Minor Details - January 6

January 6 - 10, 2020

Learning for Mastery

In Salman Khan's TED talk on learning for mastery (there is a link to it in the Mastery Learning article), he reminds us that it takes time to master a skill. Like martial arts or learning a musical instrument, we can't expect to progress to higher skill levels without mastering pre-requisite skills first.

Sometimes the idea of learning for mastery gets lost at school when we only have certain amounts of time during the school day. It's not realistic to expect that everyone masters something at the same rate! We need to forget about timetables, be reflective and responsible for our own learning if we truly want to achieve mastery.

We reviewed what it means to "learn for mastery" (see the image opposite). In the coming days, we will spend time assessing whether we have mastered math concepts from the beginning of this year.

The next step is for all of us to create our own individual learning plan to make sure we are working toward mastering all concepts in math.

Knowledgehook is an application that can be used at home to review and practise skills that we haven't yet mastered.

January 10

Learning to Listen

We are continuing to work on our listening skills. Today we practised by re-telling the Kobi Yamada story "What Do you Do with a Problem?" We notice that it really helps to keep our focus on one thing and keying in on important words to help us remember.

We were able to practise our listening skills again this afternoon during French class when we had to listen en francais and then answer questions.

January 8

7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens "Relationship Bank Account"

We are reading our way through Sean Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens. Today we focussed on the chapter on building our relationship bank accounts. His idea is that our relationships can be like bank accounts: we need to make positive deposits in order to build relationships with parents, peers, teachers and coaches. As part of our reflection on this chapter, we set specific goals for ways that we can improve our relationships. This is something that we will keep reflecting on for the rest of the year, especially as we work together on our business venture.

Our New Logo

After much discussion and a careful evaluation of 26 different logo designs, we have chosen a design by Hailey. She is now working on some minor edits to her original design and we should have a final design soon.

January 6

Volume of 3-D Shapes

Today we investigated the volume of 3-D shapes by predicting whether the volume of a cylinder would be the same if you used the same piece of paper but rolled it 2 ways: horizontally or vertically (see image opposite).

What do you think?

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