10 Great Things to Talk About

Why does it seem that the short weeks are the busiest weeks?  Everyone return from the Victoria Day long weekend feeling refreshed and ready for the final stretch.

  1. All students have received a calendar for the events and deadlines for the next 5 weeks.  The cut off for writing math tests, deadlines for Model UN and upcoming yearend activities are all listed.
  2. This week two students from the Best Secondary Model UN Club came over and talked with us about how Model UN works, their experience participating in other Model UNs.  We’ve been writing position papers for the countries we are representing about either Access to Medicine, Gender and Science, Sustainable Tourism or Internation Migration.
  3. We also started our Shakespeare unit!  Ms. Moody gave us an entertaining introduction to William Shakespeare – even including a rap! We got an overview of his life and the context he wrote in.  And now we are looking for quotes.  Ms. Moody and Ms. Abbot have booked Bard in the Classroom for June and we are looking forward to playing with “A Midsummer Nights Dream”.
  4. The final trades and calculations are being made as we get our NHL teams under the salary cap for the 2013-14 season.  Lots of data analysizing and graphing underway right now.  Final teams will be unveiled on Monday, when our student GM’s reveal their rosters.
  5. We also showed our Yellow Team Spirit on the Mini We Day / Spirit Day this week.  We watched some videos about the diamond conflicts in Africa, about people who have overcome real difficulties and made the impossible possible, and about water around the world.  We played games for Spirit points and then competed in the Finals during the Spirit Assembly.  Yellow Team tied for first in the 6-person skiing event and in the marshmallow challenge.  We also showed EPIC Yellow creativity in our creation of an outfit for Ms. Rogan.
  6. While we were working on our Model UN preparations, we realized it was International Day for Biodiversity and this year they were honoring the year of Water Cooperation.  We checked out some of the resources online about some of the water quality and water security issues around the world.
  7. Ms. Abbot’s class listened to the first couple chapters on Alexandra Horowitz’s book “On Looking” and went out to observe our every day surroundings.  We started with a 1 minute walk outside and wrote a paragraph about it.  Then we walked our street and wrote a longer composition about what we saw.   Horowitz takes different experts with her on walks around the block and comments about the different ways that people pay attention to what is important to them.
  8. The Rugby Teams were in action again this week.  Guitar Club continues at lunch once a week.  Spirit Squad was busy prepping Spirit Day and getting ready for Crazy Sock Day next week. Band and Choir continue with concerts coming up in June.
  9. We are still in Art and Home Ec for our explorations.  And we are still doing Badminton and Football in PE.
  10. Some of our students have been out this week for competitions in dance, bagpiping and for Odyssey of the Mind.  We wish you all well in your adventures and look forward to hearing about them when you are back at school.

And to end with our poet du jour –

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: (Sonnet 18)

10 Great Things to Talk About

We’ve been so busy that somehow two weeks flew by, so this is our ten great things from the past two weeks.

1. We went to see Beauty and the Beast at Charles Best.  “It was awesome!” “It was so good!”  “They had great props and set and very very cool.”  As you can see, we were very impressed with the presentation.  Kudos to the cast and crew.

2. Some students attended a session on Friday at Evergreen called Clay 2013. Students had the chance to see works by the Members of the Fraser Valley Potters Guild (FVPG).  This is annual juried exhibition including burnished pit-fired earthenware, raku, electric, gas and wood-fired stoneware and electric-fired crystalline porcelains. We designed and built a vase or a pot inspired by natural forms. We used two techniques coil and slab work.

3. In PE, we have gotten back onto our schedule after several weeks of interruptions and weather delays.  Students are doing a mini-unit on football and then on badminton.  Students were able to self-select the unit they wanted to start with and they will have the opportunity to do the second unit in a couple of weeks.  Several students have been excited to learn the rules of football and several other students have been thrilled to have more time playing badminton.

4. Zooming in with Ms. Trieu – Ms. Abbot’s class completed a couple of lessons with Ms. Trieu on non-fiction reading comprehension.  We learned the zooming in strategy from “Reading Power”  by Adrienne Gear.  Ms. Trieu brought in newspapers in different languages and we had to look at the layout and features of the paper to try to figure out what the stories were about.  Some of the features that we noticed were heading and subtitles, blod face type, underlined, pictures and visuals, captions, coloured text and information in chunks.  We explained what we learned to Ms. Moody’s class and designed our own textbook pages for the countries we are representing for the Model UN.

5. Ms. Abbot and Ms. Moody have introduced the Model UN topics for this year.  We are looking at Internation Migration, Gender and Science, Sustainable Tourism and Access to Medication. Students were randomly assigned countries based on the issue/topic they were interested in.  Each student is working with a partner and has developed a textbook page about their country.  Students brainstormed a list of topics to be included on the page and Ms. Abbot added the expectations for text features.

6. Ms. Moody loves her hockey.  We are all thinking about changes that NHL teams might need to make to reach to salary cap for next year, so she designed a project – Hockey Data Analysis.  We each are the GM for a NHL team and we are looking at the regular season stats for our teams.  “This is real life and real statistics,” said a student.

7. Throughout the past several weeks, Ms. Moody and Ms. Abbot have been introducing us to different types of poetry and different poetic devices.  We looked at free verse this week and had a chance to try our hand at writing.  We are collection our works onto a website, the MACC Journal of Writing.  The website will be available and public soon.

8. Ms. Moody’s class has been working on science.  We did a lab on density and buoyancy.  “We learned that if they are more dense, they are less buoyant,” said Maggie and Christine.  “We floated balls, pennies, onions in water, coke, orange juice,” they said.

9. We finished up designing our own country set in an extreme environment.  We presented in continent groups based on where we set our country.  This let us demonstrate some of the alliances we formed with other countries and trade relationships.

10.  Ms. Abbot and Ms. Moody are teaching several students in small groups to focus in on specific units and concepts that students need to master before the end of the school year.  Our groupings have been shuffled, so some of us are working in a different classroom right now or with some different students.

SUMMER POSSIBILITIES in Our Area 2013

Jabber-Wacky www.odysseybc.ca Offering kids a chance to be totally creative including making things that go zoom, building towers from balsa wood, exploring inventions and making prototypes

Mindstein www.mindstein.ca Strategy-thinking puzzles and games, critical thinking strategies, generating many ideas and finding new ways to think for children in grades K-7

Think Tank Challenge Center www.thinktankchallengecenter.com -innovation and problem solving in a cooperative group setting

Legomation & MORE at Heritage Woods in Coquitlam www.mediafinearts.com

SFU Summer Camps http://www.sfu.ca/camps.html or www.sfu.ca/recreation

Evergreen Cultural Center: SUMMER CAMPS GALORE! A terrific line-up of camps for 7-18 year-olds, running in July and August READ MORE  http://www.evergreenculturalcentre.ca/Programs/Summer+Camps/default.htm

Place des arts Art Center and Music School – Inspire the artist in you! http://www.placedesarts.ca/

the art centre Port Moody – Summer Art Camps and Classes 2013 http://www.pomoarts.ca/

Quiring Chamber Music Camp www.quiringmusiccamp.org A unique program for musicians aged 5-20! A combination of chamber music, master classes, composition/art classes and concerts providing a well-balanced, fun and enriching experience for music students

UBC Summer Programs: http://camps.ubc.ca/ Tech Trek Summer Camp https://www.cs.ubc.ca/grades-k-12/techtrek/summer-camps  and Geering up http://www.geeringup.apsc.ubc.ca/vancouver/

Bard on the Beach www.bardonthebeach.org The main camp at Vanier Park, with satellite camps in Burnaby and other communities.

Academie Duello www.academieduello.com *Knightly training including falconry, heraldry, swordplay, archery, strategy and medieval games.

St. George’s School www.summeratstgeorges.ca Fun topics include Lego, engineering, alien guide to planet earth, junior robotics, cartooning, digital media, web design, chess & puzzles, circus skills and Shakespeare

Digivations  Summer Programs http://www.digivations.com/programs/summerdaycampacademy.html