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.....)
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.....) 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! 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. 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! 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. 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.
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