Raz Kids

Today Mrs. van Rees showed us how to use Raz Kids. It's a home reading program on the computer. We can listen to books, read books and answer questions about the books we read. We can also decorate a room with all the stars we earn when we read!

Go here for Raz Kids: http://www.raz-kids.com/main/Login

(Your child's password was sent home today. Please let Mrs. van Rees know if you need the password again.)

Measuring Length

Our learning goal in Math has recently been to measure length. 

When measuring lengths of objects, we make sure to...

• use the same tool to measure something.

Aiden is only using paperclips to measure his desk.

• make sure that there are no spaces between the tool.

Kailey is putting centicubes right beside each other to measure.

• make sure to start at the beginning of the object and measure all the way to the end.

Jayden made sure to measure the entire length of his desk.

• try and keep a straight line.

Leeya is trying to keep a straight line of erasers to measure.

Following these rules we created, can you measure something at home?

Exploring Measurement

We have been exploring measurement this past week. At the beginning of the week, Mrs. van Rees put out a bunch of measurement tools for us to explore.

We really liked exploring with all the different tools. Some of us explored the balance scales, others filled up buckets with counters and some of us tried measuring ourselves with a metre stick. It was a great way to start our measurement unit by exploring all the different tools we can use to measure.

We Like... Our First Class Book

On Thursday and Friday we created our first class book. One of our words of the week was "like" so we thought we'd write a story about all the things we like. Mrs. van Rees is going to bind the paper book so we can share it at home, but you can also listen and read our story through the movie we made. We used 'Explain Everything' to record our voices. We hope you like our first class book!

Have you Filled a Bucket Today?

Today Mrs. van Rees read the story, Have you Filled a Bucket Today? It's a great book that talks about everyone having an invisible bucket. When our bucket is full we feel good, when it's empty, we feel upset. We want to be bucket fillers by saying nice things and being kind. We need to work hard at not being bucket dippers by being mean or rude. 

After the story, we talked about things we can say to help people feel good. We practiced this by writing each other put ups. It was a great morning of bucket filling!

Welcome!

Welcome to Grade One! We will use our blog to show others what are are doing throughout the year.

Can't wait to share all the exciting adventures of our class with you!

September is Coming!

Hi Boys and Girls,

It's Mrs. van Rees and I'm excited about meeting you in a few days. Hope you are enjoying the last few days of your summer holiday. I have been busy getting our classroom ready for learning and I can't wait to share it with you.

This space will be used for our class blog. Here we will share things we are doing in our classroom with others. Please share our blog with others in your family who would be interested in knowing what we're learning about this year.

Looking forward to learning with you this year!

Teaching Educreations

On Friday afternoon, we went to Miss Campbell's Kindergarten class and became teachers. We taught our Kindergarten friends how to use Educreations. Miss Campbell knew that we had used Educreations in the past and asked Mrs. van Rees if we could come and teach her students. She even called us "Digital Learners"!

We took pictures of things in the room that were big and small and then recorded our voice (or our kindergarten buddy's voice) to explain which object was big and small. Here's a few examples of our work.

Collaborative Writing with Ms. Lirenman's Class in BC

We finished the rest of the "Good News Bad News" stories today! It was such fun to work with another class (on the other side of the country) and create great stories together. Thanks for thinking of the book topic, Ms. Lirenman's class!

Here are the rest of the videos:

Make sure to check out our previous post for the other 2 stories.

Good News Bad News Stories with Ms. Lirenman's Class

GOOD NEWS, we are starting to finish our "Good News Bad News"collaborative stories.

BAD NEWS, you can only watch 2 stories so far.

GOOD NEWS, the rest will be finished soon.

We'd love for you to watch/read our stories below. These stories are illustrated by Ms. Lirenman's class (in British Columbia) and the words (and title page) were written by us.

GOOD NEWS, Ms. Lirenman's class has finished their stories. You can watch/read them all here. In her stories, we created all the pictures and her class wrote the words.

Stay tuned for 5 more stories written by us. Hopefully they'll be up on our blog soon!

Good News Bad News Writing Project

We have been working hard on an iPad writing project with Ms. Lirenman Grade One class from British Columbia. Our stories are based on the ideas from the book, "Good News, Bad News" by Jeff Mack. Both classes created pictures using iPads and then put them into a dropbox account. Mrs. van Rees downloaded Ms. Lirenman's class' pictures into the Photo Library on the iPad and we put them into iMovie and put words to the story.

Mrs. Lirenman's Grade Ones writing words for our pictures!

We are just finishing the final pages of the stories, then we'll put them onto our blogs. Mrs. Lirenman's class has finished some of their books. You can read them here:

Good News, Bad News: Story 1

Good News, Bad News: Story 2

Stay tuned for more 'Good News, Bad News' stories!

Building a Community

This week we built our own community on the floor of our classroom. Mrs. van Rees put tape on the floor for roads and we did the rest. We brainstormed different things a community needs and then each of us took a specific thing to create. Slowly our community started to look like a real (flat) community. Once we had buildings, we added in things like grass, parking lots, cars, stop lights, bridges, even closed roads due to construction.

Getting started!

Putting it together.

Placing the building in just the right spot in the community.

We've been really working together on this project. Today we blogged about it. Mrs. van Rees took pictures of different areas of the community we were interested in and we uploaded the pictures ourselves. Mrs. van Rees was super proud of how independent we are becoming in our blogs. You can read about community here on our blogs.

Our community!

Playing with Money

We have been learning about money lately. Our learning goals were to know how much each coin is worth and adding coins together up to 20¢.

Mrs. van Rees thought up the idea to create a store. We found items in the class and put different price tags on them. Then we pretended to be the store owner and the shoppers. It was a lot of fun buying and selling different items, but we also doing MATH at the same time!

Today we created "receipts" of the items we bought. Mrs. van Rees was the store owner and we had to give her the money. Once we paid, we filled in a sheet that was like a receipt to show how much we paid and how we paid it. Playing store and using money has been a great way to understand money and having fun while doing it!

We are Writers!

Mrs. van Rees read the book, "Library Mouse" by Daniel Kirk a few weeks ago. We loved it! It is about a mouse named Sam who lives in the children's section of a library. Sam loves to read. One day he decides to write a book. He knows that all good authors write about what they know, so he wrote a book about himself. When he was done, he added it to the collection of books in the library and the next day the children found it and read it. This happens a few times in the library and the children become so curious to find out who the author is, they ask Sam to show himself to them. Instead, Sam creates small "mouse-sized" books and "mouse-sized" pencils and allows the children to see themselves as writers and gets them writing. Mrs. van Rees made us "mouse-sized" books and "mouse-sized" pencils and we were able to start writing our stories. This has been such a fun way to write! We have been writing ghost stories, stories about our families, stories about our favourite sports and so many more!

Building Structures

We have been collecting various sizes of boxes and paper towel rolls for the past week and today we got to build structures! Mrs. van Rees first had us draw a "blue print" of our structure and then today we were trying to build our structure to match. We learned that some of us had to change our initial drawing, as it couldn't be made as easily. We had such a great time building today. Here are a few pictures of our structures as we were creating today.

Flat Stanley

We finished reading the book "Flat Stanley" by Jeff Brown. If you're not familiar with the story, the main character, Stanley gets flattened by a bulletin board that falls on top of him while he is sleeping. Luckily, he wasn't hurt - just flattened! Later in the story, Stanley visits some friends in California by mailing himself in an envelope. After a nice visit, his friends send Stanley back to his family with some pictures and descriptions of his trip. From this part of the story, we got the idea to create our very own Flat Stanley to send away for an adventure of his very own! Mrs. van Rees created a blog where others can tell us about Stanley's adventures and include pictures too. Our friends and family can also send in paper copies of their adventures instead - it's up to them.


We'd love for you to check out our Flat Stanley blog! You can read all about his adventures here.

Objects and Materials Inquiry

Last week we started a new inquiry on objects and materials. We started by getting time to explore different materials and objects Mrs. van Rees put around the room. We asked lots of questions and enjoyed playing with the objects. They all felt different and smelled different too. Some were hard, some were soft. Then we looked at a book about materials and most of the class was interested in metal or wood. Today we did some research about wood and metal. We wrote down some important facts about the materials and asked lots of questions too. We started thinking of lots of objects made from these 2 materials. I think we're going to make lists of all the things we know later this week. Keep posted to see all the learning we're doing with 'objects and materials'.

100th Day of School!

Today we are 100 days smarter - we celebrated the 100th day of Grade One! Some of us brought in 100 items to count and show to others. We know that if you put 10 items into 10 groups, you make 100. See our pictures below!

On Twitter, Mrs. van Rees found that that there were other classes that was celebrating 100's day too. A Grade 1 class from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan were trying to get 100 tweets for 100's day by tweeting out their 100th day stories and items. We followed along using the hashtag #100storiesof100 and added our pictures and stories too.

We made lists of different things in our classroom. We made 10 different lists of 10 things - that way we had a list of 100 things altogether!

We also tried to find out how many times our names could be written in a hundreds chart. It was fun writing our name so many times, but it was tricky counting how many times we actually wrote it.

Did your class or will your class celebrate the 100th day of school? If so, we'd love to hear about it!