Report Writing!

We have been so busy over the past few weeks working on our Unit of Inquiry - How The World Works. We are making and creating 'lapbooks' which we will be presenting to our parents at our end of year celebrations. We are also writing a report on a chosen insect and we have been learning about the way in which a report is written and how we can make our report informative and full of valuable information.

Ms Rachel came to talk to us about what we can do to inquiry into insects. What resources can we use and how might we find the correct information that we are looking for.

She gave us a lot of helpful tips and we are now putting that into practice as we continue our research. 

We know that we have to use non-fiction texts to get real information about our insects. We looked at the characteristics that make up a non-fiction text, we found out that they have:

A contents page
A glossary
An index
Writing based on facts and real life
Real pictures that can be labelled
Real drawings of real things

We had a group challenge where we had to try and put a non-fiction text into the correct order. It was pretty tricky!

We were also lucky enough to have one more final travelling tale to do before the end of the year. This time we were in charge of making the problem, which is always fun! Our tale doesn't have a name yet but we included the #TeachSDG - life below the water #14

The tale was started in Saudi Arabia, then went to Columbia, they sent it to us here in Cambodia and we sent it to a school in Tanzania. Finally the tale will be completed by a school in America. We are very excited to see what direction the tale has taken. We will share it with you once it is uploaded and ready to go!

We really enjoyed brainstorming, illustrating and recording our part of the tale!

Grade Ones leading the pathway to collaboration across our grade level. All students were team teaching to lead, instruct and mentor while sharing and inspiring each other for our Unit of Inquiry - How The World Works.

Here is a sneak peek at what you can expect to see at our Grade 1 learning celebration.

We also spent some time reflecting on the Learner Profiles. We, as a grade brainstormed and shared our personalised learning experiences to represent, support and celebrate our year as holistic learners.

Bees, Bugs & Butterflies

Our central idea for our sixth and final unit is:
"Insects, like all living things in our world, have a purpose."

With Mr Jon we unpacked the central idea by taking out the keywords and figuring out what they meant. We had six words - Insects, world, purpose, characteristics, behave and depends.

We worked in pairs:

We shared our ideas altogether at the end and I think we all have a pretty good understanding of what our central idea is and means now.

We then had a discussion about 'What is an insect and is NOT an insect'. I got the students to do a sort of what they thought.

We explored our environment and had a little help from Mr Ben who gave us some little (or not so little) friends to keep in the classroom!

We showed our buddies and told them all the things we know about insect and our new friends.

Guest Speaker

We were very lucky to have Mr Simon Underhill who is the secondary Biology teacher (and Emma's dad) to share his expertise with us. He talked about what is an insect and how do we know it is an insect. What are the characteristics and behave of some insects and the purpose of those insects in our world. This got very interesting when we learnt their was a cockroach farm!! We were all very excited and had so many question for Mr Simon. Thank you so much for coming and sharing with us :-)

We also went on a trip to see the bees, bugs and butterflies in our very own school yard. We are so lucky to have these fantastic resources right here on our door step. We had the experts share with us what they do to keep these insects in our garden and the different stages of their lifecycle. It was so great to se first hand each stage that these insects go through.

Emma, Kuong Shen and Ivy were great helpers and read to small groups a book about lifecycles. They answered a number of questions from their classmates and helped to explain each stage that the insects, seeds and humans went through. 

We also had a very fun activity to complete afterwards by creating our own lifecycle of anything we wanted from clay. We posted them to Seesaw for you all to see.