1B Wraps up their first year in ES Physical Education!!

Head into the summer with a few useful tips:

1). Stay active! Get outside and move!

2). Rest and relax! 

3). Have fun!! 

Have a great summer everyone and great job this year! 

Summer Reading

       Summer Reading Lists

Inspired by Animals? Of Course!

Animals have inspired many composers and choreographers.  By exploring animals through creative dance concepts, students improvised dances.

Concepts we explored were:
ENERGY
FORCE:  powerful or delicate
TIME/ TEMPO:  unhurried (adagio)  or quick (allegro)
FLOW:  staccato/ detached  or legato/smooth/ flowing

SPACE
LEVELS: low, middle, high
PATHWAYS: straight, curved, zigzag

Students danced to "Olympic Fanfare" using unhurried and quick movements.  They became giants and fairies in "Cross Dance."

Students explored the various movements of mini-beasts.  They analyzed the movements of six different mini-beasts, and organized them to give variety to their dance piece.

Photos and videos will follow.

Students have been listening to pieces from Camille Saint-Saens "Carnival of the Animals." Saint-Saens wrote humorous compositions about various animals. Your daughter can listen to the entire piece here.

 Using the dance language above, they were able to describe how they could move to each of the varied movements.

Visiting Nakamachi Day Home for St. Raphaela Day

Today, Friday 19th May we celebrated St. Raphaela's Day, the founder of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and patron saint of our Seisen Sisters, with a day of service. 

As part of this service the grade 1 students visited the Nakamachi Day Home in Yōga and sang, danced and performed songs to entertain the senior citizens that visit the home.  May and Mio are to be commended on being such brave risk takers, performing solos on the piano and violin.  They both gave amazing performances and blew the teachers away with their skill level. After the fantastic performances the girls then chatted and made origami with the senior citizens.  The girls are to be congratulated on how polite and friendly they were with the elderly at the Nakamachi Day Home.  I am sure they brightened the days of many of the visitors to the centre.  

Amazing, Extraordinary Homemade Instruments

Lots of things have been happening in our Grade One music classes.  We just realized that you haven't had a chance to look at these beautiful instruments made by Grade One in their last unit of inquiry.

If you looked around the Grade One classrooms, you could find many examples of amazing, extraordinary homemade instruments!

The most popular instrument groups were shakers and strings.  A few students, however, made drums, scrapers, metals, wind instruments and barred instruments.  They had a chance to talk about how they made their instruments and created a short "sound carpet" to tell a story about the cherry blossoms.

Here are just examples of the students sharing their stories. I'm sure that they'll have fun creating more instruments throughout their summer holidays.

Sports Day and First Grade leading Mass

Dear Parents,

We had a busy week in grade 1.

On Tuesday, we had our elementary sports day. You can see what kind of a day we had by going to:

http://www.seisen.com/student-life

There are many outstanding photos from this day and should be able to find your daughter by logging into the secure portal on the Seisen website under the "Galleries" page. Go to ES Sports Day Photo Gallery. The link to get there is: http://www.seisen.com/student-portal/photo-galleries. If you do not know how to login to the parent portal, there are instructions at the bottom of this email.

On Thursday, the students led their first mass of the year. You can see some wonderful photos here: https://goo.gl/photos/MeGoQkPdbRvBtyCz5

Coming up next Friday is St. Raphaela Day. Here is a quick video of what the day is about. 

https://youtu.be/Mxq6Gy27NGg

Many thanks to Mr Brittain for the photos and videos from this week. They will leave you with wonderful memories!

Instructions for Parent to Log in to the Secure Portal

All Seisen parents can access both the "Parents" and "Students" portal of the Seisen website using the e-mail address registered with the school.

If you are logging in for the first time this year:

1. Go to www.seisen.com
2. Click on the "Parents" button at the top of the page
3. Click on the "Forgot Username or Password" at the bottom
4. Enter the email address you have registered with the Records Office
5. Open the email notification sent to you
6. Enter a new password that will be easy for you to remember
7. Allow your browser to remember your password
8. http://www.seisen.com/student-portal/photo-galleries
9. Email the Records office with any problems skim@seisen.com

If you have already set up your password on the new website since February and your browser has your password saved, you should be able to enter directly using the link to the photo galleries. http://www.seisen.com/student-portal/photo-galleries

Sharing about our family history in our summative assessment

This week was our last week learning and investigating in our "Where We Are in Place and Time" unit.

We were very grateful to have several parents come and visit the grade 1 students and share about their family history and the reasons why have chosen an international education at Seisen for their daughters.  

 

Here is Mirai's Dad sharing talking to the grade 1 students about his time in Perth Australia and how this time spent abroad has now influenced his family in the future. 

Special thanks to Mirai's Dad, Emi Plackman's Mum, Nina Fuji's Mum, Riana's Mum and Dad and Jian's Mum for generously sharing their family stories with both classes. 

To demonstrate the learning that has taken place over the unit, the students completed a summative assessment this week where they made a book documenting important events from their family history (before they were born) and important events from their own lives.  They then shared these along with their family trees/mind maps and photos with their grade 1 peers.

Below is a copy of the SOLO rubric the students used when creating their family history booklet and before presenting to the other grade 1 class. 

Below are some of pages out of students' history books where they identified important events from the past. 

Sara K explains an important event from her life. 

Emi P explains an important event from her family's history before she was born. 

This is an important event to Emi because her "dad was a teenager and he was learning to talk Japanese and he met my mum."

Juri explains an important event from her life, when her uncle passed away. 

The grade 1 girls did a great job confidently sharing what they knew and had learnt about their family history over this unit.  

Our new unit of inquiry is Sharing the Planet where we will be learning about Living Things. 

Researching Significant Events

This week, the students were learning about significant events as part of our unit of inquiry. We used the word important instead of significant as it was easier for the students to understand. Before the students decide what events are important in their life, we thought it would help them to ask other teachers in the school.

So first the students thought of three questions to ask the teachers:

- What was an important event in your life when you were little?

- What is an important memory from your life? Why is it important?

- Is there something that happened before you were born that changed your life?

The last question is especially important for our central idea which is 'Learning about previous generations can help us understand the relationship between past and present.'

The students were then split into groups and went around the school to interview teachers and staff members.

Here are the interviews! When you watch these, you can reflect on your own life or your parents life to see how similar or different your own experiences were.

Ms Mai was interviewed by Evelyn, Mio, Rianna, and Sophie

Ms Ciara was interviewed by Matilde, Ellen, Maiko and Fiona

Mr Brittain was interviewed by Luna, Lana, Erika and Junhee

Ms Brittany was interviewed by Dru, Emma, Aoba and Mao

Mr Carrol was interviewed by Lena, Sara, Hannah and Sadhika

Ms Mina was interviewed by Yuna, Anastasia, Luna, Natalee and Nina

Ms Ingrid was interviewed by Netsuke, Mirai, Emi P and May

Ms Mariko was interviewed by Juri, Ayane, Mauru and Jian. 

Please turn your head to the side to watch this clip!

Looking at Toys from the Past at the Toy Museum

On Tuesday this week the Grade 1 students went on a field trip to visit Tokyo's Toy Museum. The purpose of our trip was to look and play with some toys from the past and inquire into how and why these toys are different to those we have today.

We began the day by participating in a craft session where the girls made a simple "jack in the box" out of materials that most homes would have, such as; cups, straws, plastic bags and markers. The girls had a great time making these and I am sure you enjoyed seeing them Tuesday afternoon.

The girls then had a chance to play and look at many toys from the past and participated in a mini lecture from one of the educators at the Toy Museum.

During our stay at the Tokyo Toy Museum we found out that the building used to be an old school and there were many photos of what the building and the school used to be like.  We used these photos later this week as a source of investigation into how school life has changed over time.  The girls have all expressed that school seems like much more fun now than in the past! 

Learning to tell the Time...

How did you learn to tell the time? Can you still remember?

Here is the central idea and lines of inquiry of our current mathematics unit:

Many teachers and parents teach their children the time using an analogue clock face with two hands but an analogue clock face has too many dials, too many hands and seems to offer too much information. The secret to this is to break up the learning into smaller chunks, which is what we did in grade 1.

First we learned about clockwise movement, then we learned how the hour hand works on its own. We learned how you can tell the time with only the hour hand! This stage takes a lot of practice and you can't move on to two hands if you are not confident to tell the time with the hour hand on its own.

Then we learned how useful an extra hand is to tell us the time more accurately so we can know how many minutes past the hour it is.

We were now ready to make our own clocks!

The clocks that we made have some special features. The hours and hour hand are shown in red. Can you spot them?

The minute hand and minutes are shown in blue. Can you spot them?

It was a big surprise for some of the students to find out that the minutes are actually on the outside of the clock and that people who can tell the time have to imagine the digits because they are not actually shown!!!!!!

Now we are ready to learn to tell the time with two clock hands and if you come to our learning celebration next week, you will see how we are getting along with that!

Learning about Multiplication in Grade 1

Over the past couple of weeks the Grade 1 students have been learning about equal groups and Multiplication in their Maths sessions.

We have inquired into whether the groups must be equal and the various strategies they can use to solve number stories that involve multiplication.  We also spent time learning about the symbols and what they mean in a number sentence such as 5 x 3 = 15 ... 5 groups of 3 is 15.  Most recently we looked at arrays (columns and rows) as a way to represent a multiplication problem.


Students were given images of real life arrays and asked to think about a multiplication sentence to match it.  They were challenged to think - can this be written another way?

Juri and Sara K look at the delicious chocolate block array and think about how this could be written as a number sentence. 

We begin each lesson with clear Learning Intention (which the children love to read aloud).  For this lesson we also had a focus on skills too "How Can I present my work in a way that is easy to understand?" The Steps to Success are there for students to refer to for extra guidance when working independently or with their group. 

The children worked in groups to solve open-ended problems with equal groups.  They began the session with an investigation question and during our share time at the end thought about what their learning for the session was. 

During our investigations we worked together to think about what the symbols and numbers mean in a multiplication sentence. 




In this session instead of being given the array, the girls were given a number and had to try and think of as many different arrays they could make for the number. 


In the next few weeks we will revise over what we know about equal groups again but through the area of division. 

How are longer and shorter shadows made?

This week we finished our science unit: How the World Works. Our investigation questions was: How are longer and shorter shadows made? 

We took the students outside and measured the length of their shadows in the morning at 10am and at 13:30.

So that the test was fair, we used the same student in each group both times that we went outside. This way we could tell if the shadow had changed in size or not.

Here you can see the students drawing around their shadows.

When we came back later in the day, the girls were very surprised to find that not only was their shadow shorter but that it had changed direction! 

Can you identify the following shadows that belong to: Hannah, Miki, Ellen, Mirai, Julia, Jun Hee, Lana, Sadhika?

They noticed that the sun was higher in the sky, which made the shadows shorter. The strange thing was however that a few of the shadows didn't get shorter and were the same or even longer. Then we realised that the test had not been completely fair as some of them had not measured accurately or drawn around the head and feet carefully enough!!

Back in class, we used a torch and pencil to re-create the experiment. We could clearly see that when the sun (or torch) is low, that a long shadow is created and when the sun is higher in the sky a shorter shadow is created. 

Can you show your parents this at home?

Dr. Dallaire's Wind Extravanganza

On Tuesday Grade One students took a "field trip" to the Music Room at Seisen.  They were treated to a special lesson by Dr. Dallaire, one of our high school music teachers. 

Dr. Dallaire teaches the students about the trombone. 

 Students learned about the tuba, trombone, trumpet, clarinet, flute, and piccolo.  Dr. Dallaire showed students how air creates vibrations.  

In order to make a beautiful sound, instruments must produce vibrations.   He also showed students how to change the length of the air column to make a sound/pitch higher or lower.  

Dr. Dallaire shows students how the valves on the tuba make the air columns longer or shorter.  The tuba is the biggest wind instrument in the brass family.

The trumpet is the smallest brass instrument. It has the smallest mouthpiece too.  When Dr. Dallaire "buzzed" in the mouthpiece, he created a sound.

The clarinet is a woodwind instrument. Clarinets use a reed to create sound. The reed vibrates when the air passes by.

Students felt the air as it moves from the mouthpiece and end of the flute.

 The piccolo is the smallest wind instrument.  Students heard how its sound was the highest of all of the instruments.

Can you make a sound by blowing air into something?

Students will continue to explore how sounds are made and changed.  At the end of this unit, they will create their own, amazing instruments.  You might start brainstorming about interesting ways to create instruments.