Minor Details - September 28

September 28 - October 2, 2020

Terry Fox Reflection What do YOU believe in?

Today we reflected on the sacrifices Terry Fox made because he was passionate about raising money for research into a cure for cancer. He sacrificed his time, his energy and ultimately his health in order to inspire Canadians to join his cause.

We reflected on what we believe in so passionately that we would make sacrifices to change (see image to the right). This is a challenging idea ... many of us haven't thought about this before.

In our class discussion, some of the causes we are passionate about are:

social justice and making the world more fair for everyone
education
ending child labour
animal protection
the right to play sports
access to clean drinking water
racial equality
littering & pollution
animal testing
family counselling for everyone who needs it
world hunger

Human Impacts on Ecosystems

We have been learning about the impact that human activities have on ecosystems. Building houses and roads, industries creating pollution, introducing invasive species, agriculture and mining are some examples of ways we impact ecosystems.

We discussed several Canadian examples of negative impacts on ecosystems, including:

Sydney Tar Ponds
Alberta Oil Sands
INCO (Sudbury)

Using a Visual Model to Calculate Percent

We discussed how often we need to calculate percent in real life (tips, sales, etc.).

There are many ways of calculating percent. One way is to use a visual model. This helps us "see" math in different ways.

We have been practising how to use a visual model to represent percent of a number (see image to the right).

Problem of the Week

Each week, the Centre for Education in Math and Computing shares a challenging problem with us. We spend the week puzzling through each problem, knowing that challenging problems take time to solve.

We have solved this problem! Take time at home to talk about the different strategies we used.

Our Commitment to Justice

We had a signing ceremony today where we put our names on a statement of what we will commit to do in order to stand up for justice in our class, our school, our community and our world.

We commit to:

LISTEN so we understand peoples' experiences
Be educated about issues
THINK before making decisions
Apologize
Avoid judging
Treat everyone fairly & with kindness
Do the right thing even when it's tough

Orange Shirt Day

Today is Orange Shirt Day where we recognize the injustice done to Indigenous people in Canada through residential schools.

We discussed Phyllis Webstad's story and the significance of wearing an orange shirt. We also talked about the ugly legacy of residential schools.

An important part of our discussion today was to commit to specific choices WE can make to stand up for justice and stand against injustice (see image below right). We used Desmond Tutu's quote (see above right) to guide our discussion.

One of the things we discussed is the importance of a sincere apology. None of us is perfect and we need to remember to apologize when we have made mistakes.

Mindfulness Art

In art, Ms Quaranta is helping us focus and practise mindfulness in order to become more aware of our thoughts and feelings and to manage them in a positive way.

We are creating designs inside our hands to show our emotions using a variety of colours and lines that represent the ways we are feeling. We made connections to our discussion a few weeks ago about what colours represent when we began our designs for our class flag.

Inspirational Poster Oral Presentations

Today we discussed the importance of mastering oral presentations. In our class discussion, we realized that if you are an excellent public speaker, you can convince anyone of anything. We know that we will have to speak in front of people for the rest of our lives so it would be really helpful to master that skill now.

We developed criteria for an excellent oral presentation (see image to the right). In the coming days, we will learn the steps to creating an excellent oral presentation and then work on developing our own 1-minute presentation to convince our class that our favourite inspirational poster is the "most important".

If you have suggestions for short youtube videos of people delivering amazing oral presentations, we would love to hear about them so we can watch them in class for inspiration.

We will give our 1-minute oral presentations on Tuesday October 6.

Understanding the Roles of Producers, Consumers & Decomposers

In Science, we have been learning about the roles of organisms in ecosystems. It would be amazing to review the roles of producers, consumers and decomposers at home (there are actually several types of consumers!). All the lesson notes are posted in the Google classroom.

In order to make sense of what happens when the balance of producers, consumers and decomposers gets out of whack, we played a game where we used paper clips to represent "carbon units" in an ecosystem.

Talk about this at home to reinforce what we learned!

Using Data from Graphs to Create Word Problems and Equations

Today we learned how to identify a constant and multiplier by decoding algebra word problems. Once we had the multiplier and constant, we were able to determine the equation that represented word problems as well as data from graphs.

We practised by writing our own word problems. Students' word problems were much more creative than mine! In the image to the right, you will see an example of my word problem. In the images below, you can see how creative students were in writing their own word problems!

Report abuse