After we finished these neighbourhoods we used them to play a partner game back in class called "I'm Lost!". In this game, one person chooses two places on the map of their partner and asks how to get from here to there. We wrote our questions and answers using pencil and paper and some people recorded their conversations using Fotobabble. Here are some examples:
We'd been working so hard on making group decisions in our class community structure, that it was time to take a rest and just let our own ideas flow. We collaborated with Mr. Gallagher in the IT lab to represent these ideas by making a neighbourhood on Kidspiration. We used our notes from class about which features and places of communities we thought were important to inspire some ideas. After we finished these neighbourhoods we used them to play a partner game back in class called "I'm Lost!". In this game, one person chooses two places on the map of their partner and asks how to get from here to there. We wrote our questions and answers using pencil and paper and some people recorded their conversations using Fotobabble. Here are some examples:
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As we were building our community, some people started to use shape names and vocabulary to describe the pieces and structures they were talking about. This lead us to a discussion about the FORM of 2D and 3D shapes: I then asked the students to spend some time studying the shapes in our community and record some of their observations in answer to the question "What shapes do you notice in our community?". We used the I Used to Think/Now I Think visible thinking routine to record our initial thoughts. We then We knew that Grade 3 had been learning about 3D shapes earlier in the semester, so we also tweeted our friends in 3SS some questions to see if they could teach us anything new. We noticed that they were really knowledgeable about shape names and features...especially complicated ones like hexagonal prisms!! One of our learning centres also asked us to record our ideas about the FORM of 3D shapes. We did this using one of our favourite web tools called "Popplet". We made comparisons to real-world objects and described the features of the shapes using words like 'sides' and 'corners'. We also had an opportunity to record our perspectives on the shapes in our community using the ipad. We photographed the structures and made notes about their shapes and features using the app Skitch. After about an hour in these learning centres we returned to our thinking routine to see if we'd learned anything new. We completed the "Now I think" section of our work page, as also noted some Aha Moments and Seeds of Thought. The next day we shared our learning with our Grade 4 buddies. They were very impressed with how knowledgeable we were! 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've been testing our addition skills and challenging our thinking with the Magic Square. Can you do it? Get a deck of cards and keep only the Aces, 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, 7s, 8s, and 9s. Arrange the cards in three row of three. Keep trading and switching out the cards until each row (horizontally, vertically, AND diagonally!) adds up to 15. Our Grade 4 buddies have been investigating the brain and learning as part of their current unit of inquiry. Mr. Burden and Ms. Alison thought it would be interesting to see how they might use their knowledge to teach us Grade 1s something about our maths focus on number sense. Ms. Alison gave one question to prompt our buddies: 8 + ? = 14 From here our buddies had to use their own strategies and materials from the classroom to teach us about this concept. As an added challenge, they did their best to differentiate and extend the learning for each unique and individual person in our class. Here are some of our reflections on what we learned from our buddies:
In our new unit of maths, we'll be working on concepts such as composing numbers with 2 or 3 addends and solving addition and subtraction problems. As always we'll be discussing different strategies and approaches as we engage with investigations and activities. We believe it is important for children to solve math problems accurately in ways that make sense to them. Our unit will address the following goals:
We've gained a lot of knowledge about measurement over the last few weeks! We know how to compare lengths, heights, weight, and capacity using words like "longer", "shorter", "taller", "heavier, "lighter", "full", and "empty". We also have discovered how to use centimeter rulers and tapes to measure lengths and heights accurately. We've been putting our new knowledge to use inside and outside the classroom. We've been documenting our measurements and comparisons using pencils, paper, whiteboards, markers, and the ipad app Skitch. Take a look at what we've been up to! As part of our inquiries into growth and measurement, we've been thinking about concepts like change, bigger/smaller, longer/shorter, and distance and length. At home, we traced our own feet and our mum's (or dad's) feet. We brought the cutouts to school and compared them to each other and with our friends' feet. We even compared them to a basketball player's footprint, which was huge! To practice our measurement skills, we used all of the feet as non-standard measurement tools to find the lengths of various pieces of tape around the room. We developed strategies for measuring and identified common errors, like leaving gaps between the objects used to measure, not keeping the objects straight, and not starting at the beginning of the line. We also thought about how the number of steps it took to measure the line was connected to how short or long the feet we used to measure were. Thanks to our parents for letting us use their feet! As part of our data management unit, we've been learning how to conduct surveys. We read Would you rather by a Bullfrog? to learn more about the difference between open and closed questions. We discovered that closed questions have only a few possible answers and that any answer is possible for open questions. When conducting surveys, we should only use closed questions. Some ways to start a closed question are:
Have you ever been fishing? If you have, you know that there are certain rules about the fish that you can catch and keep. For example, you can't keep a baby fish. You can tell if a fish is a baby or a grown-up fish by measuring how long it is. When a fish is long enough to keep it's called a "keeper". Before we started measuring fish, we read a story about a girl called Kim. She had been fishing and caught a perch. She was trying to measure the fish with inch tiles to see if it was long enough to keep. The problem was that she kept getting different measurements. The first time Kim measured the fish, she found that it was 6 tiles long. The second time she measured it, she found that it was 8 tiles long. The third time she measured it, she found that it was 5 tiles long. The fourth time she measured it, she found that it was 4 tiles long. Every time she tried to check her measurements she got a different answer! We tried to help Kim figure out what she was doing wrong. 1st Attempt: 6 tiles long
2nd Attempt: 8 tiles long
3rd Attempt: 5 tiles long
4th Attempt: 4 tiles long
We then tried to measure Kim's fish ourselves. Even we got some different answers! Using photographs of our measurements on the ipad, we compared our strategies. We decided on some important measuring techniques that can help us to always get an accurate answer:
Finally, we measured some of our own fish to decide if they were keepers or not.
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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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