We finally met our parents at the picnic spot after a very long (and accidental!) walk. We were so happy to share this exciting morning with them. We played on the adventure playground, ate delicious food, reflected on our year, and share holiday plans and stories. It was a beautiful way to celebrate our great year. We hope you had fun!!
This week we visited the Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park to celebrate our wonderful year together. As we walked through the park to get to our picnic spot, the students were able to make many great connections to our 'Where we are in place and time unit'. They observed and commented on how all sorts of different people were using and the park, and in different ways! We saw people jogging, doing yoga and stretches, walking their dogs, playing on playgrounds, working to clean the ponds, doing team activities as school groups, and even filming a movie! We finally met our parents at the picnic spot after a very long (and accidental!) walk. We were so happy to share this exciting morning with them. We played on the adventure playground, ate delicious food, reflected on our year, and share holiday plans and stories. It was a beautiful way to celebrate our great year. We hope you had fun!!
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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. 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: 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! For three weeks now we've been building a community right in the middle of our classroom! We've have made decisions as a group and made additions and changes to the structure as our thinking has evolved. One of our favourite additions was mini versions of ourselves! The community we have now represents our combined thoughts as a class and over time about what places and features are important in a community and how they fit together. We've loved using our community as an inspiration for story writing and maths work. We hope you like it! 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. 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! 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.
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? Representation is the part of our inquiry when we start to discuss in depth how we can share what we have learned. We focus on the ways we can document our processes, ideas, theories, transformations, and understandings and make them visible to other people. We were lucky enough to have our yearly assembly presentation scheduled right around the time we were ready to start representing our learning. We considered our audience (Kindergarten 1 to Grade 5 students, parents, and teachers) and decided that the most significant thing we could represent was the types of conflicts that occur for students at our school and how they can resolve them with peaceful solutions. We had lots of class discussions about exactly what this would look like and decided that "role play" was the best way to show what we wanted to express. Together we wrote a script and started practicing! If you're interested, you can read our script here:
We think we did a great job of representing our learning and teaching the school how they can handle their conflicts. What do you think? We even inspired Aina M. in K1PA to create a puppet show using ideas from our performance. She showed two characters having a conflict over what game to play and finding a peaceful solution by choosing to play both games together...just like we did with tag and ball! Check out Aina's performance by clicking here.
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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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