Mystery Reader!

We were very excited to have our very first mystery reader today! This morning the children had a chance to try and guess who they thought it might be and came back from lunch very quickly so they didn't miss the surprise.

A very big THANK YOU to Erin Lucas (Anna's Mum) for coming in today to be our very first mystery reader. We were even treated to not one but two fantastic books and the children were such great listeners. We were all really impressed that one of the books even had Anna's name in it as one of the character!


Erin read first - 'A Flower in the snow' written by Tracey Corderoy. It is a delightful story about a friendship between a little girl and her best friend bear. The book tied in perfectly with the beginning of our new Unit of Inquiry on 'Interactions'. It showed that no matter the distance between you and your friend your friendship will never fade.



The second story that Erin read was - 'The little girl who lost her name' written by David Cadji-Newby. It is one of Anna's favourite stories and we could all see why. At the end of the book we found out that Anna was the little girl in the story and when she finally finished her adventure of gathering letter. They spelt her name! It was pretty awesome :-)


The children are very proud when they have a parent, relative or friend come in to read. Please don't miss out on the chance to share a story with our class. 

Follow this link to sign up:

Mystery Reader - sign up

Elementary Student Council

After feedback from our students and teachers we have decided to run the Elementary Student Council for a third year.

This group of students and teachers will help to organize fun inclusive activities for students to help promote school spirit and celebrate diversity across the elementary school.  The council will be composed of students from Grades 3, 4 and 5 and a teacher representative (Dee Smith) for KG through Grade 2.

The council meets once a week to discuss ideas for the elementary school to encourage school spirit.  Classrooms will hold regular meetings or team times to discuss ideas for the council.  As the representative, Dee will take students’ ideas to the meetings to discuss, and achievable ideas will be carried out.  

The council will be formed in the next two weeks. You will hear about planned events from your child’s homeroom teacher, class blogs and the ISPP Pulse magazine.

We all look forward to seeing what ideas the elementary students propose.

Elementary Student Council Supervisors: Ms. Emily, Mr. Simon & Ms. Leigh

Posted on behalf of Elementary Student Council

Great Day for a Swim and a Guest Speaker

This morning I went to check on how our swimmers were doing. They were having a great time in the pool swimming, diving, splashing and kicking!



We were also very lucky to have Bjarke (Anton's Dad) come in and speak with us this afternoon about weather. The children really enjoyed looking at the satellite pictures and recognising the different countries. They got to see the global forecast from the Red Cross and had lots of questions about what it all meant.

Thanks again for sharing this with us Bjarke :-)

A few things....

We have spent this week finishing off our inquiry into weather. We have some weather experts in our class now and they have all become very good at predicting and reading the weather! 

We will be starting our new unit of inquiry next week under the transdisciplinary theme of Who We Are. 

The central idea is:
Interactions - 'Being aware of how we interact with people can help us to make good choices for ourselves and others.'

Please check under the tab 'Unit of Inquiry' for more information.  

We will also change our focus in language from procedural writing to an investigation into fiction stories, specifically FABLES. Please check under the tab 'Language" for more information. And of course Maths has not been forgotten, you can also check under that tab to get updated information for our focus during this unit.

A few fun things from this week:

IPads with Mr Matt! We were on the fantastic app Explain Everything again. We're making some very funny movies. The children were taught how to search images, save them, add their own photos to this picture and record a story. They were hilarious. Once they are all complete I will upload them to the blog.

Here we are working hard making them:




We have calendar time everyday where we do the date, number of days in school, estimation jar and pick a problem. This week we had a great 'pick a problem' card which asked us to see how many blocks we could use to build a tower before it falls over. We had great fun building towers out of various shaped blocks in the class. I think the largest tower we made was 85 pieces. However, this did lead into a discussion about the types of blocks you used and how some were a lot easier to stack than others ;-)

Thank you to everyone for coming to the Parent/Teacher Conferences on Tuesday and Wednesday. It was great to see you all and to meet many new parents and put faces to names :-) It is always very helpful to be able to have time to discuss the hopes and concerns you may have about your child. As I said to you all during the meetings please feel free to come and talk to me or email if you have any other questions, hopes or concerns throughout the year.

Gentle Reminder

Just a gentle reminder that we will be having our Parent/Teacher conferences the afternoon of Tuesday 15th and Wednesday 16th September. The children will be dismissed from school at 11:30 am. They will eat lunch before they go home at the cafeteria, if they have a lunch from home please make sure it is dropped at school before 11am. Or if you chose for your child to wait to eat until they are home that is fine too. There will be no after school activities on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Thanks so much to the parents who have informed me that they are unable to make the time or have rescheduled. 

Please take some time to look over the questions that were recommended by the admin team.

Please see schedules below:

Tomorrow Tuesday 15th September timetable:

Wednesday 16th September timetable:

 

Looking forward to seeing you all over the next couple of days!

Fun Friday + Gentle Reminder!

Friday is always fun in our class and this week has been no exception. We had an action packed day starting with our spelling/sight words and Language. This led into a big brain storming session about meteorologists and what information we learnt from our guest speaker Mr Whelan. 

We thought we had done a pretty good job at everything and decided that we should have time to be creative. We drew self portraits which look fantastic. Please do take a look when you come to our class for your parent/teacher conference next week. We also built farms, dinosaur parks, lego constructions, drew and coloured. 

After lunch Mr Matt came to our class to teach us more about using our IPads. He showed us a really cool app called - Explain Everything. We had a hilarious time creating weather pictures using images that we searched for on the internet and then saved. We could even take pictures of ourselves and add us to our creations. So of the ones the children made were very funny! They all do a great job and had a whole lot of fun!



Finally we ended 'Fun Friday' with one of our favourite activities - Buddies! This week we were very lucky to get to listen to a story that our buddies had written themselves. The Grade fives have been doing a Unit of Inquiry on Migration and their stories told of a journey someone or something might take. They were fantastic! The children also got to help their buddies by giving two positives about their story and then one thing they would like them to work - Two stars and a wish. I think we were very helpful :-)

A gentle reminder to you all that on Tuesday and Wednesday next week school will finish for the students at 11:30am. The students will eat their lunch before they go home. Parent/Teacher conference begin at 12:30pm so please be on time to pick up your child. If you have an appointment at 12:30pm you are still asked to pick your child up at 11:30am as the conference is only parent/teacher.

Thanks everyone :-)

Have a great weekend everyone!

Guest Speaker!

Today we were very lucky to be able to have a guest speaker. Normally our guest speakers come to our class or to the piazza and we see them in person, this time it was a little different. We got to have a skype call with our guest speaker! 

This is Mr Jon's friend, Mr Whelan. He was in the US Navy for more than 20 years and was a meteorologist for them. He lived and worked on Navy ships and travelled to many different places for his work.

The children had lots of questions for Mr Whelan and did a great job! We learnt a lot about what a meteorologist does and how they are very important for the Navy. Through asking questions we got to understand that being a meteorologists helps people everyday and can also save peoples lives!

 

We also helped Adrien celebrate his sixth birthday. A very happy birthday to you Adrien, hope you have a great day on Saturday! Thanks for the delicious rainbow cupcakes :-)

Fun Friday tomorrow!!

Parent/Teacher Conferences

As you know our Parent/Teacher Conferences are next week on Tuesday and Wednesday. Please find below the day and time that you have been allocated. If for any reason you are not able to make the conference or need to change the time please let me know as soon as possible. As you can see both days are very full so the sooner I know the easier it will be to try to reschedule.

Just a bit of Fun!

This morning we started off with having a chat about what we did at the weekend. Everyone had something exciting to tell me about what they did and who they saw. This led into some fantastic recount writing of our weekends. I was so pleased to see the children really concentrating and being risk takers with their writing. The biggest aim for them at the moment is to not get 'stuck' by a word they feel that they can't spell. I want them to write freely and just sound out the unknown words and write down the letters that they hear. This is improving the amount they write, and I can hear them talking with each other to explain about words they didn't know but now do and it is 'so easy' to spell  :-)

The children were busy in the middle part of the day with their specialist classes, and after lunch we conferenced their writing from the morning. We practised our fire drill, focusing on what we have to do and where we have to go in the event of a real fire. After this we thought we should have some FUN!

We had a look at some of the clouds that were in the sky. The children named the clouds cumulus, stratus and cirrus. I asked them if they could show me what these clouds looked like. They all answered, "Yes", so I asked them to sit at a table and gave each child a big pile of shaving cream and asked them to create each of the clouds. They had such a fun time using their hands to create the clouds and once we had finished it was time to just explore with the shaving cream and have fun.

Check out our pictures :-)

Fun Friday!

Since we had a short day today, finishing at 11:30, we did all of our 'hard work' in the morning. As a class we decided that since it was 'Fun Friday' we should do some of the fun things that we wrote about on the board for our morning question. The consensus was to play! So play it was! This consisted of making rain gauges, searching for weather words, building a dinosaur land, constructing things from paper and many more. I think play in our class is pretty awesome!

Experiments and Buddies

This afternoon we got to visit another classroom for a weather experiment. This time it was Ms Rachelle's class where we got to make a wind vane. The children were extremely excited to do another experiment and even got to test theirs out. By all accounts the wind was blowing from the North :-) 

The children again worked in pairs or in groups so not everyone got to take a wind vane home. But now that they are experts in making them I'm sure they will be able to show you at home how to make it.

Here are pictures of what they did with Ms Rachelle:




I dear say all of our rain gauges from yesterday will be well and truly full after this extremely heavy rain too!! WOW!! 

A highlight of the week is always hanging out with our Grade 5 buddies. Today we only had a short time at the end of the day to see them so we decided that we would have them visit our class and join us for some Maths and Language games.

Fun Friday tomorrow!!

Gentle Reminder

Just a gentle reminder that we do finish school at 11:30am tomorrow Friday 4th September. 

The children will eat lunch ahead of time.

Grades 1-5 students will go to cafeteria with homeroom teachers around 11:00. 

If your child brings a home lunch on this day, please ensure that it is dropped off by 10:45 or send it along with their snack first thing in the morning. If you prefer your child to wait and eat at home, that is okay, too, but please keep in mind, they will be sitting in the cafeteria while the other children are eating.

After students finish eating, they will be accompanied back to their homerooms to collect their bags.

Thank you for your cooperation!

Experiments!

We are so lucky here in Grade one to have the chance to visit the other two Grade One classes and do an experiment with another teacher. Today our class were super excited to go to Ms Carina's class. The children were very curious about going to another classroom and it was a surprise as to what the experiment was going to be. Today they made their very own rain gauges. They listened to instructions and did a piece of procedural writing to explain the steps. The children were also delighted to see it was raining at home time so they could try out their new tool. Tomorrow they will be going to Ms Rachelle's class to do another experiment!

They worked in pairs so not each child got to take a rain gauge home but now that they know how to make one they can show you all at home :-)

Have a look at the slideshow to see what they did:

Guest Speaker and Cloud Making

On Monday we were very lucky to have James Le Compte come and speak to all the Grade One students about the effect weather has on people and the land. James shared with us his knowledge about people who rely on farming as a living and the challenges they face. I was very proud of our class who listened so well and were also very knowledgeable and answered many of James's questions!

Here are some of the slides we saw and talked about.

After the talked we went back to the class and discussed the things that we learnt. I was very impressed by what the children said:

"You can collect rain water from your roof when it rains, this can be used for your plants to help them grow"

"Too much rain can cause flooding which is not good for the crops"

"Too much sun is also very dangerous for the plants and Earth, it causes droughts"

"You can dig in the ground to find water"

Another highlight today was making clouds!! We had a great time doing a hands on experiment and we were very careful making sure we all took care when woking with hot water and matches. I know if you ask your child about it they will not only be able to tell you about clouds and how they are formed but  can also show you how to make one.

Here is what we did:



We made clouds, we felt them and we observed what they did. We even had it raining in our classroom!

Anton in our class also asked the question:

"Will it work if we do it in a plastic bottle or cup?"

So to find out the answer Anton and his lovely assistant Anna decided to try the experiment with a plastic bottle.

The conclusion was: 

It works but not as well as the glass jar.

Finally we had some more fantastic learners in our class taking action! Ahmed made a weather book that had a different type of weather on each page.

Also Eito drew a very interesting picture of a weather tv. There were many channels you could go on to learn about different types of weather.

Phew and it is only Tuesday! What will the rest of the week have in store?!