#YYCLC Day 174: Grade 1 and Google Presentations

These grade 1 students have been working hard to transfer their research into a Google Presentation (for the first time). So far, we have learned to:

• Create a Google Presentation
• Use Google's Research tool
• Add 'free to use' creative commons licensed pictures and make them full screen
• Add text and manipulate it

#YYCLC Day 157: The Tree Project

Today this Grade 1 class took their learning commons work outside. They have been documenting trees in our playground throughout the year. They noticed there was a big change in the tree over the last month!

#YYCLC Day 121: Lego & Math

The latest craze at Chris Akkerman is hitting the classroom. Grade 1 is working with Lego to represent numbers.

#YYCLC Day 114: Living & Non Living Things

Chris Akkerman students in grade 1 are learning about living and non-living things at the moment. Today they came to the learning commons to talk, visit and observe Bubba the turtle.

#YYCLC Day112: Co-Creating Criteria

This Grade 1 class is co-creating some criteria for making a digital book.

#YYCLC Day 74: Learning about Nutrition

Today our Grade 1 students were learning about healthy eating and nutrition. We had a nutritionist, Jamie, from Food Impact here to help us learn.

#YYCLC Day 17: Learning to Take Photos

Chris Akkerman grade 1 students learning to take photos on iPads before venturing outside to document the trees!

What Do Horses Need?

My grade one class at Guy Weadick School recently completed an inquiry into the needs of plants and animals.  We took a close look at the history, the value, and the role of horses in Alberta!  We were lucky to visit Aggie Days at Stampede Park to meet many domestic horses.  We also had the experience of having Mr. Larry Semchuk, a wildlife photographer come to our class.  Mr. Semchuk wrote a a book on Alberta's wild horses called Running Free: The Wild Horses of Alberta's East Slopes.  

After learning so much about horses, the class was eager to create books.  In groups of three we worked together to write non-fiction books using the iPad App StoryMaker.  This was the first time we used our school's new iPads!  There was lots to learn, but working together to solve problems really helped. Here are some  pages from their books to help you learn about some of the things that Wild and Domestic horses need.

For more information about our inquiry please visit our class inquiry page at 
http://www.makingmyworld.ca/inquiry.html 

Grade 1: Celebrations!

Welcome to our Grade 1 Celebrations!

Over the last two months, all of the grade one students have been learning about Celebrations and Traditions. The students were encouraged to share about a celebration which they participate in, why it is important to them, and explain a tradition (something that they do every year) that they do every year for this celebration. They were asked to present this information to their peers and hopefully bring an artifact (object) to supplement their presentation.

Below, we have explained the learning process from beginning to finish, including the planning, preparation, instruction and assessment of this work in the Learning Commons. Please enjoy.

First we thought of all the celebrations we know.

Then we decided what would be needed for a decent presentation. We came up with the following sentence prompts and practiced with each other. 

We choose to talk about the celebration that was most important to us and filled in the needed information.

We tried to include most of the parents by sending home a form asking them to help fill it out with their child.

While the forms came in with detailed information about student's celebrations, we let others in the school share their celebrations with us. Since the grade three students were doing a similar project about Celebrations and Traditions around the World, we had a few students come in as expert speakers. We also had a grade one teacher share her Mother's Day celebration from Albania with us. 

We then shared our Celebrations and Traditions with each other with the sentence prompts on the SmartBoard in case we forgot what to say. We each brought an object to share that was related to our presentation.

While we were presenting our work to each other, our teachers helped us by asking us questions about our celebrations.  

Sometimes we took breaks and had questions to think about and answer in small groups. We were first asked, "What was the same or different between some of the presentations?" and then we were asked, "What is one thing we learned from a presentation?"