Today is World Math Day! The Elementary School celebrated by dressing in number-themed clothes. K1AC celebrated with some of our favourite number games at a math picnic outside of our classroom. What a fun day!
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Ever since we visited Orchard Boulevard/Paterson Road and noticed lots of differently shaped road signs, we've been playing with and exploring shapes in our classroom. Students began to notice and comment on the many shapes that surround us in our daily lives, including in our playground, our homes and even our lunches! As the excitement about finding shapes grew, Ms. Alison suggested that we document some of our findings. We used the 'Explain Everything' iPad app to photograph and annotate the shapes we found. Our shape hunts gave us extended time to develop our ideas about shapes in a social context and debate with our friends about the 'form' of the shapes and what they are called. We gained so much shape knowledge from these experiences! What shapes can you see around you? Lately in our morning meetings, we've been showing our "moves" as a student-initiated connection to our current unit of inquiry. Last week Henry and Frankie began focusing on different jumps. Their friends were inspired and also began showing different jumps. Since then, every day a few students have wanted to show jumps. Henry and Frankie have been calling them "big jumps" or "small jumps". There were disagreements though and different ideas about whether the jumps were big or small. Ms. Alison saw a connection to measurement here and asked the students: How do we know if a jump is big or small? A few opinions were shared, then Daniel suggested that we use the same measuring tape we used to measure our heights. Everyone thought this was a good idea. Ms. Alison proposed that we go outside to measure our jumps and reminded everyone that we could use words like 'long', 'short', 'longer' and 'shorter' to describe the size of jumps. So we all took turns jumping and then marking where we landed in chalk. Once we'd all jumped we compared how far the chalk marks were from the yellow line where we all started jumping and discussed who had jumped 'shorter' or 'longer'. Everyone wanted to know though, Who had the biggest jump? Who had jumped the longest? There were some different ideas about whose chalk line was furthest from the yellow line. Daniel then reminded us that we had the measuring tape to use, so we lined it up to measure each jump. We learned that you have to line up the part of the measuring tape with the '0' with the place you start jumping. Then we looked at the numbers that matched the chalk line representing where we jumped to. Some of us knew the really high numbers that we were seeing. When we compared them we saw that Wilma's number was the biggest which meant she had the 'biggest' or 'longest' jump.
Since this experience we've still been jumping in our Morning Meetings, but are using different words to describe our jumps, like 'long', 'far', 'short', and 'high'....as well as 'big' and 'small'. Frankie is our latest Star Name. With his name we got to practice two letters that were new to us as a class: f and k. We also learned to write one of the most challenging letters in the D'Nealian alphabet...the lower-case k! One of the things we noticed right away about Frankie's name was that he has one of the same sounds as our last Star Name Cameron. Frankie has 'k' in the middle of his name which makes the same sound as 'c' at the start of Cameron. This helped us to think again about how letters can sometimes sound the same as each other and how one letter can even make two different sounds depending on the word it is in. Last week Grade 1YT kindly invited us to join them in their presentation in the whole school assembly. They suggested we sing the song 'If You're Happy and You Know It" which is one that many of us know and love, so of course we said YES! Yesterday we finally had our chance to perform after lots of singing practice in our classroom. Thanks to all the mummies, daddies and little brothers and sisters who came out to support us. We hope you enjoyed the show! When Lucy left her old school in the UK they promised they'd keep in touch. This week she used the app 'ThingLink' to share some photos, videos, and voice recordings about her new classroom and friends. We everyone back in the UK enjoys learning about Lucy's new life in Singapore! This week we journeyed to Somerset MRT and back in two different ways as part of our inquiry into the reasons people move in different ways. Before we left school, we read the story Jonathan Cleaned Up - Then He Heard a Sound by Robert Munsch, which is an imaginative story about subway trains. This led us to sharing and discussing our real-life experience with MRT travel. We completed the first a Harvard Project Zero Thinking Routine called 'I Used to Think, but Now I Think' about what we see at and on the MRT and why people move in this way. When we got back from our trip we completed the 'Now I Think' section, using our recent experiences at the MRT stations and on the trains. On our trip, we had so much fun exploring the busy streets of Singapore again and practicing moving safely by paying attention to road signs, walking on the sidewalks and crossing streets obeying the green and red men and staying in the crosswalk. A highlight of our trip was when we stopped at the skate park and watched some skateboarders move with their skateboards. Emma even asked them a question: "Why do you move like this and do all these tricks?" They gave us a great answer... "It's fun!" When we got back to school we connected this answer to our line of inquiry 'Reasons that we move' and added it to our 'hows, whats, and whys' of movement chart.
With the help of some mummies and daddies we bought tickets to go on the MRT. We put them on a special spot which made them beep and opened the gate for us to go through. Then we traveled even deeper down under ground to get to the trains and used the map to know which train to get on. We knew we wanted to get back to Orchard so we looked for the 'O' on the red line. Soon the train came and we hopped on! We were lucky to all get seats, but noticed that there were no seat belts to keep us from tipping when the train turned. When we got off the train we talked about which way was better to get to Somerset: walking or MRT. We continued the discussion when we got back to our classroom. What is better about walking?
What is better about the MRT?
Which is the better way to get to Somerset?
Our discussions were also supported by drawings we made on two opposite pages of our movement books. One drawing was us walking to Somerset and the other was us taking the MRT back. Two days later during their free play, Henry, Frankie, Daniel, Cameron, and Axel decided to build an MRT. "Somerset MRT!", said Henry!
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