Grade 1 Class Blog

Hi Families!

Last week we were given an amazing opportunity to visit and play with Grade 1 and 2 students at Magic Years International School. During this field trip, we practiced our communication and problem solving skills while working in a group. It was so much fun! We even got to play on the Magic Years playground and visit their classrooms for choice time.

This week we are diving into our inquiry unit and exploring decision making. We will also continue working on writing down our thinking and reasoning, practicing spelling words correctly and writing sentences with spaces between words and capital letters to start. In math we will continue to work with making patterns and organizing data.

Reminders 

PYP Parent Forum

Do you have questions about the PYP? If so, come visit KIS and get your questions answered by Ms. K, our PYP coordinator. This Friday November 30 we will have a parent information forum from 8-9:30am. See the flyer for more information.

PS Parent Forum 301118

A Season of Giving 

You may have noticed the beautiful Christmas tree in the atrium. If you look closely, you will see photos of children who may not have a happy holiday season and need help. If you are in a position to give, please stop by the tree and pick a gift tag. See the letter from Mr. Karl for more information. 

PS_Christmas Giving Letter 2018

Party Time!

Our end of term celebration will be on December 12 from 1-2:30. As a part of our unit on decision making, we are asking the students to help plan our activities during the party. More details to come!

Have a happy week!

-The Grade 1 Team

Hello Families!

 You may have noticed a painted portrait put on your child’s Seesaw account. These portraits are the product of weeks of our hard work! We have been exploring skin tones, paint mixing, vocabulary, and building community in Grade 1. This project has been inspired by Angelica Dass and her project, Humanae.

Please click this link to view her very powerful TED Talk!

We used photos from her project to compare, contrast, and discuss how people all over the world look. As a pre assessment for vocabulary and adjectives, we took a gallery walk to write down words we thought about the pictures we saw.

After that, we worked with a partner to create our skin tones, and began the process of doing our best drawing of our facial features to celebrate the way we look.

The last step was to read and work through the book The Colors of Us by Karen Katz. In this book we were exposed to different adjectives that can be used to describe the wonderful range of skin tones that can be found anywhere we look. We also worked through thinking of adjectives that are positive and uplifting, words that we can be proud of as we talk about ourselves.

Using our new vocabulary, we created our own paint color names and put them on to our portraits. The ending product is one that is personal to us, and inspired by Angelica Dass’ powerful work. If you have seen your child’s work on Seesaw, please leave a compliment or a congratulations! These were hard work, and they turned out spectacularly! Here is a sneak peak of some of the portraits!

Please come to the art room to take a look at our work!

Kind regards,

The Grade 1 Team

Hello Families!

A huge thank you to the parents who helped us celebrate Diwali at school on Friday! We loved learning and celebrating as a community.

Last week we worked with partners to create our skin tones. With our skin tone papers, we have been practicing how to draw ourselves using mirrors, practicing to get our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth to look just like us. Our self portraits are almost complete, and will be on display in the art room. Our work has been helpful in discussing the differences and sameness that we share, helping to cultivate a caring and inclusive community in Grade 1.   This project has been inspired by the work of Angélica Dass, a photographer from Brazil. Please listen to her recent TED Talk to learn more!

Additionally, we have been working on gathering and organizing data. We went to the basketball court to make graphs using our classmates. It was a ton of fun! We also wrote down our “first thinking” about the Learner Profile open minded. Our hope is to compare our first thinking to our thinking at the end of the unit.

Reminders

Grade 1 will be going on our second field trip on Wednesday! We can’t wait to play and learn with Magic Years! Please see the attached letter for more information!

G1 Trip to Magic Years International School

Loy Krathong is Thursday November 22nd! Please see the attached letter for more information.

Loy Kratong 2018 Letter

Have a wonderful week!

-The Grade 1 Team

Hello Families!

Last week we did a ton of learning. While exploring the concept of perspective, we played an “I Spy” game to think about what others can see that we can’t. In connection with art and building a caring community, we explored skin tones of people from all over the world, working to identify and describe the beautiful colors that make up a community. We hope to create portraits this week to show all the colors of us, and how acknowledging and celebrating our differences bring us all together. We also worked to describe our opinion on the “best” room in Grade 1.

This week in language we are continuing to work on letter/sound relationships, working on strategies to help us decode words we don’t know, and identifying problem and solution within a story. In maths we are continuing our work with estimation, counting, and writing, identifying, and building numbers 11-20. Additionally, we are working on gathering data and organizing it in different ways using graphs, tallies and drawings.

Reminders

Please see the attached flyer regarding Diwali Celebrations this Friday, November 16.

PS Diwali Celebrations 2018

We are also preparing for our next field trip. On November 21, Grade 1 will go to Magic Years International School to work with students and “Strive for Understanding”. Please see the attached flyer for more detail.

G1 Trip to Magic Years International School

Finally, in Grade 1 we believe there is no time too early to discuss screen time and internet safety. Please visit this website from Mr. Eric for more information.

Have a happy week!

-The Grade 1 Team

Hello Families!

We hope you had a wonderful weekend and are getting back into routines after October Break. Last week we had a busy and brilliant time in Grade 1! Having a field trip and a Halloween celebration in one week makes for an exciting time. In between events, we did a lot of learning and exploring. In language we worked on writing sentences with capital letters, spaces, and punctuation. In math we began our work on estimation as well as exploring and representing numbers 11-20.

Our field trip to More Than A Game Cafe was amazing! We were able to practice our speaking and listening skills, solve problems together, work as a team, and show our ability to be caring members of a community. We came back with a few new games to play in class as well!

Additionally, we have had support from Ms. June in our request for playground equipment specifically for the Lower School Playground. We are now responsible for using the toys correctly, collecting them at the end of play time, and making sure they are in the right place. Grade 1 is so excited to demonstrate our caring nature by sharing these toys with others and helping younger students use them correctly!

We would like to give a special thanks to the parents who have added their Mother Tongue language to the “How To” writing display in the Art Room! Currently we have English, Chinese, Korean and Thai represented. If you would like to add your language to the display, please stop by!

This week we begin our exploration into perspectives within a community. Our hope is to show that by listening and acknowledging another person’s perspective, we can create a peaceful community in Grade 1. In language we are continuing to work on letter/sound relationships, working on strategies to help us decode words we don’t know, and identifying the beginning, middle, and end of a story. In maths we are continuing our work with estimation, counting, and writing, identifying, and building numbers 11-20.

Have a happy week!

-The Grade 1 Team

Hello Families!

With October Break starting next week, we wanted to remind everyone that November 2 will be a very spooky day at KIS! We will be celebrating Halloween!

Please see the attached poster for more information. The week of break would be a great time to plan and make a costume if so desired.

Halloween1819

Have a safe and happy holiday!

-The Grade 1 Team

We want to say thank you for all parents and families who were able to attend conferences last week! Thank you for spending your time with us! We hope our meetings were helpful and informative.

Last week we focused on the concept of connection. As our unit comes to a close, we are beginning to stretch our thinking to see how our community connects at KIS and beyond. To support this concept, we built a community with our previous homework buildings, building roads with blocks and LEGO to show how each building connects to others and how people can access them. We also worked on drawing connecting lines between people who work at KIS with information that we gathered from our mini field trips, wrote more wonderful “How- To” instructions, and practiced connecting numbers to drawings, groups of objects, and words. It was a busy and wonderful week!

This week we will continue to make connections as we reflect on our field trip and discuss different people and their role in KIS. Our goal is to help everyone understand that each person at KIS helps us learn. For language, we are continuing to work on independent reading and retelling stories using the words Beginning, Middle, and End. We are also continuing our work in maths and number, practicing our ability to show and write numbers in different ways.

We hope you have a wonderful week!

-The Grade 1 Team

In our learning throughout this unit, we have been most interested in making connections between Grade 1 and the rest of the KIS community.

To do this, we went on mini field trips on the KIS campus in small groups and interviewed important people who impact our community. Those people are Ms. Sally, Ms. Linda, Mr. Big, Mr. Sassy and Mr. Sanan, Ms. Ja, Mr. Mike, Mr. Nantapon, and Ms. Nan. After our trip, we wrote down our information and created a poster. We then practiced presenting our poster and explained the ways that important people help us learn.

After we created our posters we presented them as a small group to all of Grade 1. Then, our Grade 10 buddies came to support us and watched us perform in the Audi Box! We were a bit nervous, but did an amazing job!

Here are the videos of our performance.

We are so proud of the presenting skills we have in Grade 1! Way to go everyone!

Hello Families!

First, we would like to say THANK YOU for your support with bringing in reusable bags! We have enough for every student in G1, and we appreciate your support so much!

Last week we had an awesome time on our first House Sports Day of the year! We tried our best on all events and showed we are risk takers in Grade 1. We also had a very special guest in our room, Dr. Puk, who showed us the beginnings of Physical Computing! We hope to do physical computing and coding work with her each week!

This week, we are exploring number by using different materials to represent how many in a set of objects. We are using the concept of connection to think about numbers and gain familiarity in recognizing groups of objects and their amounts.

In language we are working on independent reading and strategies to help us learn new words. We use animals like Lips the Fish (get your mouth ready for the beginning sound) and Eagle Eyes (look at the pictures to help you figure out the word) to help us remember these tricky strategies. In writing we are working on using capital letters at the start of sentences, finger spaces between words, and punctuation at the end of our thoughts. We have been hard on the genre of “How To” writing with Ms. Helen, and our work has been amazing!

In addition, this week we will finalize our learning that took place during our field trip to the secondary school. In our small groups, we will give a presentation to the whole class about the important people we interviewed. We will be using our speaking and listening skills to express our learning to our classmates.

Reminders

Please visit the book fair in the atrium this week! See the attached flyers for more details.

2_PS BookFair Poster (October2018) 1_PS BookFair (October2018)

We hope you have a happy week!

-Grade 1