Minor Details - December 6

December 6 - 10, 2021

Propagating Spider Plants

We are hoping to root some spider plants before the Christmas break. This is the first time we've done this, so if you have expertise to share, we'd love to hear from you.

We're also looking for small pots to plant them. If you have some pots you can share, please send them to school.

Filming, Editing & Producing our Interview Podcasts

We will be using an app called Anchor to record, edit and produce our podcasts. You can find a terrific tutorial on how to use Anchor here.

Our next step is to prepare open-ended questions for our interviews.

Cigarette Butt Public Service Announcement

We are investigating public service announcements (PSAs) to determine the criteria for an effective PSA. The purpose of our PSA is to educate smokers on the effects of discarded cigarette butts in our water systems and to provide realistice alternatives to throwing cigarette butts on the ground.

One of those alternatives is provided by Terracycle. You can learn more about Terracycle's programs here.

What Makes a Good Podcast Design?

Today we are investigating podcast names and designs in order to develop criteria for creating our own podcasts.

We used the same weight factor analysis that we used to help us with our Big Project ideas.

Here is an example of Will's podcast design.

Rainbow Week Spirit Days

DeWitt Carter student council has organized a month of spirit days to encourage everyone to have fun while we learn.

This week is Rainbow Week. On Monday, everyone was encouraged to wear red. Mrs. Laur's kindergarten class had the most students dressed in red of any class! Here are some grade 7/8's who wore red on Monday, yellow on Tuesday, green on Wednesday, blue on Thursday and purple on Friday.

Mrs. Laur's kindergarten class was a sea of green on Wednesday!

Cigarette Butts and Water Contamination

Cigarette butts are a "double whammy" when it comes to water contamination. First, they are are physical contaminants because they do NOT biodegrade. They are, in fact, the most ubiquitous form of plastic waste (the filter is made of man-made cellulose acetate) with 4.5 trillion cigarette butts being thrown on the ground every year.

Second, with just one rain fall, hundreds of toxic chemicals in cigarette butts (lead, polonium, nicotine, arsenic etc) leach out in our water systems. So they are considered chemical contaminants as well. All it takes is 1 cigarette butt in 1 liter of water to kill half the living organisms (plants and animals) in that liter! Many environmental scientists want cigarette butts to be considered toxic hazardous waste and treated the same way we treat poly-chlorinated biphenyls (PCB's).

You can read about cigarette butt contamination here and here.

We think that most smokers don't realize that their cigarette butts are leaching toxic chemicals into our water systems that are harmful to both aquatic life and human health.

Our project is to create an effective public service announcement (PSA) that will educate smokers on the effects of their discarded cigarettes and provide realistic strategies to dispose of them safely. This will be a combined media literacy and science project.

Advent 4, 5, 6 & 7

Students entered in the leadership and responsibility draw for December 4, 5, 6 & 7 and whose names were drawn were Jessica, Macy, Will and Bannon.

Advent 8

Jersey was the lucky winner on December 8

Advent 9

Josh was VERY excited to be the winner on December 9!

Advent 10

Jessica's name was drawn on the 10th

Scale Drawings

We are learning how to use ratios to interpret and create scale drawings.

Not only is this a key expectation in the spatial reasoning unit in Math, but this will be an incredibly important skill as we start designing our school yard improvement project.

Determining the most appropriate scale, converting real-life measurements using scale and drawing top, side and front views are the main focus this week.

We started by creating a scale drawing of our windows, then a front/side/top view of a box and finally a scale drawing of our classroom.

You can see our progress in these images.

The Big Project

We are really excited about starting work on a project to improve our school yard!

Capt. Mark Eldridge is a retired Canadian Navy officer, a lead instructor of Change Management courses at Algonquin College, an expert in leadership and founder of Soldiers Helping Soldiers. He joined us in person as our executive project manager to help us brainstorm ideas, clearly define what a "better" school yard means and begin the mathematical process of using weight factors to determine the ideas that best meet our criteria (see picture).

This is an incredibly exciting opportunity for us to to develop our leadership and communication skills as we embark on a journey to design, plan and implement improvements to our school yard.

On Thursday the class will meet with superintendent Kelly Pisek to introduce our idea and to ask for her support.

Editing Essays

This week we will be using feedback from the peer editing process to write our final copy of our persuasive essays on the importance of kindness and empathy.

The word essay is derived from the Latin word "exagium" which means to "weigh".

We see it again in the French verb "essayer" which means to "try".

The Latin and French origins of the word essay remind us that writing an essay is like planning a trial! You build a case and use facts as convincing evidence.

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