As you may know, we've developed a good friendship with Mrs. Frazier's class from Ohio over the last month or so over Twitter. This class has been very helpful to us in our learning and we've enjoyed sharing our ideas and inquiries with them as well! One Saturday, Ms. Alison and Mrs. Frazier got to talking (at 12 noon in Singapore and 12 midnight in Ohio!). They knew how many favourite books all of the students have and thought about how great it would be to share some book recommendations. Mrs. Frazier's class got us started with a VoiceThread full of incredible suggestions! Over the past week we have been listening and re-listening to their advice, searching for and reading these books, and responding to them on the Thread. We also made our own VoiceThread for their class with our recommendations. We look forward to them listening to the Thread and leaving us comments about our book suggestions here on the blog!
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For the last few weeks we've been exploring a new central idea under the transdisciplinary theme "Where we are in place and time": Places in communities help people connect and change over time. Our lines of inquiry are:
As a "Tuning In" or "Invitation" activity we thought about the places we know from our own neighbourhoods in Singapore and our home countries. We made made big lists of as many places as we could think of. We then explored maps, as well as map books and atlases to see if we could gather any other ideas about the different places in communities. Once we were finished, we each had our own individual list of places in communities. But how did our own lists compare to the lists of our friends? Had we listed the same places? Were there some things we had not thought of? Were all of the things we listed actually places in communities?
To answer these questions, we made a HUGE list of all the different things from our own lists. We cut out the different ideas and decided to sort them into categories: public place, private place, a bit of both, or neither. This was a variation on the "Trash or Treasure" thinking routine that we had done before. We used the FORM concept key to unlock our thinking about what private and public places in communities are like. We quickly started to see some patterns. For example, we discovered that public spaces are shared spaces. Everyone can go to them, but sometimes you need to buy a ticket, make a booking, or pay a little bit of money. Sometimes these place are open and sometimes they're closed. As we progressed through the activity, we also started to realize that some of the places we wrote down on our original lists were not actually places at all! Instead, they were ways we get around communities, including taxis, buses, and trains, so we created another sorting category. We all demonstrated very strong thinking skills during our sorting work, as well as an ability to revise our previous thinking. We learned a lot from sharing our ideas and reflecting as a group! The theories and information that developed out of this activity have been very useful to our investigations and inquiries as we continue with the unit. What a fun day we had on Friday at the Elementary School Swim Gala! We felt lucky to be in the water on such a hot Singapore day and were thankful to all the mummies and daddies who came to support us in the heat! Thanks too to Mr. Nathan and Mr. Keef for all of their organization. We loved showing our swimming skills off at all the exciting stations! We're already looking forward to next year! A video of Swim Gala is now available on the ISS Phys Ed website. CLICK HERE to see it. Thanks to Mr. Vic for his great camera skills! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday dear Jack! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to Jack D who turns 7 today! We celebrated Jack's special day by singing "Happy birthday" and digging into some delicious cupcakes. Did we mention they were army-style? Thanks for the special treat! We hope you have a great birthday weekend! Love Grade 1AC We'd been waiting a long time to go on our Forest Adventure field trip. When we were first supposed to go, there was a HUGE thunder storm that kept us at school, so we rescheduled for May 2 and started counting down the days! Our high ropes course adventure was connected to our unit of inquiry about peace and conflict, during which we investigated how we can help each other through personal conflict. To prepare for the trip, we read the books Courage by Bernard Waber and Ish by Peter Reynolds. They both have themes of supporting other people when we don't feel brave or confident. In Ish, Marisol compliments and encourages her brothers art work that he thinks is not very good. The last page of the story Courage says "Courage is what we give to each other". So we discussed: How can we give someone courage?
We put these and other strategies to use to encourage each other to take big risks on the high ropes. Congratulations to everyone in Grade 1AC for supporting their friends through their fears, problem-solving, and decision-making. Well done! Today Grade 1AC participated in Chalk-a-Bration Day. This is a special event thought up by the author of the blog Teaching Young Writers in the United States. She had the bright idea of inviting people to join her in celebrating poetry by writing it with chalk. Our friends from Mrs. Frazier's class in Ohio first found this event and us the link and idea over Twitter. Earlier this month we became interested in a particular kind of poem called Haikus because of a slideshow app we use on the ipad called 'Haiku Deck'. Of course lots of students had questions about exactly what a Haiku was, so we investigated and found out. We even shared our discoveries with Mrs. Frazier's class on Twitter. They suggested a book we might like to read called Guyku which is full of Haiku's! We were so excited when one of the authors, Peter H. Reynolds, joined our conversation. How exciting! And so it was decided! We were so inspired by the ideas of all of these wonderful people that we joined the Chalk-a-Bration and focused on Haikus. We wrote our Haikus in small groups and were surprised to find out that we even needed to use our maths skills! Haikus have only 17 syllables. No more and no less. Many of us used number lines and our subtraction and counting-on skills and strategies to make sure our Haikus had exactly the right number of syllables. Once we finished our Haikus in the classroom we headed outside. It was time for chalk! We hope you enjoy our Haikus! If this butterfly could talk it would say Let's fly up in the garden. By: Scarlett, Quinn, Maryam, Sanjita & Min Jae If the clock strikes 12, Then I will turn to a wolf. I will eat people. By: Chloe, Jack D, Sofia & Hana M It is sunny and the horses are racing on the grass. It is nice. By: Jack B, Andy, Evangelina & Hana T Once there was a poor little puppy who saw a cat and ran away. By: Bailey, Jakob, Esther R, Filippa & Miri The IB Primary Years' Programme has an action cycle that goes like this: Reflect-Choose-Act, repeat. Units in the transdisciplinary theme 'Sharing the Planet' are always a good place to put this to use -- especially in the younger grades. Over the course of our inquiry into peaceful solutions to conflict we thought a lot about personal responsibility and action. We reflected continuously on what role we could play in creating a more peaceful life for ourselves and the people around us. Paulie Pastrami taught us that our actions don't need to be enormous and that a little thoughtfulness and kindness can create a lot of change. When we reflected on the book we decided that one of the most important things we can do is to try to make other people happy and that by doing this we make ourselves happy too. This connected to what we discovered when we represented peace with artifacts: Feeling at peace usually means feeling happy! So we thought and we thought, and throughout our unit collected lots of ideas about how we can create more peace in the world around us. We made personal action plans, which answered the questions: How can we create more peace and less conflict in our lives? What action can we take?
We included these and some other ideas on a graffiti board for our classroom wall: We also tried out some of our peaceful solutions through role play by trying to solve real life conflicts that we'd drawn and written about at the beginning of the unit: Since our discussions in class we've been putting our strategies and ideas to use in real conflicts we've had in the classroom and playground. Most of all we're practicing more listening and forgiveness. We hope to continue to take action so that our own lives and the lives of people around us can be more peaceful.
In Monday, April 22 people around the world celebrated Earth Day. At ISS we were lucky to continue our celebrations for a whole week! As many students pointed out though, Earth Day is not just about one day or one week. It's about taking the time to reflect on our actions and be thankful for all of the wonderful things our planet provides. To help us reflect, we read some books, made Earth Day pledges, and asked our friends on Twitter what they knew about Earth Day. To see the bright ideas from our class discussion about Earth Day, click on the file below:
One of the questions that came out of our discussion was whether or not everyone celebrated Earth Day, so we asked our friends from Mrs. Frazier's class in Ohio, USA. They gave us the clever idea to go on a Nature Walk, so we did that afternoon. We each took a photo of our walk and sent them over Twitter. The next morning we found a wonderful surprise! Mrs. Frazier's class had included our Nature Walk photos and their Nature Walk photos in a VoiceThread slideshow! Since then, a Grade 2 class from Maine has also shared their Nature Walk pictures. We had lots of fun finding the similarities and differences between them. Click here to see them for yourself! Thanks to the great organization of Kindergarten 2, we also had the opportunity to make promises to take action for our planet, which we included on the Elementary School Earth Day Pledge Tree:
Throughout our Sharing the Planet unit of inquiry, we've been working on representing peace. Many of us know the word, but explaining exactly what it is provided quite a challenge. We jumpstarted our thinking by bringing in artifacts from home that represent peace for us. We spoke from our own perspectives and connected around ideas and feelings like happiness, safety, comfort, cooperation, and quiet. We also completed one of our Harvard Project Zero Visible Thinking Routines called 'Colour-Symbol-Image'. This helped us to refine and compare some of our ideas. We also contrasted this work with a 'Colour-Symbol-Image' we'd done for the word CONFLICT. Once we'd had an opportunity to express our own ideas with colours, drawings, stories, and artifacts, we considered some other children's perspectives with the book What Does Peace Feel Like? by Vladimir Radunsky. We used our five senses and discussed what other children around the world think peace looks like, sounds like, smells like, tastes like, and feels like. Many of us wrote a response in our Feelings Journals about what peace feels like to us. What do you think peace means? We love writing in Grade 1AC...especially letters! After reading a portion of The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss, we decided to write a persuasive letter to the Zooks and Yooks to convince them to stop their conflict and find a peaceful solution. We had lots of ideas and many of us were able to write them down quite quickly and independently. When we re-read our letters though, we realized that they were good, but could use some improvement. The next day, we used our Editing Hands to check our work. We checked for spaces between words and letters, correct spelling, punctuation (including full stops, exclamation points, and question marks), and capital and lower case letters. We used a coloured pencil to show where changes needed to be made. The next day we worked as a class to make more edits to a letter written by Ms. Alison. We focused on the Six Traits of Writing 'Sentence Fluency' and 'Word Choice'. We ask questions like: Did I use sentences? Do my sentences begin in different ways? Does my paper sound smooth as I listen to it? Have I used any new words? Did I try not to repeat words too many times? We highlighted the first words in the sentences and realized they all started the exact same way! Not only the first word was the same, but there were FOUR words exactly the same! As a group, we collected idea about how we could change our sentences. The day after we revisited our own work. We worked in small groups to check our Sentence Fluency and Word Choice by asking the same questions. We highlighted the beginning words in sentences to check if they were the same. If we saw too much repetition, we thought of new ways to write our ideas.
Finally we were ready to publish our work. This means writing a final copy! We worked hard to use all of our editing ideas to make changes. After reading our work again we realized that we'd made some huge improvements! Check out some examples of our work from the beginning to the end of the process: |
Grade 1ACWe are a group of Grade 1 students at the ISS International School in Singapore. Our teacher is Ms. Alison. Take a look at how much we're growing and learning! VisitorsWhat's happening in PE?What's happening in Art?What's our Principal up to?What's happening in Literacy?Grade 1 Classes We Follow:Ms. Cassidy's Class (Moose Jaw, Canada)
Mr. David Bullio's Class (Tokyo, Japan) Mrs. Frazier's Class (Ohio, USA) Archives
August 2013
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