It is a day or shall I say a week of fun. The children had their photos taken when they were wearing their most creative costumes related to Christmas. They posed confidently and showed their best.
They shared presents, played games and received books from their favourite person every December, Santa Claus.
It is a very cold wintery weather, but the warmth inside their hearts pours over.
A very Merry Christmas to all and a Blessed New Year!!! 🎄❤️🎉
This week, the Grade 1s chose the extinct animal that they would want to research about.
For primary students, researching means finding lots and lots of information about a topic. They mentioned that when they research, they have to read books and watch videos to become knowledgeable.
For them to get a better understanding of research skills, we talked about what researching is and how it is done.
Researching begins with asking questions. Through this, learners would slim down the broad information and categorise facts into groups. Then they will find the best means to collect information. Either they will watch videos or read short texts. It is quite a challenge for them to research using the internet but they have started with baby steps. They can now launch the search engine and type their topics and questions. After getting the information, they record their findings on their research template.
Their research is not done yet for they have to share and present their knowledge they have collected. They are learning to use google slides as their way to present their findings. They are still working on it. Those steps they took will soon turn into big steps.😍
Our unit on Sharing the Planet revolves around the central idea:
"Learning about extinction can help us prevent the loss of the things we value."
The big idea we are exploring are divided into three lines of inquiry:
- what extinctions happened in the past
- natural and man-made causes of extinction
- understanding the impact of extinction in our lives
As the central idea is composed of challenging words, the whole class did a homework of finding out what EXTINCTION means, shared their understanding and came up with simpler terms to define the word.
- Extinction means "the end"
- Extinction means "gone forever"
- Extinction means "totally destroyed"
The learners took a closer look at the central idea and found more challenging words:
prevent
loss
value
The learners asked the help of the school community to unpack the unfamiliar words.
Afterwards, they shared their findings to the class and together we paraphrased the central idea. Now it is easier for grade 1 learners to understand.😊
This week, we officially started with our third unit of inquiry. The current unit goes under the theme of Sharing the Planet, with the focus on extinction.
Looking at the central idea, this unit is quite heavy in terms of the general understanding we would like the students to explore, plus it is full of challenging vocabulary. Indeed, this will require them to do more proper research which most usually might require guidance from adults. 😊
To start with the unit, we unpacked the word EXTINCTION. Their answers were collected and used by the class to simplify the definition of extinction. They came up with the following:
- Extinction means The End.
- Extinction means gone forever.
- Extinction means animals and plants that died will never ever live again.
Grade 1s also shared their perspective on what Sharing the Planet for them is. Most of them thought of environmental problems, ways fo taking care of the Earth, animals, plants and people.
Every week, the class looks forward to watching their classmates share objects that they are fond of. They listen attentively and ask questions in the end. Although there are times that some of them items similar to what others already have brought, still the information that they share about them are different. it is because each one of them have different personal connections to those items. That's what makes their sharing interesting and fun.
For our last day of Show and Tell, the students shared an object that they find interesting. They shared information about their favourite ...
