a confident voice.  Check out these awesome examples.

We'll be learning about sound soon.  Check back here to see more.

EAL with Ms. Kathi

To work on their speaking, describing and writing skills, Grade 1 EAL students have started using an app called Doodlecast to write riddles.  We have booked the iPads long term, thanks Mr Towse!

Here are some examples:

These videos are being added to an EAL website which allows the videos to be put in alphabetical order or by subject so that they are easy for students to access. Recently added videos are on the home page.

God's Eye

This is what we are up to in Art these days:
learning to weave a simple God's Eye or Ojo de Dios in Spanish, a craft from Mexico meant to ensure the health and safety of young children. Ask your daughter how it is made! See if you can find out which tribe started this tradition...

Mr. Ed

On demand Writing - Becoming better writers!

In the elementary school, we are inquiring into a new way to assess and develop students' writing. Part of this inquiry into writing involves doing 'on demand writing', which means the learners have to show their writing skills without any advance notice and show the full writing process: planning (pre-writing), drafting, revising and editing all in 45 minutes. 

The idea is that the learners will become more skilled at writing in this way as the year goes by with regular practice and also by having lessons that give them skills that they can apply to all their writing not just the writing of one particular genre.

Here you can see some photos that show some of the stages of the writing process: drafting, revising and editing. 

The video show how a learner is carefully editing her work. Look at that concentration!

Drafting in full flow!

A blue colour was used to revise the work. Revising includes adding more detail, removing parts of the story, changing a word for a better word, crossing out a repeated word etc.

Concentrating to look for misspelled words during the editing stage!

You can see the places where this learner edited her work. The red lines show where there should be finger spaces. This learner has gone back to drafting her work some more, which shows that the writing process is not a linear one!

During the drafting, the learners may need to pause while they think about their ideas for the story

This is how we introduced the On Demand Narrative. We explained what a personal narrative was by saying it is a true story about something that happened once to you.

Building Good Relationships

Enemy Pie by Derek Munson
Available on www.tumblebooks.com

After reading the story, Enemy Pie by Derek Munson, and other various books about friendship, the girls in 1A and 1B examined how relationships are built and maintained. The students in 1B demonstrated their knowledge and understanding by writing and drawing pictures, while the students in 1A wrote and produced short videos.

       

Festival of Nations

We would like to thank all the students and parents who helped out at the grade 1 Super Scooper booth today at Seisen's annual Festival of Nations. We really appreciate all of your hard work and effort. We are especially grateful to the parents who worked double shifts to help us keep up with the high volume of customers. With everybody's help we were able to collect nearly 2000 tickets, and make a lot of children very happy. 

We would also like to congratulate all of the grade 1 girls on a spectacular musical performance. Everyone sang and danced so professionally. Good work girls! Ms. Meyers, Mr. Brigham, Ms. Mai and Ms. Kampa are all very proud of you!

 

Shape Study

This week in grade one, the girls in 1A and 1B explored the properties of two-dimensional shapes.