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!

Milkshake Moustaches

We have had such a fun afternoon today making milkshakes!!

We had a question both yesterday and this morning on our board -

Yesterday the question asked 'What is your favourite flavour?' The children could choose between chocolate, vanilla or strawberry. So the groups were made - 12 chocolate, 3 vanilla and 6 strawberry.

The children were given a blender, plastic cups, ice cream and milk. In their group they had to discuss how they were going to make the milkshakes with these items. The teacher gave no instructions but was the robot that the children had to give directions to.

Vanilla went first:
They decided to each have a turn at putting a scoop of ice cream in the blender, followed by a splash of milk. Next they blended it together and had a taste test. The verdict was - lots of milkshake moustaches!

Next was strawberry:
They spent a lot of time talking about what steps they would take to make the milkshake. Using what we had learned about procedures they decided who was going to scoop the ice cream, pour the milk and operate the blender. They decided each person in the group got to add a scoop of ice cream, that meant 6 scoops!! Very clever thinking :-) Then the milk had to reach the number 40 on the blender. Turn on the blender and after the taste test the verdict was - a big thumbs up!

Finally it was chocolate:
This proved to be the most popular and since we had 12 people we had to halve the group and make two chocolate milkshakes. They each had a turn at putting a scoop of ice cream in the blender, followed by each putting in a splash of milk. All into the blender and after the taste test the verdict was - huge smiles!

First group:

Second group:

Once each group had finished we sat together on the mat and reflected on how the groups worked together. We had previously talked about what was an effective procedure and what was an ineffective procedure. 

We talked about what they thought worked well and what they would do differently next time. They all agreed that if you don't work together, listen to each other and follow the steps of a procedure correctly then things can go wrong! We had a lot of fun making them and clearly we followed the steps carefully since each group had a milkshake as an end result!

Happy Holidays!

We had fun making patterns on Thursday.  With a partner the challenge was to create a pattern that would run the whole length of the table. We had patterns made by colours, shapes, animals, size and numbers.

A very big thank you to Mr Pheap who shared with the children some interesting information about the up and coming Water Festival next week. The children always enjoy learning more about the different holidays we have here and when there is colouring and chips involved, they were delighted :-)

Wishing you all a happy and safe Water Festival. See you back at school on Monday, November 11th.

Gentle Reminder!

Just to confirm about tomorrow - Friday 11th November, movie afternoon:

The Elementary movie afternoon sign ups are closed. All students who have signed up will be watching the movie 'Finding Dory' in the Grade 1/2 piazza. 

Following the ending of the movie all students will be taken to the cafeteria. Students will be picked up by parents and/or guardians in the cafeteria by 4:30pm please. There will be no pick up from the piazzas and there will not be a late bus taking students home.

*Only the students who have returned a signed permission slip can attend. Please refer to the list below.

Tuning into Communication!

We started our new Unit of Inquiry last week on Communication. We have been doing a lot of tuning in activities to see what prior knowledge the students have already. They know lots about communication devices and are already very savvy on iPads and mobile devices :-)

Brainstorming all our knowledge:

Gentle reminder

Tomorrow - Wednesday 9th November school is closed for all students. All staff are attending professional development and there is no after school programme.

Have a restful day and see you all back at school on Thursday.

Welcomes and Farewells!

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

We have also started our new unit of inquiry under the transdisciplinary theme of How We Organise Ourselves - Communication. We have been doing a lot of tuning in activities to see what prior knowledge the students have already. They know lots about communication devices and are already very savvy on iPads and mobile devices!

Please check under the tabs - 'Unit of Inquiry', 'Language' and 'Maths' for more information.

Grade 10 show

On Tuesday we were invited to watch a show that the Grade 10 students had created for our KG and Grade One students. They adapted the classic story 'The Three Little Pigs' for stage, which was commissioned by our students. It was hilarious and had the children taking part in the show. Congratulations to the Grade 10 students!

Buddies

On Wednesday we went to see our buddies. Since we were finishing off our unit on weather we decided that we could have some fun making kites and paper planes. Next week we will go outside and see if they work.

Paper Planes

We have calendar time everyday where we do the date, days of the week, number of days in school, estimation jar, morning board question and pick a problem. This week we had a great 'pick a problem' question inspired by Oan. He wanted to know who could make a paper plane and throw it the furtherest. We had great fun folding and creating many different types of planes. Then we went outside to see which one flew the best. This lead to a great discussion about what worked well and how improvements can be made to make the planes fly better.

Maths

Working hard with addition up to 20 and using tens frames to help us.

We worked with Ms Dee again this week and reflected on all the ways we knew to help ourselves calm down when we get angry. After we brain stormed went went outside and tried a few of the techniques, running, taking a walk and breathing. It was nice to take some time with the children to talk about which of these techniques they thought worked best for them. 

Running:

Walking:

Breathing:

Then back to the classroom to use two other techniques - drawing or writing.

We have another new student who joined our class on Thursday! We are very happy to introduce you to Somnang who comes from Cambodia and has settled very happily into our class.  It's great to have you as a member of our class :-)

Sadly we had to say farewell to another member of our class Daksh. He is off an an adventure with his family who have been relocated to Prague. We wish you all the best Daksh and will miss your laugh and smiles.

Finally we spent Friday afternoon watching our ISPP senior boys play volleyball during the MIRSA competition going on at our school this weekend. Everyone was very enthusiastic about supporting the boys team and it was a great game to watch.

Have a great weekend everyone!