We have had a very interesting couple of weeks of learning together in 1L throughout weeks 3 and 4. We have launched our inquiry project, all about Australian insects and we now also have a class pet, a Rainbow Stag Beetle from tropical Far North Queensland. It's a very pretty beetle that usually lives in the rainforest, we have to make sure that we water its enclosure regularly and keep it nice and warm. Some of the brave lionfish also held the beetle!

As part of the project we will be learning more about cartoon artwork so that we can make our very own Australian insect versions of Pokemon to share with some of our friends overseas. These are some of our initial artworks. It will be interesting to see what creations are to come! 

On Tuesdays we now have EdVenture Time with the other year 1 classes during which we get to rotate through a range of hands on activities. This week in our classroom we built things with LEGO and straws. We had fun working together to make some towers, and Mr. Hewes made Finn from Adventure Time with the help of some creative year 1 students! 

We have also begun our weekly library visits. We get to visit Mrs. Murphy at the library every Wednesday just before recess and we are allowed to borrow two books for the week. When we return them, we can borrow two more. We need to remember to bring our library bags!

During art we started making some ladybugs out of egg cartons. We will finish them off soon and post up the photos when we are finished. This is what they look like so far. Ladybugs have six legs, so they are also insects like some of the other insects we have been learning about through our project. 

We've continued to connect with our friends, the 3B Bees over in Canada. They have been lucky enough to get outside to play so they took some photos of their snow-covered playground and of them playing in the snow. It is very, very cold over in Manitoba at the moment. On Friday, they Skyped us and read us a book titled 'Deep Snow' by Robert Munsch. We enjoyed the book and the two classes have been tweeting many questions to learn more from and about each other, it's been very fun connecting with 3B. This Friday, we will read the book Possum Magic by Mem Fox, we need to start practising so that we can do an excellent job of reading, just like 3B!. We will put more photos of our Skype reading when we are done. There are lots of fantastic things happening with 1L at the moment. Thanks for reading! 

1L have had a wonderful first week of learning together over the last few days. The Lionfish have settled well into our class routines and we have been reading books together, and engaging in a range of writing, maths and art activities. 
Social media plays an important role in our classroom and the Lionfish have enjoyed sharing their activities with people from all over the world through the use of the microblogging platform, Twitter. Below are some of the photos we shared with our friends during a recent lesson on addition.

Our class Weebly has been very engaging for the Lionfish and they have been using their XO laptops to access flash games on the ABC Splash section of our website. More activities will be added to this section of the site so that students can continue to use them in class and also access them at home.

Students have also been using their XOs for blogging. Some of the class have already posted their first entries and have received comments from our friends over in Canada, and also from Mrs. Logan, a teacher friend from Newport Public School on Sydney's Northern Beaches. You can read their posts over on our Kidblog website here: 

http://kidblog.org/1LMEPS/

On Thursday and Friday we connected with a year 3 class from Thompson, Manitoba in Canada. We shared information about our favourite books, local climate, as well as photos of our school playground. We learned that it's very cold over in Canada at the moment, the temperature on Thursday was -46 degrees! 
It's Love to Read Month over in Canada during February so next Wednesday 1LMEPS and the 3BBees are going to Skype each other to say hello before Skyping again later in the month to read each other some books! The Storify of our Twitter conversation is posted below.
What a fun and productive first week of learning it has been, it's going to be an awesome year for the Lionfish! :-)