One of our last learning engagement in our unit of inquiry was for the girls to research another student's celebration.
Here are the steps to success the girls had to follow:
- Read the celebration posts on our celebrations Padlet site - Choose a celebration to present about - Print out the information from that celebration - Highlight the key information - Fill in a graphic organiser about this information to help your presentation - Prepare individually or with a partner a post on the Seesaw app: video or picture with audio.
This was a huge learning curve for the students. They had to employ so many different skills to do this: research, observation, time management, presenting, role taking, collaboration.
Below you will find some of the work that was produced. It may not seem so polished but it is very authentic and the students made many decisions by themselves in how to organise their research and presentations.
Afterwards we reflected on how it might be clearer and neater for another time!
Since coming back from our Autumn break the Grade 1 have been learning to write Information Books or as we sometimes call them, Teaching Books.
We have been applying what we learnt from our Small Moment stories to our new writing genre. We are still spending time planning our ideas but now we say our ideas across our fingers. If we have a fact or piece of information for each finger, then we know we have enough information to teach in a book. We are continuing to sketch across the pages to get our ideas down on paper and then of course, writing.
The main difference between our Small Moments writing and our Information Writing is that everything that we write has to be factual and interesting. We are even learning to teach with our drawings too. We noticed that in information books, authors use arrows, captions and zoom-ins to explain their topic to their audience.
Here Lena has done a great job labelling her pictures.
Would you like to learn about 'Babies,' 'China' or 'Eels?' These are the topics that some of our students have decided to teach about in their Teaching Books.
Emi P has written an interesting Teaching Book about Eels.
Mio has written an informative book about Babies.
Emi H's interesting book about China.
Perhaps you could talk to your daughter about topics they think they are an expert at and what they know about it. This will help them to begin the writing process quicker and have lots to write about.
As we look back on our learning so far, we remember the wonderful performances by Grade One at the Festival of Nations. Despite the rainy weather, students performed well. We are grateful to everyone for your flexibility in our performance spaces. We are beginning our preparations for Carol Night with celebration songs from around the world.
The FON performance was filled with songs and dances from their Who We Are unit on Relationships. Through Music and Dance, we can help students make connections with their classroom content. In their Music Unit of Inquiry, students have also been learning about "Rhythm All Around Us." In Dance class they explored many ways to dance together. As part of their summative assessment, students sang about many different ways to make friends. Through these songs, they also learned about singing, playing, and reading rhythms.
Here's a video of the students' performance. If you'd like to sing a long at home, you'll find the lyrics to the songs below.
In the song "It's So Good To See You" students learned to read quarter notes, "think the rhythm," and play body percussion.
It's So Good To See Youby Randy DeLelles
It's so good to see you.
I almost couldn't wait,
Can you clap your hands, and count to eight?
(quarter notes) 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8
Change the body percussion to: pat your legs, stamp your feet, snap your fingers
This song is a traditional song about friendship.We learn traditional songs as a connection to culture.
Make New Friends traditional
1. Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other is gold.
2. A circle is round. It has no end.
That's how long I want to be your friend.
3. A fire burns bright.It warms the heart.
We've been friends from the very start.
4. Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other is gold.
These two songs teach us about relationships.
Shake a Friend's Hand (unknown)
1. Shake a friend's hand, shake a hand next to ya,
Shake a friend's hand, and sing "La la!"
Shake a friend's hand, shake a hand next to ya,
Shake a friend's hand, and sing . . . .
Chorus: Sing a la la la la la la le lu ia, la la la la la le lu ia,
La la la la la la le lu ia, la la la la la le. . . .. lu ia,
2. Give a hug
3. Give a friend five . . .
Peace Soup by Jack Hartmann
Chorus: Stir, stir, stir it up!Mix it up with lots of love.
There's enough for me and you.
We're gonna make some Peace Soup!
Verse 1: Let's start with a little kindness, straight from your heart inside.
Just a little keeps getting stronger, In the soup it'll be just right.
Then add some great big hugs now; so nice and gentle and sweet.
Put your best hug right in please; just sweet enough to eat.
Verse 2: We’ll need all different colors; brown, yellow, black and white.
They’ll work so well together; it’ll be such a beautiful sight.
Always use lots of kind words; show others how much you care.
One by one drop ‘em in the soup now; all over, everywhere.
We Are One Family by Ray Repp
(revised by Ms. Kampa and Ms. Inoue)
We are one family,and Seisen’s our home,
We are one family where love can be known.
We are the voices and we are the hands, for bringing peace to our world.
In grade 1, we have been investigating our second line of inquiry: Reasons people celebrate.
We started with what the children know already. We wrote down on post-it notes some of the reasons for celebrating. Because this connects to the origins of celebrations, one of our key questions has been: What are the origins of different celebrations?
The next step in the learning process was for the girls to sort out some celebrations by putting together celebrations that have similar reasons for celebrating. We asked the students to think of their own titles for celebrations.
The next step was to clarify the reasons for celebrating so we guided the students by giving them the following headers for reasons for celebrating: Stage of Life, Being thankful (showing appreciation), remembering and success.
Now that we have done this we are going to look at the celebrations padlet and see if we can identify these reasons in the posts that you have put up. Thank you so much to all those parents who let their daughters interview them and then posted about an important celebration. If you have not looked at the other posts, have a look now by clicking on the padlet link in the top right hand corner of the blog. We are very impressed how many of the girls revised the posts to put them in more simple English as they are going to be reading each others' posts in class to learn about other celebrations and identify the reasons for celebrations.
As a great way to bring this unit together we are going to end with our own grade 1 celebration with food and music and a chance for the girls to share their learning. We will be contacting you soon about this with more information but in the meantime you can start thinking of a dish from your country that you could make and share with the students.
In PE lessons 1A have been learning throwing and kicking skills through a range of target games.
These include:
- underhand throws of balls, bean bags and rubber rings into targets, buckets and cones;
- rolling a big ball to knock over the bowling pins and play ten pin bowling with friends;
- throwing balls and frisbees to targets such as basketball rings and hoops on the floor;
- kicking an indoor soccer ball into a goal and playing as the goalkeeper.
1A enjoying the bean bag bucket challenge
These activities are allowing the girls to learn new throwing and kicking skills and techniques that they will use throughout their lives. However, they are also learning how to share equipment and compete with and against their classmates, developing friendly rivalries and competitive spirit without causing conflict (for the most part!). The Grade 1 PE students will begin the Striking & Fielding and Kicking Skills units soon, so watch this space for more updates!
This week the Grade 1 students have been coming to the end of our 2D shapes unit. As a fun way for the students to document what they know about 2D shapes so far, the students used an app called "Duck Duck Moose" or "Chatterpix" where they can take a photo, draw a mouth on a picture and then record themselves talking. Mr Towse came and helped us work with the iPad and refresh our memories on how to use this app, as many of the girls had used this before in Kindergarten.
For this activity, the steps for success were to include:
the name of the shape
how many sides and vertices (corners)
if it has any lines of symmetry
what this shape might look like in the real world and
any other shapes that might be similar to that shape.
Have a look below at the videos that the students in 1A produced. I hope you enjoy them!
by May and Emi P
by Juri, Sarah and Nina
by Emi H and Jussica
by Natsuki and Luna
by Maiko and Dru
by Anastasia and Aoba
by Matilde and Lena
by Mio and Erica
We hope you enjoyed watching these 2D shape videos using the app "Chatterpix." Please leave a comment below!
