Friday Fun

This week felt very long and the kids (and I) were exhausted by the end of it. Here are just some of the things we did...

Footsteps
A big part of our week was made up of dance lessons with Footsteps Dance Company culminating in a family picnic on Thursday night when all classes performed. It's a tradition at my school and has proven a fun way to start the year and build a sense of community.

Adjective Mobiles

This week our literacy lessons had a focus on noun phrases:
Understand that nouns represent people, places and things...and that noun groups/phrases can be expanded using articles and adjectives. ACELA1468.
We brainstormed a large list of adjectives and then students wrote these on coloured card. The cards were joined with strips of paper that students had folded zig-zag. these were then hung above students desks as a reference to colour their writing.

Overnight Take Home Book
The concept of noun phrases was introduced to students. We then used this to help us with writing the first two "Who Am I?" clues for our latest overnight take home book. Students were given the prompts:
I am... a cheerful lady.
I have... long, straight, blonde hair.
I like... Lego, riding my bike and sometimes running.
I am good at... doing things on the computer.
Under a flap they completed I am... and drew a picture of themselves.
As this book has flaps we bound it and sent it home rather than using a plastic sleeve folder.

Window by Jeannie Baker
We 'read' this book, looking closely at the details in the pictures and considering how the view through the window changed from one page to the next. We led students to think through the similarities and differences between this book and Uno's Garden by Graeme Base. Both books tell the story of the impact of humans on their environment, and illustrate a beautiful setting, turned bad and then a return to beauty.
Later in the afternoon we returned to the book and provided students with a photocopy of one of the pages from the text. They worked in cooperative pairs to label items from the picture with noun phrases eg. 'Woolly jumper' and then colored the page to be displayed.
This lesson reinforced the idea that images add to the meaning of the text (ACELA1469) and can be used to add detail to characterization, setting and storyline. It also provided an opportunity for students to discuss different texts on a similar topic, identifying similarities and differences between the texts (ACELY1665)

Letter Buddies
This term our writing focus is on letter writing. We began the year with a 'letter to the teacher' and this week started writing to peers. Back in high school, my bestie and I had a letter writing book, and despite the fact that we spent most of the day together and called each other at night, we still felt the need to write letters to each other! Flowing on from this experience, I thought that we could replicate this idea whereby students buddy up with a student from the other class and write letters to each other in a letter writing book. Students loved this idea and enthusiastically wrote to one another, sharing information about themselves and asking questions of the other.

Never Give Up Attitude

One of our values lessons this week was focused on having a never give up attitude. We read the story of Floppy Cat and discussed some of the things that we find challenging. We then set some goals and made some plans for how to achieve these goals. Prue, the teacher I am teaming with this year, designed a fishbone diagram worksheet for students to record their ideas. I am storing these goals in a wall display for students to revisit during the year. In this display the goals are accessible, but still private.

So all said, it was a great week but I'm glad to have the weekend now to recharge the batteries.

Friday Fun

On Fridays I like to reflect on some of the more enjoyable things from the week. In my complete exhaustion it reminds me of the great learning that has taken place during the week and helps to refresh me for the week ahead.

Fun this week:

Advent Calendars - This week we made star advent calendars to count down the days until Christmas. The star was a geometrical pattern and we made colourful links - one for each of the days until Christmas. Children take off one link each day as they count down to Christmas.

"Photoshopping" with Paint - I taught students how to use MSPaint to cut a photo of themselves and paste it onto a background. I saved background files from the Creative Commons Attribute Licence page with a name that referred to the photographer. Students made their new pictures and printed it out with a sentence attributing the background to the flickr artist.

Investigating Capacity in the sandpit - Students paired off and selected a small container and a larger container. They estimated how many sand-loads of the small container would fill the larger container. After 30 minutes of focused 'work', I gave them 15 minutes playtime in the sandpit.

Great Barrier Reef Paintings - We painted an A3 sheet of paper with water colour blues. We then cut out sea creatures from bright coloured paper and glued these onto the background. Students got ideas from a flickr slideshow based on the search "Great Barrier Reef". I also took digital photographs of students pretending to swim and printed these out for students to include in their artwork.

Shivoo - On Thursday night we had our end of year concert - our Shivoo. A stage was set up in the school playground and families brought picnic baskets and picnic rugs to pread out on the lawn for our performances. The classes performed a range of great items to entertain. The Year 1 classes did "On the Good Ship Lollipop" to tie in with our "The Way We Were" unit and "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree" to tie in with our "Are We There Yet?" unit. Once students had finished their performances, they either sat with their parents, or played with their friends. They had a ball! They wrote a journal entry about the night the next day in class.

Heads or Tails - We explored chance through the game of "Heads and Tails" and then students experimented with coins to record the way the coin landed after a number of flips.

Daintree Rainforest - After reading "Where The Forest Meets The Sea" by Jeannie Baker and discussing some facts about the rainforest, students began designing posters to encourage people to look after the Daintree Rainforest without actually writing "Protect the Daintree Rainforest". The challenge I set was to make it look so beautiful that no one would want to harm it. They got a good start to the posters and will finish them next week.