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.