Have you ever read the book The Little House? It's an absolutely beautiful story about the changes that a house and community go through from day to night, season to season, and eventually over years and years of time. 

We used the CHANGE and CAUSATION concept keys to unlock our thinking and discuss some of the changes we observed in the story and what may have been the reasons for them: 

We also learned how to show change over time by making a timeline: 

We enjoyed this activity so much that we then created our own individual timelines about our community using our imaginations about what it may have been like in the past and might be like in the future. We used these individual timelines as ideas for story writing. 

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!

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 

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: 

All year we've been working on building our writing skills with the "6 traits of Writing". Last semester we practiced Idea Development and Organization and this semester we've started learning about Voice. 

So far we understand that our writing voices express our personalities. We also know that the words we choose can show readers who we are. 

We started by reading each other's 'Dear Friends' letters and making guesses about whose voices we were reading. We also read Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Connor and made a list of all the words Nancy uses to express her personality:

• fuchsia 
• plume
• sprinkles
• tiara
• stupendous
• accessories 
• posh
• chauffeur 
• "merci" (thank you in French!) 

Since last week we've been very busy with a wonderful new website we found called "Africam" which lets us view live wild animals in their natural habitats. 

We leave the cameras on the computer all day for viewing. When we see an animal we record the date and time of our observation, including information about what the animal looks like and what it is doing. 

Check out the cameras at home by clicking HERE!   

For the investigation portion of our unit of inquiry we dug a little deeper into the changes food products go through. We brought in food containers from home and learned how to scan, skim, and read labels to find important information like ingredients, cooking instructions, and where the food was grown or processed. We represented our findings by attaching the containers to a world map and comparing the countries our food comes from with bar graphs. We used an online programme called Popplet to demonstrate our understanding of what food products can be produced from plants and animals like wheat and cows. Finally we worked in small groups to address our remaining "seeds of thought". These included questions like: What is the difference between corn and wheat? Do different fruits and vegetables come from different trees? How do we get rice from those green fields? Children did an exceptional job of communicating and collaborating in small groups using books, the internet and each other to create flow charts which answered their questions. 

We have been studying how to represent food processing and distribution using flow charts. To practice this new skill we started by reading the story Sticky Jam: The Story of Sugar. After orally retelling the story, we sequenced the story as a whole class using pages from the book. We then worked independently to retell the story using flow charts, being sure to separate each event using arrows. 

For many of us the story also filled in a gap in our knowledge. It helped us to understand how transportation is a part of food distribution. We now understand that trucks, boats, planes, and trains can all be a part of food getting to us. 

Documenting existing theories  is an important task at the beginning of every unit. In preparation for our visit to the dairy farm, this time our minds were on milk. 

Ms. Alison showed the class a carton of milk and poured herself a glass. She asked where they think the milk came from and how it had gotten to her.

Children documented their ideas independently through drawing and writing. 

Last week we read The Magic Paintbrush by Julia Donaldson, which tells the story of a girl named Shen who is given a magic paintbrush. As a whole class and in small groups we sorted out the most important parts of the book and retold them through drama. We used the props, costumes, and fabric available in the Imagination Station, as well as some items for home to help us communicate the story.