Mixing it Up

This term we have been learning all about the properties of materials and what happens to them when they undergo change.

We have been using the scientific method to observe, question and hypothesise what will happen to materials when they are changed.

We investigated how various mixtures would change when different materials were added to them during a test. Does the ingredient mix, settle or float when added to water?

We made some interesting observations which have left us questioning and wondering why some materials react in different ways.

Why does oil float on top of water and can it ever mix together?

Why does sand settle?

Why does adding detergent make the mixture all bubbly?

Let us persuade you

This term 1V are learning all about persuasive texts and the purpose they serve. Through picture books students are learning that persuasive texts seek to convince the audience of an argument or point of view using persuasive devices.

We read the story The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. This book is very cleverly written in letter format from the crayons’ point of view. This story provided much inspiration and led to many discussions and think-pair-share activities in which 1V students were required to give their opinions including reasoning, on a number of issues.

Students are also learning to write using language features that help a text serve its purpose. They have been provided with opportunities to learn about and explore modality and emotive language, all in an attempt to convince the reader of their point of view.

After reading the Day the Crayons Quit, everyone in 1V chose the coloured crayon they feel is the best and the colour they would miss most. Students wrote a persuasive text to convince the audience giving reasons as to why that coloured crayon should stay.

As a follow up activity students chose another disgruntled stationery item that was ready to quit. They then imagined themselves as that item and wrote letters to their owners expressing their concerns and point of view. Students then published their letters in Google Docs, learning word processing skills, how to change font, size and colour, insert images and change the background colours in a document.

Click on the links to read students’ letters.

Violet

Lilly

Zachy

Oliver

Jackson

Nikita

Xavier

Shayla

Skyla

Joshua J

Emma

Matthew

Grace

Joshua D

Great job 1V!

You have certainly done a wonderful job persuading your teacher.

Have they managed to persuade you too?

What is a scientist?

You may be interested to know that the 1V students really engage with science. Throughout the year it has been quite intriguing to see their eyes light up and see how excited they become at the mere mention of scientific inquiry and investigation.

This term is no exception as we will be exploring materials and mixtures through our unit, Material World. We are going to be applying the scientific method to discover and identify ways that everyday materials can be physically changed and combined for differing purposes.

As an introduction to the unit, I posed the question- What is a scientist?

Click below to hear their the responses.

What do you think a scientist is?

I then introduced the class to Ada Twist. 1V students were excited to discover that Ada was in fact a classmate of the ever popular Rosie Revere, who we had met earlier in the year. As we discovered, Ada is a budding scientist with a boundless imagination and is full of curiosity.

Ada’s boundless curiosity has certainly inspired 1V too!

We can’t wait to experiment with some of the materials that are all around us on a daily basis and investigate the properties that enable them to be used for differing purposes.

SPLASH!

The sun was shining brightly today as the eager little 1V fishies made a splash for the first time in the school pool.

There was much excitement and the consensus is that they can’t wait to do it all again next week.

Everyone did such a tremendous job and they are bound to be SUPER fish by the end of the term.

Computational Thinking

Computational thinking is vital in today’s world. Being able to both formulate a problem and also logically think through to arrive at a computational solution is a necessary skill.

In 1V we have been working on a number of learning activities to better develop our computational thought processes. I say we, because this is a relatively new concept for both myself and the students. We are working on both “unplugged” and “plugged” activities during learning time and the students are just loving it! The level of student engagement is unbelievable and many students are showing a real aptitude at computational thinking.

Students have programmed Bee-Bots to successfully travel from one point to another on the mats. We also created mazes and then programmed the Bee-Bots to travel through from start to finish.

We also enjoyed using the Bee-Bot program on the computer to program the Bee-Bots through the ready-made mazes and challenges that students had created.

1V is also loving using Code.Org too! Students are working through the self-paced activities, creating programs to solve problems. The best thing is listening to the cheers of the students when their coding solves the problem. Just look at that concentration.

What “Busy Bees” 1V are. Such a bunch of  SUPERSTARS!

Beautiful Bridges- Monet style

As a culmination to our study on bridges we looked at another artist who was famous for his impressionist style paintings. 1V students had previously studied van Gogh but this time students gained an insight into how Monet used light, shadows, reflections and colour in his paintings. We learnt so many facts about the artist and his style of painting through watching this lovely Inventing Impressionism film.

Monet’s well-known painting Water Lily Pond was chosen as inspiration for our own artworks. The stunning scene and elegant Japanese style arch bridge were perfect subjects for students to dabble with art perspective.

The students used oil pastels to draw their bridges and water lilies, concentrating on the main features and their sizing to create perspective. They then used Edicol dye colours to create a magical watery background.

Their beautiful artworks depict a sense of peaceful serenity and hang proudly in the 1V classroom.

 

Our Working Community

IV spent time investigating how communities work together to function efficiently. They discovered that each person has different roles and responsibilities they need to undertake in order for everything to run harmoniously. If one person lets the team down then unfortunately this could lead to problems.

Students discovered how they themselves are part of many different communities. They are part of their family community and also part of their school community. Every person in each of these communities (including themselves) has an important role to play and responsibilities they need to uphold. Students might need to help out with chores at home or be a classroom helper to help those communities function smoothly.

They investigated the roles and responsibilities that their parents and volunteers are required to undertake within the working community. They discovered the ways in which workers undertake their chosen careers in order to provide a service to our society and help it run more efficiently.

We were also lucky enough to have a group of parents and friends of 1V who came to our classroom to talk and answer questions about their careers and the roles and responsibilities they have in their jobs.

1V students were intrigued to hear from parents and friends of 1V who are eye doctors, marketing specialists, business entrepreneurs, acupuncturists, loss prevention engineers and train drivers. We certainly learnt many new things and I am sure that you may have just inspired some students to also pursue a career in your chosen field.

A massive THANK YOU to everyone who came along to talk to 1V. Your talks were amazing and the effort you put into your presentations was phenomenal.

 

Bridging our Communities

In real communities we are constantly faced with challenges and a team of workers is employed to come up with solutions to these problems. We were faced with such an issue in our 1V community. The 1V river was flowing strongly right between our urban and suburban communities. How were we going to safely cross to the other side? What would be the most appropriate product to solve this problem?

We contemplated relying on ferries but decided that this was not the most efficient way for people or goods to cross from one community to another.

The solution….

A BRIDGE

But what type of bridge would we need? Are all bridges created equally?

The 1V students were excited about using the engineering process to design and construct their own bridge that would be able to span the 1V river and be strong enough to transport people and vehicles to the other side.

Students were firstly required to use their prior knowledge about bridges to design a structure that they thought would be suitable for the job. The design criteria was that their bridge structures were to be made only of 30 plastic straws and masking tape. Their finished designs had to be at least one straw length long and half a straw length high off the table. Their designs were not allowed to be secured to the table and had to be able to hold some Unifix cubes.

Designing our bridges

Designing our bridgees

They then set to work building their prototype #1. They had about 40 minutes to engineer their designs and this was challenging. Many students had some good ideas and had started building their designs. Unfortunately at the end of the time there weren’t any structures that held any Unifix cubes.  We were (mostly) deflated but certainly not deterred.

What could we do? We decided that we would need to re-think our designs and see if we could devise a way to make our straw bridges stronger.

Re-thinking our designs

Altering our initial designs

It was time to build prototype #2. The design brief was the same but this time we were a little more successful with building. Quite a few students still found this challenging but some managed to build bridges that were able to actually hold some Unifix cubes. There was excitement in the room! Could we make them even stronger?

We were well on the way to becoming “real” engineers. After a further re-think of our designs, it was then time to build prototype #3.  This was such an amazing session with some fabulous results. Quite a few bridges even held 30 or more Unifix cubes!

It was so encouraging to see many students who had battled with the design challenge process, persevere to finally construct a bridge that worked.

What a wonderfully rewarding experience and such a proud achievement!

We even had a real-life civil engineer who builds bridges come and talk to all of the year 1 and 2 classes about the engineering process of “real” bridge building. He then visited our classroom to view our own straw bridges. He was suitably impressed with our work.

Thank you for visiting, Mr Bent!

Hand in hand with our bridge engineering, 1V students were also working throughout the term on an inquiry-based learning project about bridges. They devised their own inquiry questions about bridges which would help them with their own bridge designs. They worked in teams to investigate the types of  bridges that have been constructed all across the world. They discovered that bridges have different features which enable them to be stronger or more suited for a particular environment. This understanding of the engineering process of “real life” bridges assisted the 1V students with the design and building of each of their own straw bridge prototypes.

What engineering extraordinaires we have in 1V!

Community Planners

The community planners have been hard at work in 1V.

After brainstorming what they thought the  needs of differing communities were, our 1V planners set to work in their groups to collaboratively design a map of their own urban, suburban or rural community.

We learnt about what a bird’s-eye view is and looked at Google Maps to gain a greater insight into what maps actually look like once constructed. It was pretty cool to zoom in on our school and see it from above-just like a bird would! We discovered that maps are created primarily of 2D shapes and noted these when looking at the differing views in Google Maps. We were ready for the challenge…

Our finished maps

Urban

Suburban

Rural

Working together as a part of a team is a necessary life skill and each and every 1V student is learning how to work cooperatively as a valued team member.

Together

Everyone

Achieves

More

What a 1V community effort!

Our next challenge-

How will we cross that river to get from one community to another?

Can you reuse that?

Today 1V had the opportunity to go on an excursion to Reverse Garbage at Marrickville. It is an environmental co-operative that is committed to promoting sustainability through the reuse of resources. We discovered a wonderful treasure trove of goodies that would have otherwise ended up in landfill. In fact- they throw NOTHING away! Everything there gets reused.

It was an action packed day. The students enjoyed taking a tour of the factory where they spent time uncovering a vast array of products that had been saved from landfill. What a collection there was! Plastic lids, mannequins, table legs, fabric, furniture, sewing machines, coat hangers, even a HUGE red heart and dinosaur were just a few of the products to be seen. Students were kept busy with a challenge that required them to work in pairs to locate as many different products as they could within the factory and record them on their worksheets.

Students were also involved in a whole class design challenge which required them to work collaboratively to design a bridge from a given set of products. The whole class worked together to design and construct the 1V Swans Bridge. What fun we had and our bridge was pretty amazing too!

The last challenge was to work in teams to build a 3D Big Box City. Each group of students was given a particular building in the urban community that they had to design and recreate out of recyclable materials. The tricky part was that there was no sticky tape or glue! So they had to become quite creative in how they designed and constructed their building. The buildings were all then placed together to become the BIG BOX CITY.

It sure was a very productive day and students now have a greater awareness and understanding of how important it is to reuse products and the benefits it has for our community and the environment.

So before you throw something away think about whether you might be able to REUSE it!

A huge thanks to Max’s mum and Jack’s mum for their assistance today on the excursion.