To begin our latest project, we went on a bus ride over to Buffalo Creek last Tuesday to visit @FieldOfMarsEEC. It was a fun day and we engaged in a range of cool activities to learn all about the creatures that live among the shorelines, mangroves and surrounding bushland of Buffalo Creek.

You can see our project outline below.

After arriving on the bus, we started our excursion by meeting our friendly guide, Laura and taking a walk along a boardwalk surrounded by a muddy shoreline and lots of mangrove trees. Laura told us that it was high tide and that it would be hard for us to find the crabs that lived there because the water was too high. She also said that if we were quiet whilst walking, it would be easier for us to see what crabs were still around.

We stopped and Laura told us to look around to see all of the shiny spider webs that were hanging between all of the trees. She showed us some holes in the trees and explained that they were called 'hollows'. Laura said that spiders and other small animals like birds and lizards liked to use these hollows for shelter and that birds hunt here for spiders to eat.

We kept walking and went high up into some bushland where there were lots of dry leaves on the ground. Laura explained that all of this was called leaf litter and that the local creatures also use this for sheltering and living in. She said that if small insects or animals were scared about being eaten by larger animals or birds, they could hide under the leaves to make themselves safer.

After walking for a while longer, we stopped underneath a tree to look up at what looked like a bird's nest. Laura told us that what we were looking at was actually the home of a ring-tailed possum. She told us that possum homes are called dreys. 

There was so much to see in this lovely, natural environment that we found it really hard to fit everything in. We stopped to look at tadpoles in small rock ponds, we looked for more crabs along the shores of the river. 

We also went on a bug hunt using small, soft brushes called 'ticklers' to put all of the creatures we could find into specimen jars and look at all of their similarities and differences.

Below you can see a photo of us on our excursion with our cool guide Laura. 

We had loads of fun and will keep you posted as we work our way through our brand new project about looking after the environment.

Thanks for reading!

We have a cool application installed on our XOs which we have been using to demonstrate our learning. Lensoo allows us to create simple drawings using our XOs, add text boxes and overlay audio recordings to show what we are doing.

We are all at different stages in our learning and we love sharing what we are up to. You can view some of our recent creations by clicking the images below.

Thanks for watching!

We were responsible for the assembly item at school today. We have been learning about the months of the year and the seasons, so we decided to put on a performance for the school by singing The Months of the Year Song. 

We got super creative by making costumes and props for our performance. We had crab costumes and a beach scene for summer, some hats with sticks and brown leaves on them and some fallen leaves on a backdrop for autumn. We made a white winter backdrop with white paint and cotton wool for winter and some green hats with a rainbow, sun and flowery backdrop for spring.

We practised, practised and practised our song and we arranged for different kids to come out at different times as we sang the song. after everybody was on stage, we sang the song together quite quickly and a bit like a rock song. We even had some kids in the audience join in. It was lots of fun and Mr. Hewes told us that we were rock stars!

You can view a video of our performance below along with some photos of our preparations.

We have finished our MinecraftEdu buildings for Lionfish City and made some awesome screencasts to show all of our hard work. We had seven teams who built seven different buildings all with their own unique designs.
 
Mr. Hewes gave each team a plot of land and laid the foundations for our buildings, from there we had to build the rest of the buildings and include the things that we said we would need in our plans. These are some of the design features that we included:

The shops needed big windows and signs.
The house needed a triangular roof.
The school needed a playground. 
The hospital needed a car park and helipad.
The post office needed letterboxes.
The offices needed spaces for tables, chairs and computers.

Some of the buildings like the school, office and hospital are really big and Mr. Hewes had to help us with the design process. For this, he placed a row of windows on each wall for us to copy when building the walls to make sure they were all uniform.

The other tricky design that Mr. Hewes started for us to copy was the roads, which are seven blocks wide, with white wool lane markers in the middle. It was the special job of some of the builders to go around and complete the streets in the correct pattern after they had finished their buildings. 

The helipad was really hard to figure out, so Mr. Hewes put that onto the roof of Lionfish City Hospital for The Rainbow Stars once they had finished. 

It was a really cool project and we all learned some excellent skills in collaboration as we all shared our individual strengths to help everybody get their job done.

You can see our screencasts embedded below!

We hope you enjoyed our videos. Thanks for watching!

Recently we sent our Minecraft building plans to our friends over at HWPS. It was a good chance for us to revise some of the things we've been learning and practise our writing and speaking skills. 

65 Midnight, as our buddies are known, are also building away and have given us some information about what they are doing. You can see their video below. We are so lucky to be collaborating with kids from other schools and learning similar things. 

Go 65 Midnight! 

Last week we finished our building proposals and made our videos for HWPS. Below you can see our video with all of our building designs. We can't wait to start building them and making our Minecraft movies. We hope you like our video and look forward to the helpful feedback from HWPS! 

The Purple Spiders' blog post is here!

Below you can see some photos of our proposed designs. They are also in the video.

Above is the driving question and project outline for this term's project-based learning. We are learning all about places and spaces and how the different purposes of different buildings affect their designs. 
We have been for a walk around Merrylands to look all at all the different buildings and their design features and we have decided in our teams which building we would like to build using the sandbox video game, Minecraft. One of our proposed building designs is below.

As part of the project, we have to send these pictures, along with our proposed design features to stage 3 kids from Homebush West Public School, who will give us feedback and some suggested changes. In a way, they are acting as our City Council.
Most of us have decided to make a video presentation for HWPS with our team, but one group, The Purple Spiders, have decided to blog their proposal instead. They have decided to make a post office and the design feature which makes post offices different from other buildings can be seen in the diagram labelled 'Front' in the picture above. Post offices need a lot of little letter boxes so that people can collect their letters. 

Here is The Purple Spiders' blog post! 

We have also made a video introduction for HWPS and uploaded it to our YouTube channel. On Monday we will be uploading a new video with the rest of our building proposals for HWPS, along with our proposed building diagrams. In the meantime, you can see our introductory video embedded below. Thanks for watching!

The last few weeks have been very busy for 1L, with lots of eciting things happening in class.

We have continued our Skype sessions with the 3B Bees in Canada, reading them Possum Magic by Mem Fox and having a question and answer session about our Edventure Time and their Maker Time. After the book reading, we had a joint 'Tim Tam Slam'. This is when you bite both ends off of a Tim Tam biscuit and suck milk through it, like a straw! It was great fun to be eating delicious treats and sharing the experience with students and teachers on the other side of the world!

We have been engaging in a lot of hands on activities during our maths lessons, such as dice games, using geoboards to create 2D shapes and blocks and counters to show place value. We have also joined the 3B Bees 'math photo a day' Instagram challenge for which you upload a maths related photo every day. Some of our photos are below. 

Mr. Hewes has brought in a tent which looks like a castle, which we call the Quiet Castle. Each day a different group uses the Quiet Castle for reading groups and other classroom activities. We LOVE the Quiet Castle, although at times it does become the noisy castle! During reading groups some of us have also started using Storybird to create stories based on artworks made by real artists. The introduction to one of our stories is below. It is a cool story about an angry and upset vampire girl!

We have continued our project-based learning around bugs, finishing our ladybug craft and practising our cartoon drawing. We 'think, pair, shared' and have all chosen which insect we will be putting onto our final blog post to share with our friends overseas.
Our project is so exciting that Mr. Nick came running into our class the other day with a praying mantis! We have put her into our terrarium with Trevor the beetle and have been feeding her all sorts of things like ladybugs, crickets and even daddy long legs spiders. She ate 9 spiders in the space of a day! She is getting a very fat belly! After putting the call out on Twitter and Instagram, we have decided to name her Frances, so we now have Trevor the Beetle and Frances the Mantis.
Mr. Hewes has also caught us some antlions and we love to catch ants for them to eat. We have many helpers who like to catch ants with us at recess and feed our antlions. We put a video up on our class Instagram gallery with some of the lionfish students explaining what antlions do and how they feed. They are a gruesome predator! Some of us have chosen to draw and write about the antlion as part of #ProjectPokemon, because there are really no 'how to' pages on cartoon antlions, we decided to put a mane around a cartoon ant. 'Ant' 'lion', get it? :-)

Edventure Time and Developmental Play has continued on Tuesday and Friday afternoons and we have been making some really cool things. We have been building a wooden castle and colouring in circus and fairy artworks. We have also started to create craft flowers and dragonflies using pipe cleaners, glue and pom poms. We also have some Minecraft mini LEGO called The Village. To make The Village, you have to follow the photo instructions, work together and go step by step. You also need to keep all of the pieces well organised so that you don't lose any. Losing just one piece will mean that we can't complete the building. It's actually made for kids much older than us at 10+, but we like the challenge. It's going to take us several weeks to build! 

We have recently updated our XOs to the latest Android Operating System and given ourselves new avatars. The new system will be great, with lots of new apps installed and better browsing for when we access our Weebly site and blogs at school, plus our new avatars are really awesome!

Finally, we have a massive dragonfly hanging above our reading and bloggers corner and it looks like it's flying!!! 

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! :-)