Hello all G1B parents. This weebly will be a smaller than most as I was absent for the whole week. I even missed International Children's Day which disappointed me as I wanted to see everyone's awesome costumes and presentations. Ms Sophia has told me that she took a lot over the course of Friday so I will have them up as soon as I get back! We started our unit on addition up to 10 this week and mainly concentrated on the strategy of 'counting on'. This requires students to start at the first number then 'count on' the addition. For example: 4+3, (start at 4 then add three more) 4 5,6,7 . We looked at using physical objects and number lines (which are kind of like rulers.) The student also looked at the cumulative property of addition, where is does not matter which order you add the number in, you will arrive at the same answer. 4+3 is 7 and 3+4 is 7. We are encouraging the students to start counting on from the larger number though, just for the sake of speed. For writing this week we looked at editing our work using editing marks. For grade 1 they will be mainly looking at capital letters, end marks and spelling with indentation later on the year. The students revised their work and then began to spot mistakes and correcting them. Next week they will have writing conferences with me to finalise everything then publish their work! I am very cranky at missing reading this week as it was 2 of my favourite lessons! We looked at 2 of the 3 ways to read with a partner. First we looked at reading a book to someone. The main focus was to know the book you are going to read beforehand and make sure it is interesting. Students were also encouraged to use their 'storytelling' voice to keep their partner entertained. The next lesson was about taking turns to read. Although this could be easily though to 'read one page/paragraph at a time', the students were encouraged to read some of our 'Elephant and Piggie' books by Mo Willems. These books lend themselves to reading with someone else as they are written as a script (complete with different colour speech bubbles) and the students have a blast when they read them. I look forward to seeing how everyone got on when I get back. We finished our unit of, 'Why do schools have rules?' this week and it got very in depth at the end. We worked on which rules we have in the classroom and why we have them (To help up be safe/get along/learn/be fair.) Students then discussed who decides the rules in different areas (home, school, public.) This led to students learning about democracy and electing a leader to vote on their behalf and talked of the advantages and the disadvantages of this system. Next week we will be visiting the police station to see how they enforce the rules (it's really fun for the students) but I will be also talking with the students how police do their job to help their community and keep us safe (not just guns and shooting bad guys!) We didn't have a prize draw today so I'll get to it when I get back!
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Another short week this week and it seems that a nasty fever is going through the school (I myself have been sick all week.) Please make sure that the students are taking care of themselves and getting enough water and sleep. We still got through a fair bit of work though this week and even managed to get to a new park for lunch! The class schedule is finalised!
Mathematics. We finished our unit on number bonds this week and had our assessment on Friday and there were some areas that the students could use extra work on. While most students were able to find the whole number from parts, they struggled with finding a part from the whole number and part. This showed me that most students understood the concept of addition but will need work with subtraction. To clarify, students were able to figure out 3 and 4 make ____ (7) but struggled with 3 and ___ make 7. Luckily we will be tackling subtraction fairly soon, right after our next unit about addition in fact! Writing. For writing this week, we began our first paragraph using the writing process. We began with the Prewriting sheet, where students think of three ideas they could write about (and making sure that they are good ideas.) We then moved onto the First Draft, where we used Ms. Allison's writing hamburger and got some simple sentences down. Lastly we looked at Revising our sentences to make them more interesting. Not all of the students got all the way through each stage but we will be continuing this next week as well to give students enough time to Edit and Publish their writing. Reading. For reading this week we looked at how to reread a story to find new details. We looked at 'Olivia' by Ian Falconer which we have read before and went through the book looking for new details in both the illustrations and story. We found out that Olivia's brother Ian is actually in most of the illustrations in the background even if he is not mentioned on the page. We also noticed that Ian Falconer likes to use real photo's and picture in his illustration. We also looked at visualising in our heads what is written on the page to help us understand what is happening in the story. For this we looked at the farmers in, 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' by Roald Dahl. We listened to each description of the farmers (without using the pcitures!) and made drawings of what they looked like. On Friday the students were put into their reading partners for the upcoming lessons and we dicussed what would be the best ways for working with a partner during reading time. Social Studies. For social studies we started to our next topic of, 'Why do schools have rules?' We looked at the differences between rules at home, school and in public, who makes the rules in each situation and why we have rules in the first place. We tried to play a ball game with no rules, which wasn't much fun. We found that rules are there for a couple of reasons such as; - They help us keep safe. - They help us get along. - They help us be fair. - They help us learn. The students had a lot of really good discussions about different rules and why they would be in place. I also learned quite a few rules that the students have at their own homes! Prize ticket winner for the week.This week Osuke won the prize draw and chose a gacha gacha toy. Well done Osuke.
It was a very eventful week! We lost a day to the typhoon but we still managed to get through a lot of work! Unfortunately it was a little too hot for us to spend a lot of time outside but we took whatever opportunity we could. We have also had a great response to the mystery readers as well which will be starting next month. Mathematics. We started a new unit on number bonds this week. They are visual constructs that help students to become more flexible with numbers. They usually look like this: Using these, students realise that numbers can be broken down into parts from the whole. This will help them both in addition and subtraction later on in the curriculum. This week we worked on breaking whole numbers into different parts, combining parts to make a whole and working with manipulatives to help students see what they are doing to the numbers when they are broken up. We will continue looking at number bonds next week with the assessment for the unit to be conducted at the end of the week. Writing. This week in writing we looked at writing traits. These match up with the stages of the writing process we will be using later on. This week we looked at making sure our writing has good ideas and organisation (sentence structure). We looked at brainstorming some words about the typhoon on Monday, completing an ideas spider (a mind map) and then starting to write sentences based on the ideas that came up. The two steps reflect the planning and drafting stages of the writing process that the students will be using. We also spent some time on Keeping It Simple Silly (KISS) to help students organise their thoughts succinctly. We covered some handwriting this week as well, looking at G and g, Q and q. Reading. We looked at three different skills in reading lessons this week. We began the week by outlining some rules to help improve our reading stamina (the amount of time the students can read silently before the fidgets set in!) We came up with these guidelines: - Don't Talk - Worry about yourself - Find a comfortable spot - Concentrate -Choose interesting books. The last one us the most important and we spent a bit of time finding out how to choose a book that would interest us rather than just looking at the cover. Thanks to these rules we managed to get up to 15 minutes of silent reading on Wednesday! We also looked at refocusing ourselves if we make a mistake by rereading from the beginning of a sentence or paragraph. Lastly we looked at using a storytelling voice to make others interested in the book we are reading. Social Studies. This week we looked at why it is important to learn from others. We began by looking at the differences we have in the class and how we are all different to each other. We also looked at how we are special and what makes us one of a kind. Lastly we wrapped up by looking at what we could teach other people to do and which other people could help teach us things as well. We didn't have enough time this week to get all the way through the unit, so next week we will continue and make a new display for outside the classroom! Prize box winner! This week Taishi won the prize draw and opted to take home a mystery 'gacha' toy that Mr. Ivan donated to us. Very well done Taishi!
It was a busy week as we started a lot of the curriculum units for most subjects. We also had to get used to our new schedule and where we need to be and when. We managed to get a lot of work done and had our first couple of assessments for the year. We also took advantage of the fairly good weather to get outside a few times! Mathematics. We concluded our first unit for mathematics this week. We looked at number sequences and patterns and this caused a few problems for the students. For example: 2, 3, _, 5, _ Students will need to fill in the blank numbers. 8, _, 6, 5, _ These caused some confusion as the pattern is not shown in the beginning. It is also going backwards. 3, 5, _, 9 The students found these patterns harder as not only is it not in sequence (i.e, going up by ones) but it is also off number for counting by twos (students will readily recognise 2,4,6,8 etc but struggle when asked to count by twos from 13 for example.) We also looked at numbers one more than and one less than. One key word that was stressed to the students was finding the, 'difference.' This phrase will be popping up throughout the curriculum and we worked on using manipulatives to model 2 numbers and found our how much more or less one number was compared to the other. Writing. It was a grammar heavy week for writing this week. We looked at parts of a sentence and tried to find the ,'naming' part and the, 'telling' part. We also looked at different types of sentences and the punctuation used for each one. The sentence types we covered were: Statements - Require a capital letter in the beginning, be a complete thought and use full stops (periods) Questions - Require a capital letter in the beginning, have a question word and use question marks Exclamations - Require a capital letter in the beginning, require a strong emotion like excitement or suprise and use exclamation marks. We also had time for more handwriting and covered 'o' 'd' and 'g' this week. Next week we will look at writing traits and the expectations for writing full paragraphs as well as looking at the rubrics I will be using for marking. Reading. For reading we looked building good reading habits and extending our reading stamina. First we looked at how we can use the pictures in a book to tell the story. For this we looked at, 'STUCK' by Oliver Jeffers. Next we looked reading the words in books and at the tricks authors use to make their books easier to read, specifically rhyming and repetitive sentence structure. For this lesson we read, 'Where is the green sheep?' by Mem Fox. We also looked at retelling a story by asking ourselves questions and presenting in front of the class. This will lead into our reading group work that we will cover later in the year. Social Studies. We started our Social Studies course this week and began with the unit, 'How can we all get along?' We looked at how people work together in schools and key concepts such as sharing, cooperation, listening and taking turns. We also looked at how we can be good sports when playing games. The students also watched the cooperation song from Sesame Street which is turning into a class favourite. I have posted a link to it below but it is quite old (I watched it as a kid.) Prize ticket winner for the week. This week Rio won our prize raffle and chose to get a week off homework! Good job Rio.
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