Minor Details - November 4

November 4 - 8, 2019

"Why Struggle is Essential for our Brains"

In the past 10 years, there have been several studies and books published on "grit" and the importance persevering through struggles makes in our learning process. It is a fundamental design principle on which I base the challenges, assignments and activities I share with students.

Jo Boaler, the Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Education at Stanford, co-founder of youcubed.org and author of the new book “Limitless Mind: Learn, Lead & Live without Barriers.” has published an excellent article in EdSurge that I will be sharing with students.

You can read the entire article here. The article in Science News that Jo references in the second paragraph of her article is also worth reading (you can also access it here)

November 8

Values Project Presentations

Ms. Bergen & Mr. Medhurst's classes joined us for the first 2 presentations on values. Intermediate students were impressed at the listening and questioning skills of the grade 4 & 6 students.

We got some helpful feedback from our discussions after each presentation (ie. more pictures, fewer words) so we were able to make changes to our presentations.

We'lll be presenting to other classes next week.

What is a Billion?

Understanding really big numbers is challenging. We were exploring the idea of a billion dollars by investigating these 2 questions (see opposite).

We were all pretty surprised at the answers. Rylee's solution is below.

November 7

Burger Experiment Update

We have been weighing and making observations on our 8 burgers for the past 30 days. In the past week, we were completely shocked to find mould growing on the McDonald's burger. Most of us had a hypothesis that the McDonald's burger would NOT mould. In fact, the only burgers that have mould are the Beyond Meat burger from A&W (a 1mm diameter spot that hasn't grown at all in size since we first observed it) and the Dairy Queen burger (a 1cm diameter spot of reddish-purple mould that also hasn't grown in size).

We will be writing a news release to publish the results of our experiment in the coming weeks.

You may have found the story about the "Indestructible 10-year old McDonald's burger" from Iceland on your social media feed. You can read it online here

November 6

Grade 8 Day at EL Crossley

EL Crossley hosted grade 8 students for a day of activities to help welcome the Class of 2024. It gave us opportunities to see a variety of electives like instrumental music, drama, comtech, auto mechanics, business, food & nutrition and horticulture.

When we reflected on our experiences, we realized that we would have more freedom at high school, but also more responsibilities.

We will be choosing our courses in the coming weeks and we still have lots of questions to consider before making those important decisions.

November 5

Values Project Presentations

We are creating audience-specific presentations to help students in all classes at Glynn A Green understand values. Some of the most challenging presentations are the ones for primary classes. Makena and Reese and Hailey and Michelle created presentations that really show their understanding of how to use the criteria for excellent visual presentations that meet the learning skills of primary and junior students.

We will be presenting to Ms Bergen's class and Mr. Medhurst's classes on Friday and then other classes next week. We'll post pictures of the collage when it's done.

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