SLEEPOVER is an OVERJOY of FUN and EXCITEMENT

Yearly, Lower Primary organise a sleepover at school. This is to train the students to be independent and responsible when they are away from their homes. It is an overjoy for all of the students to do fun activities with their friends at school. They had dinner together and ate together on a picnic mat. They played scavenger hunt in mixed groups, they looked the Jupiter and Mars using the telescope and of course, they had a thrill doing hide and seek in the dark. The experience is an unforgettable one to all, and surely, they are all looking forward to doing this again next school year. :)

Relationships of Living Things in an Ecosystem

This week, Grade 1s explored the different relationships of living things in an ecosystem and how these relationship influence survival. The symbiotic relationships are predation, parasitism, commensalism, mutualism and competition. after discussing the characteristics of each relationship, Grade 1s used their own words to show understanding and sorted out the pictures to the right relationship.

How do living things make sure that they will survive in the ecosystem? If they were prey, does that mean they will just wait for their time to actually be eaten by their predator? When these teacher questions were raised to them, the students were firm of their NO and explained that some animals can hide from their predators. This led us to learning adaptation skills of different animals and plants. We defined adaptation as the means of living things to adjust to temperature, weather, predators around them and others in order to survive. Some of their adaptation strategies are camouflage, migration, hibernation, using their physical body parts, mimicry and more. To assess how they understand adaptation, Grade 1s were given a challenge. If they were to turn themselves into a newly-found living thing, what features will they want to have in order to survive the ecosystem of their choice. They showed impressive ideas working on this task. Some of them added thorny spike around them so they could drive away small bugs or insects that would want to feed on them. Some added poison as their way to protect themselves from predators. Some covered themselves with colours that will help them camouflage.

Their way of thinking was amazing. It gives us an assurance that in the future, when they face difficult or challenging situations due to the demands of the changes, they will not run out of ideas to use to adapt and adjust to these demands.

Presenting and Sharing our Research Work

After doing a research about their chosen ecosystem, Grade 1s created a visual aid and shared it to thier classmates. During the sharing session, they also took note of the important facts about the other ecosystems and filled out the note-taking chart template handed out to them. We began exploring the different relationships of living things that influence survival. Through the exploration of these relationships, some terms that they remember from their Pre-School unit also come up in the discussion: camouflage, life cycle, and others.

Different Ecosystems

This week, Grade 1s explored the roles of living things in the food chain and how the transfer of energy happens, as well as how was a food chain a cycle. We learned that there are roles shown in the food chain: producers, consumers and decomposers. Consumers are grouped into herbivores, carnivores and herbivores. Grade 1s also explored ecosystem and used this as an official term to use for a community of living and non-living things. In one ecosystem, we learned that biotic and abiotic elements are present. Biotic elements include all the animals and plants that grow in it. Abiotic elements are wind, soil, sunlight, temperature, water (amount of rain, etc. At the end of the week, each child chose one ecosystem s/he finds interesting and created a simple diagram to show its characteristics.

SPORTS DAY!!!

The whole school has been waiting for this event to happen. The Grade 1s have been talking about it since we returned from spring break. Finally, it is here. In this event, the students did a series of activities starting from javelin throw to sprint. They showcased their stamina, endurance and muscle strength through performing challenging physical activities. The students were scored and ranked based on their performance in every activity. The points were collected and totalled in the end. Grade 1s are all winners because they all did their best to complete the challenges. However, these six students, stood out. Girls: Mei, Aika, Kallea Boys: Kai, Yorinobu, Zion. Congratulations everyone!!!