#travellingtale completed!

Delighted to share with everyone our completed Travelling Tale - 'Avocado Babies'. During our assembly on Friday we shared the process of creating our part of the tale. Please check our journey and finished product.

and finally the completed tale :-)

We can't wait to join another tale in the new year! Well done to Grade One for such awesome ideas and creative thinking.

Following a Procedure!

On Monday morning we had a great time rotating around 4 different activities. At each activity we had to read and follow a procedure to complete a task. It soon became clear to the students that if you didn't follow the steps in order and do each step correctly things started to go wrong. It became frustrating when you couldn't complete a task!

Making a phone call:

The children were absolutely delighted to speak with many of their Mums and Dads on the telephone. I think you will see from the photos some very happy faces :-)

Making Playdough:

This was hilarious! Very messy and loads of fun.

Skype:

Mr Jon had the children show him the procedure of how to make a call on Skype.  It was clear that a lot of the children had used it before to chat to family and friends who live in a different country.

We also welcomed another new friend to our class on Monday. A very warm welcome to Thai Hak, we are very happy to have you in our class :-)

ISPP's Got Talent and much more....

A very big thank you to Manuela (Noel's Mum) for coming in on Wednesday to be our mystery reader. She read us a hilarious book about a Dinosaur who ate up all of Christmas! The children really enjoyed the story as did I and we had a good laugh about what happens to you when you eat too much :-)

We also helped our very good friend Oan celebrate his seventh birthday on Wednesday. A very happy birthday to you Oan and thanks so much for the delicious doughnuts and fruit :-)

We had some very brave 'Risk Takers' from both our class and Ms Rachelle's class, who on Thursday afternoon took part in 'ISPP's got Talent'! They worked very hard practicing during the up and coming weeks and showed off some fantastic acting! We are all very proud of you Shae, Magalie, Pong Pong, Jennita, Somphoas, Molly and Maële.

It was so lovely to see many of you at the 'Spotlight on the Arts' hosted by Ms Leigh and Ms Dana on Thursday night. It is always so great to see the children taking the lead and sharing with their parents and extended family their learning. It was also a very eye opening time for me as both a teacher and parent to see what has been happening in the Art and Music classes :-) Thanks to everyone who managed to come.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Communities are up and running!

Grade Ones have been introduced this week to our 'Community' boards. This is showing them yet another way of how we can communicate with others. After surveying all the children to see what was popular with them and where their interests lie, we have come up with eight different communities for the children to be involved in. They will be treating these boards like an online forum where they can browse, lurk, comment and ask questions.

The communities are : 

PokePals - Pokemon 

Master Crafters - Minecraft

Sports for kids

Eh! Oh! Lego!

Toy Stories

The World of Kittens

Cold Blooded or Not?

Hot Dog!

The children had the opportunity to go to our piazza to see which community they were signed up to and what was posted on the boards. Then we went back to the class to brainstorm together what we will do next. They had fantastic ideas!

We saw that the boards had pictures, information, questions and likes. The class knew that they wanted to write things on the board, but how were they going to do that? Mr Jon introduced us to the idea of making comments and we discussed what this might look like. With great enthusiasm the students were off post it notes in hand and the commenting began. I can't wait to see how this will progress.

Inquiring Minds!

We have been inquiring into communication and all the different ways that we can communicate with other people. We have been learning and teaching each other about the different ways we talk to family locally and globally. Mr Jon has been introducing us to lots of vocabulary related to how we communicate.

We tried out a few games where we had to communicate with each other in different ways.

Whispers - where we had to send a secret message around the circle and see if it was correct at the end after being passed from person to person.

Pictionary - without talking each student had an object that they had to draw and get everyone to guess what it is.

Barrier - Students sit back to back with a partner. One gives instructions and the other has to follow.

Following a Procedure

After making our milkshakes, as a class, we wrote down the step by step instructions of what we had to do to make this procedure an effective one. We looked at the photos of the students making the milkshakes and enjoying them :-) All the students managed to put all the photos in the correct order and write down the steps. Great effort!

Next up Mr Jon showed us how to make a lovely cup of tea. Together we talked about each step he had to do to make a delicious cup of tea. We watched as he showed us the steps and then with a partner we wrote down on a white board each step. After this each child had a set of photos for that procedure and they had to put it in the correct order and write the instructions for making a cup of tea.

These procedures will be posted under your child's individual page here on the blog very soon.

#travellingtales

We recorded our part of the story and it looks and sounds fantastic. We can't wait to see what is going to happen and where the school in New Zealand will take this. Waiting in anticipation!

We had fun playing with walkie talkies this week. A big thank you to Maële who shared her own ones from home. We had such fun. Check out our video. 

Buddies

We finally got to fly out kites and paper planes that we made with our buddies a few weeks back. It was a perfect morning with lots of wind. We had a blast!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Connecting Globally - #travellingtales

Created by Joel Bevan's, teacher of our twitter buddy class in Luxembourg 

We are so excited to be part of this amazing opportunity to connect globally with other schools to tell a tale. The children have already been talking about how cool it is that we get to communicate with people all over the world even though we have never met them face to face. I have to agree, it is pretty cool!! :-)

We are joining up with our fabulous friends in Luxembourg to be part of a digitally created progressive book. Mr Bevan's class are starting the story off for us. They had two days to create the beginning of the story. We watched their part this morning and it was awesome! Our story is called "Avocado Babies' and we were really excited about the characters and setting they had created.

Now it's our turn! Our job is to write the build up and add some events and excitement. We had a fantastic time today brainstorming all sorts of ideas. We finally agreed on where we would like the story to go and drew illustrations to add to the digital tale. Tomorrow we will be making our slides and doing the voice recording.....stay tuned!!

Once our two days are up we send the story onto a school in New Zealand, where they will be adding on from where we left off. There job is to create a problem or dilemma. From there it will travel to India and be added to by finding a resolution. Finally the tale will travel to America where the ending will be set.

The final product will be posted here on our blog, twitter and Youtube. We are so excited to see the finished product!!

For more information please check out this You tube video and talk to your child about what we are doing. They really are very excited to be communicating globally with other classrooms and collaborating on this tale.

Save the Date

Grade 1 Spotlight on the Arts:

Thursday, 8th December: 5pm

The Grade 1 students will have their annual 'Spotlight on the Arts' celebration of learning on this date. It will start at 5pm in the Elementary music room. Your child will share their learning and their artwork with you.

Three Way Conferences:

Tuesday, 13th December (all day)

EY1 through to grade 5: Every child, with his/her parents, has been signed a 15 minute conference time with the homeroom teacher.

Please remember that your child will not attend school on the day of Tuesday 13th December, but your child must accompany you to school for his/her three-way conference. This is a special time for your child with you and your child's homeroom teacher and we ask that siblings do not attend the conference.

Three-way conferences are one very important form of how we share information between teachers, students and parents. During the three-way conference, parents with their child and the teacher collaborate to establish and identify your child's strengths and areas for improvement.

On Tuesday next week, you will receive a letter with this information repeated and also your three-way conference time(s).

All single subject teachers will be available to meet with you and your child on the day of your scheduled three-way conference.

Grade 1 Assembly:

Friday, 16th December: 7:45am Black Box Theatre

All Grade 1 students will present their learning during the assembly. the assembly begins at 7:45am sharp. New and leaving students will also be recognised at this assembly. You are all invited to attend and watch your child preform.

You will receive invitations and information about each event this week in your child's take home folder.

Communication

On Monday morning the class were given a tuning in activity to get them really thinking about effective and ineffective communication,

The challenge:
You and your group are stranded on an island with only a few materials with you. The water surrounding the island is full of sharks and you do not have a boat to get you to another island for help.

The goal:
To effectively communicate a message to any other group on the other islands and get the item that you require. You can only use the the materials you have with you.

The task:
Organise yourselves and brainstorm for some bright ideas on how you can best use your material to help you communicate your messages without talking or yelling to the other groups.

We had two groups that successfully got the item that they required, others were not so lucky.

Once back in the classroom we had time to reflect on what we thought went well in our groups, what did not go so well and what would have made it better. There were some really fantastic ideas and clever thinkers that grasped the idea of how communication can be really helpful when it is effective but very frustrating when it is ineffective.

Maths

We have been doing lots of work this week on 2D shapes and place value. We have been taking numbers apart and looking at how many digits they have, where they are placed - ones, tens, hundreds and expanding numbers to show each digits value. We have also been looking at all the 2D shapes that we know, drawing and labelling them. Next week we will be going outside on a shape hunt.

We do love building towers in our class. We used all sorts of shapes and patterns for our morning calendar question this week. The question was: who can build the tallest tower that could also free stand. We had a lot of tumbles and rumbles with a lot of smiles and laughter :-)

A very big thank you to Sabine Park (Magalie's mum) who kindly came in on Wednesday as our Mystery Reader. We listened to a fantastic story about a book eating boy! Some of the boys in our class were also keen to give it a try but luckily we talked them out of it ;-)

On Thursday we had an excellent presentation done by one of the teachers here at ISPP Mr. Sovathna. He shared with us his expertise on communicating in sign language. He talked to us about what it would feel like to not be able to hear and the different ways that you can still communicate with each other even though you are not talking with your voice. We tried lots of different kinds of signs and expressions. The children were really interested in signing the alphabet and learning words such as thank you, brother, sister and friend. A big thank you to Sovathna for taking the time to come in and share with us :-)

Have a great weekend everyone!