Minor Details - April 11

April 11 - 14, 2022

"Independence Day" - 30 Days of Practice

When my son was a toddler, I read an amazing book by Barbara Coloroso called Kids are Worth It: Raising Resilient, Responsible and Compassionate Kids. This is one of a few books that I continually re-read on a regular basis. (This book is available on Amazon here).

One of her key ideas is that in order to raise children who are independent, responsible problem-solvers, we need to actually give them opportunities to be independent and solve their own problems.

By the time he was 13, my son had lived in Toronto for 2 months and commuted to Queen's Park as a page in the Legislature and travelled to Japan for a basketball exchange for 4 weeks. He did this completely on his own without his parents. Now as a 28 year-old accountant with a CPA designation, he is the comptroller of a company in the Niagara Region and a home-owner. I am frequently awed by what he has achieved on his own.

When young people rely on others to solve problems and depend on other people to tell them what to do, they can fall prey to people who want to manipulate and control them.

Most psychologists agree that it takes 30 days to develop habits. Thirty school days ago, we reflected on what we needed to do to become more independent, responsible young adults. Today, students are reflecting on their progress and what steps they still need to take to achieve the level of independence and responsibility that will help them achieve their goals.

Plant Experiments

Today most of us planted our seedlings and started our experiments.

Colin's hypothesis is that watering a basil plant with 40mL of water compared to 20mL will improve plant growth.

We will be observing plant height, plant mass and number of leaves on our plants over several weeks. We will also be able to compare the plant growth in conventional pots with soil to plant growth in the hydroponic system.

We will be writing scientific reports and sharing our results with Ms. Boyer's grade 3 class so that they can reproduce our experiments as part of their soil unit in Science.

Nutri Tower Installed!

Thank you so much to Mr. Aylward who spent half a day in our class today to build, install and train us how to maintain our brand new hydroponic Nutri Tower!

This is an incredible piece of equipment and we are thrilled that our class will have the amazing learning experience of growing plants hydroponically.

We will be starting our plant experiments on Friday.

Diego Rivera Mural Collaboration

Grade 7/8 students spent time with their grade 2 partners from Ms. Cooper's class to plan their panel for the collaborative mural we are creating.

Although we are focussing on painting in the post-Impressionist style of Diego Rivera, there are lots of creative ideas for how students plan to represent the values we believe in at DeWitt.

Special Guest - Mr. Ottaviano

We were so grateful to have a special guest presentation by Mr. Ottaviano! He not only shared his work experiences and the importance of finding what you love to do as a career, but also the values and principles that have guided him through his life.

So many of his stories resonated with students. He talked about how important it is to change our thinking from "impossible" to "I'm Possible". He shared a quote that he lives by that "It's only over when you quit" that many students wrote down to remember. His analogy about sharpening a pencil also stuck with us.

Many of his reflections mirror what we have been working on all year:

the importance of communication and perception
the importance of listening and asking questions
the importance of making mistakes
the importance of collaboration

He also shared a visual strategy to help remember 10 items that students really enjoyed.

Today we are writing thank you letters to express our appreciation to Mr. Ottaviano for sharing his time and ideas with us.

Viscosity and Flow Rate

Today we made connections between flow rate and viscosity. Understanding that viscosity is a fluid's resistance to flow helps explain many real-life applications of fluids (e.g., motor oil, package design etc.)

We were able to use our understanding of the characteristics of fluids, the Particle Theory, density, flow rate and viscosity to explain that old-fashioned expression, "Slower than molasses in January".

It sounds bizarre, but there was a gang of criminals in the 1870's that used molasses to get away with robberies. You can read about the Molasses gang here.

And you can read about the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 here.

Investigating Dividing Integers

We are connecting what we learned about multiplying integers to understand dividing integers.

Our first investigation was what it meant to divide a negative number by a positive number.

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