UOI We have been very busy over the last couple of weeks getting stuck into our new unit of inquiry. From now until the end of this semester, we are looking at how inventions have changed the world with a focus on how they have positively and negatively shaped/affected societies. We introduced the new unit through the Lorax whereby the children had to look at how the setting in the story had changed and the perspectives of the different characters. As this unit requires research, we also had a few literacy skills sessions with Mrs Grant, our librarian. She taught the children how to choose the correct books for research, what to look for and she's also taught the class how to search for information using keywords. One of our lines of inquiry is, 'industrialisation.' We introduced this by watching a video of industrialisation as demonstrated in the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. The children spotted the changes straight away and came up with some interesting questions about the process such as: Why were some of the children not going to school? Why were the grass areas/farms destroyed? Who's idea was it to create factories? Prior to watching this video, we had done a little chalk talk activity on some famous inventions to find out if the children recognised the items, if they could make any connections to them and if they had any questions about them. Math Last week, we began our new unit on time. We started off by writing down what some of our worries/challenges regarding time were and we went from there. Over the two weeks, we practiced reading analogue clocks, saying the time, reading digital clocks and working out durations of time. Read what some of the children have to say about time below. Children were working out durations of time during this activity. Sometimes we do a chilli challenge which means that questions range from mild to on fire. Children choose their level of challenge. This gives them ownership and it provides room for them to be reflective. If they are finding their choice too 'hot' they may choose to try a 'less spicy chilli' and if they're finding it too 'mild' they may choose to try questions that are a bit spicier. That will explain the different coloured sheets! - Joyce This activity is called time bingo . In time bingo ,you can pick out five times on the screen you need to read the time it said on the screen and if it has the time you have cross it out.If you have no more times on your paper say bingo. i had fun doing this activity and it was a little hard but fine. When it showed a clock sometimes I could not read the time on it. - Tanisha This activity is called Time loop cards. We took a card and we just try matching the card with the other card by looking at the time picture in our cards and then we say the time and then we look at the bottom part of the card and it will say like, who has 11:30, who has 7:55 and other time. After we found the other card we keep doing it again and again. I really like playing this game, and I feel this game is pretty easy and pretty hard, I learned how to read time even better. At the start of our unit on time, the children wrote their worries/challenges regarding time on the pink post it notes. Yesterday, we spent some time reflecting on what we had written last week and on the orange sticky notes, we shared how we feel about our worries now. Some children even wrote down what they would like to work on next time they study time.
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This week we've been busy creating adverts for our cities! Read below to find out what our ministers have to say and to watch our videos. Newton Government - written by Aubrey, Minzhe, Arwyn and Nina. We made a video and used the green screen app to put pictures in the background so people know what are systems are. We learned how to use the green screen app and we learned how to put videos from camera roll into the green screen app. We enjoyed using the green screen app because we can put pictures and videos together and it makes a video with pictures in the background! House Link City - written by Teddy So we made a video about our city. We were the government, I was leader of transportation. I enjoyed making the video and making our own speech because in my speech I got ideas every 5 seconds. Working in a group was a bit easy and a bit hard. it was easy to help Gordon and Hizuki with spelling but i was the leader so I had to make sure they were on task on the whole time and thought that was hard. Star Government - written by Grace it was fun because we got to learn how to use green screen.it was also hard helping my team mates but i managed. Being the minister of education is hard because in the city i had to make sure all kids have a good learning level. Blue Somerset - written by Ruthu. When we did our city I was the leader. We had to use Atls like corporation. It was really fun because we got to use green screen and we got to find pictures that mach our role. Daily 5 Earlier this week, we spent some time with the K1 class. We went to their classroom to read with them so that they could learn the Daily 5 'read to someone' behaviours. They chose books that they wanted us to read. We had such a great time with them and they really enjoyed listening to different stories. Can you spot any of the 'read to someone' behaviours in the photos below? UOI Over the last few days, we have been designing cities! For our summative task, we have been working in groups to create new cities. We've had to put different systems in place so that people will come and live in our city. Each person in our group is the minister for a different system. We've been thinking about how our system will meet the needs of the different people who live there and how these systems will be funded. Math Because the long jump got cancelled on Sports Day due to rain, we decided to measure how far our grade 3 students could jump. We started off by making predictions and I was very pleased to see the children were using last week's knowledge and made predictions using words such as: feet inches metres centimetres After they wrote their predictions, they went through the process of writing down their equipment and method. We collected a variety of results because some children measured in feet, some used inches, some used centimetres, some used metres and a few used combinations of those units. So...how were we supposed to use this data to figure out how far our students could jump? One of the children decided that we couldn't read from the results we had collected because we had all used different measurements. This led someone else to suggest that we convert to one unit. The agreed unit was centimetres. After converting our results, we put them together and found that the shortest distance covered was 60cm and the longest distance covered was 174cm... Looking at the results, can you guess who these children are and why they got the distance they did? Although we only had two days of school last week, we very very busy indeed! Read below to find out what we've been up to... Author Visit Last Friday, we were lucky enough to be visited by Jeff Kinney, the author of the famous Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. He was very friendly and as well as talking to us about his inspiration for the series he also taught us how to draw the main characters! UOI We are continuing our UOI from before the October break. This week we began to look at our second line of inquiry; transportation. In our initial lesson, we looked at transportation in Singapore through the lenses of our key concepts; connection, function and causation. We also had a chance to write down some questions we had about transportation here. Some of our questions are here: Why is the MRT controlled by a computer? Why does the MRT use machines instead of drivers? How many stops are on the MRT? Math In math last week we began looking at measurements, specifically units of measurement that help us to measure distances and length. We've been carrying out some investigations to introduce us to using feet, metres and cm. Read below to find out more! Investigation on 'is your foot a foot long?' In this investigation we made predictions about what we thought inches and feet looked like. Then we actually got to look at the length of a foot and an inch. Some of our predictions were pretty close but some weren't! We then carried out an investigation to see if our foot is a foot long. We wrote down our predictions, the equipment we would need, method and results. In our conclusions we shared that a foot is actually longer than the length of our feet! Investigation on the length of the classroom. Ms Amin wanted to hang some string up in the classroom but wasn't sure how much she would need. We helped her out by measuring the length of the classroom. Some of us used tape measures, some of us used metre sticks and some of us used 12 inch rulers. On our first attempt lots of us had different results. This showed us that some of us weren't measuring accurately. We talked about the way we measured and realised that some people were leaving gaps between the edges of the rulers or measuring diagonally instead of straight. The second time we tried, our results were a lot closer together. We all learnt that the length of our classroom is 7 feet and approximately 25 cm. We had a wonderful international day just before the break. The performances were enjoyed by all and the workshops that the high school kids had organised were very engaging. Grade 3 took part in a France workshop and an Indonesia Workshop. In the France workshop, the children learnt some facts about France and collated it with information they already knew. They then worked in teams in a Jeopardy style game show quiz. Everyone's competitive side came out and the battle was on! A little while later, the children began a workshop centred around sharks and the people living in Indonesia. They were told a short story about a shark who lived in the water surrounding one of the islands and they also had a go at playing some musical instruments in the style of Indonesian music. To wrap things up, they were taught a simple Indonesian dance. See below for the video. Of course, after the excitement of the morning and the two workshops, I had a bunch of starving children to look after. Luckily, it was time for the International buffet; a buffet that EVERYONE looks forward to! Needless to say, the food was delicious and our bellies were all totally full. International Day 2017 was definitely a huge success. Continuing our work on data handling, this week we conducted our own surveys. We worked through the 4 steps of: - Collecting Data - Recording Data - Organising Data - Interpreting Data Before we began to collect data, we thought about what we would like to find out about our fellow grade 3 peers. Some of us wanted to find out what our favourite books are, our favourite video games, our favourite pets and our favourite colours. Once we had an idea about what we wanted to find out, we learnt about effective questioning. We had to make sure that the question we asked would give us the data we wanted to find out about. We collected our data in ways that suited us individually. Some collected in lists, tables and tallies. Once we had done that, we transferred our data onto cards so that they were easy to manipulate and sort. Categorising our data was the trickiest part as some of our data didn't fit into the categories we had made, some of us created categories that didn't represent our question and some of collected answers that we didn't recognise so we didn't know which categories to put the data into! After solving these small issues, we were able to create pictograms or bar charts to represent our data. Finally, we used phrases like the ones below to help us interpret our data. It was a long process - it took us the whole week! But we had a lot of fun carrying out this inquiry and now that we've been through the whole process we're getting better at handling data! The pictures up there, shows us when we were doing chalk talk about sanitation. We wrote ideas and questions that are connected to our key concepts, connection, causation and function. I liked this work because I had lots of question.
Ms Chloe from the "world toilet organisation" came to our school to talk about sanitation in Singapore. She taught us about the sanitation system. When you flush the toilet your poo goes down to a pipe and then goes to a place where they clean your pee and poo. Written by Tanisha After lots of crossed fingers, Sports Day went ahead! There was a bit of a downpour...we are in Singapore after all, however it didn't get in the way of our fun. We still managed to have a go at javelin, shot put and some of the races. Have a look at the photos below to see if you can spot yourself or someone you know. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to take a photo of all the kids as I was with the Grade 3 girls during shot put and javelin whilst Ms Batlaw was with the boys. During the races I was a track marshall so was unable to take photos of the races too! Therefore, parents and carers, if you have any photos from the day, please email them to me so I can add them to this post! EDIT: Ms Batlaw has shared a few photos of the boys which you can see in the slideshow below. Last week we began our new math unit on Data Handling. We began by collecting data on places we like to eat. The children gave very varied answers but we managed to come up with lots of different ways to categorise the data. Here are some photos below of us trying to sort out the information. One of our students, Gordon, decided to create the categories, 'rice' and 'dessert.' We discovered that although some of us could place our data under these headings, the rest of us couldn't. This lead to a great discussion on how we also needed the categories, 'both' and 'none.' Once we managed to find a place for all of our data, we realised that our original question no longer matched! This led to Gordon creating a new question that would connect to the data. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be creating our own surveys and learning about the importance of creating the right question.
Last week we started our new unit of inquiry; how we organise ourselves. Our lines of inquiry are transportation and sanitation and to start us off we began to think about what we already know about these two words.
Early in the week, 'disaster' struck when we were told there would be no PPU and no school buses! Panicked, the children began to think about how they would get home that afternoon. They started to draw their routes home. Thankfully, they all knew which buses they could take and from which bus stop and some also knew how they could walk home. Mysteriously, before the end of the day, PPU and the school buses managed to sort themselves out and we all got home using our normal route. Phew! |
Hello!We are a group of 8 and 9 year olds who are kind, fun and imaginative! Archives
March 2018
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