We had a few special events this week. We had our field trip to the science museum where we had some hands on activities with sound and light. We also had Oliver's mum come in as our mystery reader and she read us a non-fiction book for a change! On Thursday we had our assembly where we learned the squad of the month (Narwhals!) Lastly we had our birthday party for Oliver and Dale on Friday. A very busy week indeed!
Our read-a-thon has finished and I am pleased to announce that G1B raised 46,075 yen for our charity One Tree Planted! This means as a class we are responsible for planting 461 new trees in the world! To do this the students read for the total of 2305 minutes over the last two week which is a fantastic effort. We had a few special events this week. We had our field trip to the science museum where we had some hands on activities with sound and light. We also had Oliver's mum come in as our mystery reader and she read us a non-fiction book for a change! On Thursday we had our assembly where we learned the squad of the month (Narwhals!) Lastly we had our birthday party for Oliver and Dale on Friday. A very busy week indeed! We started our new unit on ordinal numbers this week. We began with the numbers themselves in both numeral and written form (with extra practice for homework!) The students practiced ordering the numbers before moving onto orders based on a starting point. This introduced X from the left/right and was a little tricky. We have used a lot of physical objects (and even the students) to model order and how to describe something's position. We also looked at positioning words such as, 'next to', 'between', 'last' and other prepositions. Our descriptive writing unit continued this week and we have fleshed out our Roald Dahl descriptive words wall in class. Most students are now revising their texts and trying to use this new vocabulary in their writing. This is proving a little difficult as Roald Dahl's words are packed with imagery and the students have to really think on the meaning of the word to make sure that it fits into their sentences (and if it makes sense.) 'Unbelievable' is one word that is causing problems (most students are using it as a synonym for 'good')and a lot of them are figuring out if they could use 'colossal' for their revised draft (it's their favourite word so far!) We will have a few more lessons with teacher assistance before the students will try to write a descriptive paragraph from the beginning by themselves. This week in reading, we have continued our work with characters. In particular we have been putting ourselves in our characters' shoes by imagining what they are thinking in certain situations. For the first lesson we looked at, 'Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.' by Judith Viorst. We used the structure of, 'If I were Alexander, I would be thinking _____' to describe what might be going through his head. We moved onto more direct comparisons with our own experiences with, 'David gets in trouble' by David Shannon. The students compared the situations where David is in trouble to where they got in trouble for doing something similar. This led to a very 'colourful' class discussion........ We only had time for one science lesson this week (apart from a test on Thursday.) The students had their first look at a system (something engineered to do a task.) In this open ended activity, students used a spoon gong system to answer the question: How does the sound travel from the source to the receiver? After 5 minutes of experimenting to figure out how to actually use the spoon gongs, students found that the sound vibrations were traveling up the string the spoon was attached to into the cup. Some groups of students went further and found that the cup amplified the sound to make it louder. The students had in fact made a very basic speaker system! We have one more open ended task to finish before we leave the topic of sound and spend the next 2 weeks looking at the properties of light. This week's prize draw winner was Sophie! She has chosen to swap seats with someone for the week.
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Read-a-thon kept us very busy this week. Our tree in the foyer area is looking fantastic and I am very pleased to report that over this week-and-a-bit period, G1B has read for over 1500 minutes! This means we have raised a lot of money to plant trees all over the world. I will be encouraging the kids to finish with a flourish this weekend and try to read as much as they can. I would like to ask for all parents to tally up the minutes read and the amount donated on Sunday. This will really help me get the totals together and see who our best reader the last couple of week has been. In other reading news, we had another mystery reader this week. Megumi's (form G1A) Grandfather came all the way from Norway to read us the traditional Norwegian tale of, 'The Billy Goats Gruff.' We could tell it was the Scandinavian version as it didn't skimp on the gory details (I never knew that the 3rd goat actually poked out the troll's eyes and dropped rocks on him.....) Mathematics. We finished our shapes unit this week with an assessment on Friday. This week we really concentrated on our 3D shapes and managed to get most of our 3D shape wall finished. We still have a few of the harder shapes being constructed (the isohedrons take forever) but thanks to Mr Guy's input, the display looks great. We also looked at which of the shapes roll, slide or stack and we spent Wednesday's math lesson seeing what shapes are the best for constructing towers. We also had a look at patterns with our 3D shapes with a focus on finding mistakes in patterns and correcting them. We're onto our last unit next week, ordinal numbers! Writing. We started a new unit on Tuesday this week. In the coming weeks, the students will be writing descriptive paragraphs. For this style of writing the students have been brainstorming a lot of adjectives to use. To help us with this, we have tied in our read aloud story of, 'James and the Giant Peach.' Roald Dahl is a master of using descriptive writing to flesh out his worlds and even makes up some new words that better suit his imagery! We now have a 'Roald Dahl Words' poster on our wall and all of the words on their we have found in our book. The students are very excited about his writing and I know a lot of students have been bringing in books especially to find new words. We have started our first drafts of our paragraphs but the students have found finding an appropriate topic hard to come across. We will be reviewing our work next week and seeing if we can make our topics more interesting. Reading. It's not just Roald Dahl in reading time! We have continued our work with characters as part of our 'Story Structures' unit and looked at giving evidence for our opinions. For this the students had to first look for the personalities of familiar characters and chose to focus on Charlie and Lola from Lauren Child's books. Most students agreed that the character of Lola was quite cheeky in MOST of her books (this was a topic of great debate in one lesson....) but then had to give concrete examples of where she displayed this behavior. We used this a platform to move to the next topic of characters development through a series. In the end the students decided that while the character of Lola remains mostly the same through her books, she sometimes shows different aspects depending on the situation. For Grade 1's to come to this conclusion made me a very happy teacher indeed! Science. Moving on from changing volume last week, this week we looked at how we can change the pitch of instruments. We started our first open ended investigation on Tuesday with task making our xylophones and guitars play scales (notes that go up or down in pitch.) Our key question was How can we change the pitch on our instruments. The students came to the conclusion that the longer the string/pipe, the lower the pitch and conversely the short the string or pipe the higher the pitch. I showed the students how this translated on the guitar and this lead into our reading about string instruments. Lastly on Thursday we had a formative assessment on kalimbas (an African instrument.) The students had to make a kalimba that could play scales from low to high. A lot of students struggled to figure out how to assemble the kalimbas properly but one group managed to make one work perfectly! We reviewed our findings from Tuesday and made one as a class to demonstrate how the longer/shorter bars theory translated into our kalimba. Prize draw. We ran out of time last Friday so had the draw on Monday. The winner was Jaden! But he was away :(. He can claim his prize when he gets back. We managed to have our draw this week and Oliver won the prize raffle and chose to take home one of our gacha gachas! Well don to both of them.
We had another full week this week but we missed a few people who caught a cold! We have been reminding the students to wear their jackets and jumpers when going outside to the park because we don't want more people getting sick! We have also started our read-a-thon as well. For this year, we are showing how much money we are raising by putting a leaf on a tree for every 100 yen that we earn. We are sharing the tree with all of the 3rd floor and every leaf represents one tree that we have helped plant! We are also hoping to have more foliage than the other floors in a bit of friendly competition. Mathematics. We continued our work with shapes in maths this week. For this week we looked at 3D shapes and looked at what the shapes were called and what their base shape is (a cube is made of 6 squares for example.) We continued this thinking when we looked at nets (3D shapes unfolded out) and began making our 3D shape wall with all sorts of nets decorated in collaboration with Mr Guy in art class! We explored the properties of 3D shapes by sorting them by if the rolled or not and if we were able to stack them. Lastly we looked at finding shapes hidden in pictures and how there are different kinds of 2D shapes which can be classified under one name (Isosceles triangles and right angled triangles are still triangles due to the sides and vertices.) Writing. We began our summative assessments this week. A summative assessment is where the students will attempt to use all of the writing process without assistance from a teacher! During this time we reviewed each step and some of the pitfalls which students fall into (I used examples from the students' previous writing task.) We also spent some time working on our dictionary skills and tied this into or work in reading strategies with stretching out the words, trying different vowel sounds and seeing if it looks right by writing it down. We reviewed our spelling words at the same time and I am hoping this will aid the students in their spelling results this week. Reading. We started a new reading unit this week and it's one of my favourites! We will be looking at, 'Story elements' for this unit and spent the beginning of the unit discussing how fiction is usually constructed (for children's books at least.) We introduced these elements this week: Character Setting Problem Solution Plot (which we will further explore as the beginning - middle - end 'journey') We explored characters mainly this week and spent a lot of time with the, 'Olivia' series by Ian Falconer. We discovered that her character remains the same throughout the books as she has the same likes and dislikes in whatever story she is in. We also found that we could discover new information about her in each different story. Science. This week in Science we studied, 'volume' and how to change the volume of percussion and string instruments. This resulted in some very noisy lessons where we annoyed Mr. Morris and G3B next door with our loud experiments. We also talked about different, 'sound receivers' on animals (and us) and why they would need to be able to hear certain sounds. Feel free to ask the kids about this! Lastly we used our ears to find out the range of sounds that the human ear can hear. We discovered that the closer you are to a sound source, the easier it is to hear softer sounds. We also found that the pitch of the sound makes a big difference to whether or not we can hear it. I even brought in my electric guitar so the students could experiment with volume and further annoy Mr. Morris. Unfortunately the amplifier I borrowed from Ms. Erin isn't very loud :( Prize ticket winner (s)! We had jus one prize draws this week as we ran out of time again on Friday! The winners was Emma Li and she chose to take home a gacha gacha. Well done Emma.
We had a more settled week this week after the bedlam that was Halloween. We took advantage of the gorgeous autumn weather to go outside as often as we could. We also had a visit from the therapy dogs on Friday and we got to learn how animals also have a role in our community! We started some of the assessments for a lot of our units, it's hard believe that we only have a couple of weeks until the end of term! Mathematics. We started our unit on shapes this week and the students are really enjoying the more hands on tasks that this entails. This week we looked at properties of 2D shapes and covered: circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, hexagons and rhombi. We covered sides and corners and proceeded to sort out our shapes collections into size, colours and sides. There was a new area introduced into our maths rotations, Tangrams! We started with easy ones (with the shapes drawn on them) but Ms. Allison made some super hard ones for us! At the end of the week we looked at symmetry in shapes and the students will be designing their own worksheets to try and test the class. Writing. This week in writing we finished off our formative narratives. These were our first attempts with the help of myself and Ms. Sofia. The students have begun their final summative narratives and we spent a lot of time reminding ourselves of the writing process and what needs to be done at each stage. We did spend some time on grammar and the past tense as this was an area that we found mistakes on in our previous writing. The students will have all of next week to finish off their narratives before we move on to the final unit of the term! Reading. For reading, we finished the last of the reading strategies. We looked at 'Chunky Monkey' where we look for words inside the tricky words.For example, 'bring' has 'ring' inside it. We also looked at compound words (two words stuck together. E.g. ladybug) and how, ' Chunky Monkey' helps us with these longer words as it would take a much longer time stretching these words out. We also covered, 'Knowing Kangaroo' which is where students ask the teacher for the help but this used only when they have tried everything else! At the the end of the week we looked at how to read in a storytelling voice for non fiction books and how different fonts reflect how we read the words (such as bold words and words in italics.) Finally, we managed to finish, 'Fantastic Mr. Fox'! Science. We had another busy week of science. We managed to finish off our first investigation about hearing sounds. First we looked at the question, 'Which sounds are easy to identify?' and we used drop chambers (where we drop objects behind a screen and try to identify them based on the sound they make) as well as tuning forks. We found out that heavier objects make louder sound when dropped, that the distance we are from the sound source makes a difference in volume and we discovered that if you can make an object stop vibrating, it will stop producing a sound. On Wednesday we observed sounds outside and make a quick trip to the campus to listen to what sounds we could discern. We found out that sound can be blocked by objects (such as walls and trees) and that high pitched sounds seemed to be easiest to identify. Next week we will be looking at,' Changing Sounds.' where we make our own usable instruments! Prize box winner.Nobody! Our assembly with the therapy dogs went much longer than we expected and we didn't have time. We will have our draw on Monday morning.
Here's our cast of ghoulish and ghastly G1B's in all their Halloween finery! |
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