Gratitude, The Values Project & Today's Challenge

What are values? Values are things that we think are important in life. For example, some of my values are my family, my friends and my beautiful home - Kaycie.

Today we spent time building criteria for our Values Project. Next week we will be working on our presentations for other classes at Glynn A Green.

To practise our listening skills, we listened to a TED Talk on gratitude and summarized the main ideas. David Steindl-Rast has some important ideas about how being grateful makes us happy, not that happiness makes us grateful. He has a Stop. Look. Go. strategy to help us remember to be grateful for every moment.

It works out really well that the 20-Day Challenge for today is to stop and watch the sunset. (Sunset tonight will be at 6:09pm)

You can watch David Steindl-Rast's full TED talk here

Practising Listening

After listening to the TED talk by Julian Treasure on how we are losing our ability to listen really well, today we made our first attempt at retelling a story as close to word-for-word as possible. The story was "What Do You Do with a Chance?" by Kobi Yamada. We'll keep track of our retelling skills and will continue to work on building our listening skills to see how we improve over time.

Hudson had an interesting idea for an experiment ... Would we be more successful if we were able to re-tell the story orally in chunks? We'll give this a try as we keep practising.

Try re-telling the story to someone at home tonight.

Learning about Life - Grade 7 Ecosystems

Today, we talked about life and what you need to be a living thing!

One of the things we learned was a sea animal called a zombie urchin. This animal has a shell that is very spiky and eats everything in sight. Including kelp. It is bad for them to eat all the kelp because kelp is used for a food source and as a habitat for other sea animals. (It's called the zombie urchin because when all the kelp is gone, it goes dormant and will come back to life when there is more food available). Scientists are trying to stop the zombie urchin from eating the kelp. We were talking about ideas as a class on what we can do to stop them.

We also talked about what you need to be a living thing.:

1. you have to eat

2. You need to have cells

3. You need to grow

4. You need to need to have a safe environment

5. You need to give more life (ie reproduce)

I wanted to write about this because I feel like it is so important to know this stuff so we can stop what is going on in the earth!