Over the past few weeks we have been inquiring into our personal histories. We have been learning a lot about each other and sharing many of our memories. Mr Jon has been working with us on asking the right questions. We learnt that 'thin' questions only give us a small amount of information or a yes/no answer. Whereas 'thick' questions give us a story and lots of information. We have been working hard on coming up with questions ourselves and over the past few weeks I'm sure the children have been asking you all lots of questions about when they were younger. We have had some hilarious moments and fantastic stories from the children!
Some of the children shared their favourite things that they had when they were a baby, toddler or have now. Great job taking action you guys :-)
Some students also made things at home to share with the class related to our unit. Aoife made a timeline and drew herself from a baby up to the age of 22. Elina made a house and a number of us shared our favourite grade one memory on the morning board.
For the children to really know what they are learning about we looked at what history means and what change is. We spent time brainstorming these concepts and also sorting and ordering photos in a variety of ways. We posted the changes we made to our pipe cleaners on Seesaw and we made memory maps.
Continuing with change and time, in maths we have been learning to tell the time. We have been practicing to the hour, half past, quarter past and quarter to. We had fun testing each other.
We are also making our very own clocks!
Mr Matt came to our class to share with us a fun way to make timelines on the app Explain Everything. We are working on showing how we have changed over time. Once these are finished we will post them to Seesaw to share with you.
For our 'Personal Histories' unit each student is creating a special scrapbook - 'All about Me'. They are already full of loads of information and many memories are being recorded and shared. To help the students with their writing and to encourage them to dig deeper when sharing a memory we talked about 'water melon moments'.
This lesson started with a simple watermelon that the children passed around. They touched it, smelt it, looked at it and felt how heavy it was and what it sounded like. We talked about how big it was and tried telling everything about it. We decided it would be really hard to eat a watermelon like this.
Then Mr Jon shared a story with us, it was pretty boring and only told us what happened, it didn't give us any detail. Suddenly Mr Jon remembered a funny moment on his trip and he went into a lot of detail about that moment and we were really interested and listened to that story.
We then made the connection that the HUGE watermelon was just like Mr Jon's "boring" story. I went to Thailand, went took a plane to Chang Mai, we saw different places and went on a motorbike. We stayed for three weeks, then we went home. We talked about the story and decided that knowing what happened is very different than knowing all the details. So we decided to cut the watermelon!
What did we see?
We saw the details that were a lot more interesting. The different colours, the seeds, we could see and feel the different textures. These are all the 'little moments' that we need to make more details for. So when we connected this to our writing we could see that instead of writing about the WHOLE, we could write about the little moments, we called these the 'Seed Moments'.
I'm looking forward to some fantastic 'Seed Moment' writing!
Wacky Wednesday!
We also had some visitors from KGMA - also known as 'The Master Cleaners'! After being inspired during their UOI - How We Organise Ourselves, they are now sharing their knowledge and expertise across elementary to encourage us all to take care of our working spaces. We can't wait for our visitors to show us what they have learnt next week!
