On Wednesday we went to the library to hear a story from a mystery reader. Our mystery reader was Athan's mum. She read us the story Situ Bagendit which had lots of good lessons to learn about sharing, being kind, being generous and looking after people in need. Also on Wednesday we had a visit from the author Andy Chua. Andy is a fossil expert and has written 3 fiction books called in a mini series called 'Fossil Finders'. He showed us some of his fossil collection and gave an informative and interactive talk about dinosaurs. Afterwards we went in small groups to meet him in the library and see other fossils. On Thursday we were able to swap our old books for ones we haven't read that other children brought in. It was fun exchanging books in this way, helping to recycle used books. Friday was the book character parade where we dressed up in costumes of some of our favourite book characters and walked around the school to look at everyones costumes.
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To spark our interest in how living things change and lifecycles we played a game with our baby photos. We had to guess who each person was. To do this we used a 'think, see, wonder' thinking routine. We had to note clues which made us think the photo was the certain person. We also had the opportunity to wonder and ask questions about the photos. Some were a lot easier to figure out than others!
To help us understand the central idea 'living things change' we worked on sorting out things into living or non living. We used a venn diagram in groups and had some interesting discussions about things such as oranges which were once living but are no longer living. We also discussed items such as a wooden table that came from a living thing. After further discussions and watching a video clip we came up with 4 questions to help classify things as living. Does it move? Does it breathe? Does it make more of itself? Does it grow and change? Then we took a walk around the garden to find things which we could classify as living or non living by asking these questions.
Our new unit of inquiry is from the transdisciplinary theme 'How The World Works' with the central idea 'Living Things Change'. To help with the tuning in and to spark many wonderings we went on a nature hunt. We had a checklist of living things to find and even managed to add on some of our own to the list. We saw crocodiles, monitor lizards, bats, turtles, crabs, mud skippers, birds, fish, spiders, butterflies, dragonflies, ants, geckos and squirrels. We enjoyed some snack and also had some time to write about what we had seen.
As part of our inquiry about the journey of food we focused on where and how different foods grow. Some of us were interested in rice and some of us wondered about where flour comes from to make bread. After watching some videos about rice and wheat we planted some wheat seeds. They took about a week to start growing and we have been measuring how tall they are each week. We also grew some cress seeds and once they had sprouted we knew they were ready to eat. We tried the cress in a sandwich with some cream cheese. Our reactions ranged from loving it to hating it, but we were all risk takers and tried it. We also planted chives and are still waiting to see if they will grow!
On Tuesday we had mystery readers from grade 4 come to visit our class. They read us stories in pairs and some of us also read to them. We enjoyed this time with other children from ISS reading to us.
For the past few weeks in maths we have been focusing on measurement and the use of non standard measures. We have used many classroom objects to measure length, height, weight and capacity. We visited the garden to do some measuring of heights and lengths. We went to the sandpit to compare capacities of containers by using sand.
This week we read the story of Stone Soup as it connected with our Unit of Inquiry. As the moral of the story is about sharing and teamwork we decided to work as a team in Grade 1.1 to make some soup for ourselves. As a class we decided which vegetable we could each bring and someone said they would bring bread. On Thursday we worked together to wash, peel, chop and slice all the vegetables for our soup. At the end of the day we had a bowl of freshly made soup. We were all risk takers and tried a little bit. Some of us enjoyed it so much we had three helpings!
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Grade 1.1Follow our learning journey throughout the year. Archives
June 2018
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