Ms Kelly's Class: Making connections and taking action!

Phew, it has been a busy month!! Moving to a new campus, starting school, having both my daughters Molly and Ella's birthdays in the space of a few weeks and a whole month of school done! We have been so busy in Grade one inquiring into our Unit on "Weather" and making connections between many of our other curriculum subjects, especially Maths and Language.

Last week I asked the children to bring to school or send in some pictures of them in different types of weather. Thanks so much to the children who sent in their pictures. We had a show and share session where the children who had pictures were the experts and had small groups rotating around the class getting to see all the pictures and ask questions from our experts. There were lots of interesting questions and some great discussions about the clothes they were wearing and the activities they do in different types of weather.

I was delighted when Adrien, from our class, arrived on Thursday with his very OWN weather station! It is so great to see that he is making connections and taking action with his learning, by bringing in something from home to share with his friends at school, related to our current unit. The weather station was so cool! It had all sorts of exciting things for us to use and inquiry into. It had a rain gauge, thermometer, anemometer and wind vane. After Adrien introduced his weather station to the class we decided it would be a great idea to find some where around the school to put it and take measurements throughout the day.

Check out our slideshow:
We made predictions first - the temperature, wind speed and rainfall (sadly no rain fell on Thursday plus the wind let us down too) before we went to check on our weather station to see what was happening. Ask your child about this experiment and how we recorded our information.

Anna was so awesome and also took action this week by bring to school a drawing she made of a weather station! She did a show and share session with the class and showed us what her weather station does. She even had help from her little sister Nina!

We also spent a lot of time looking at the different words we use when explaining or talking about the weather. We had help from Mr Jon who visited our class to help us do lots of language activities to get us thinking about the correct terminology. We had fun learning lot of new words!

During Maths we have been doing a lot of graphing. We have been gathering information and using this information to make bar graphs, line graphs or tally graphs. Our morning question has been a great way to gather information for this. This week during our calendar time we have a "pick and problem" card. We got a pattern card, although this wan't related to our current maths unit I was so pleased to see how many of the children used their prior knowledge to answer it. The question asked them to create a pattern.

On Friday we talked a lot about the clouds. We went outside and just lay down for a bit to see the sky and what was happening. Then we went back to the class to check out on the internet information about what we saw:

We found out that there were lots of different types clouds with very tricky names! But we learnt a lot about three types of clouds - Cumulus & Cumulonimbus, stratus & stratocumulus and cirrus. We had fun weather watching and throughout the day many of the children told me that they saw one or two of these types of clouds during snack time, lunch or just looking out the window during class time.

We also had Mr Matt our IT Coach come to our class to show us how to search the internet on our IPads for weather images and save them!