Minor Details - September 12

September 12 - 16, 2022

Terry Fox Walk

It was a beautiful day to get outside and recognize the contributions that Terry Fox has made over the past 42 years.

His legacy is one of perseverence through unbelievable obstacles and a reminder to us that one person can change the lives of millions.

Looking at this picture of our class, I am full of hope about what we can do together over the next 10 months.

Thanks for a wonderful 2 weeks.

"Magic Unicorns"

I'm smiling thinking about a great conversation Laura and I had this afternoon.

We were talking about how confident she was feeling about her classroom scale drawing and how much she had learned in the past couple of days.

I jokingly asked her if her success with scale drawings was the result of a unicorn showing up and magically manifesting her work. She laughed and said, "Yes!". I replied then she must be a magic unicorn.

I live for these moments where students see that their success is a result of their willingness to ask questions, accept feedback, persevere through a difficult task and put the time and effort in to solve problems.

So even though, sadly, no magic unicorns appeared in our class this week, with this kind of attitude toward learning, I think we're going to be just fine on our own.

Student Council

Congratulations to Alexis and Sheyanne who will be our student council representatives for Term 1!

Six students submitted applications represent our class and all six would make wonderful contributions to Student Council. I hope they will re-apply for Term 2.

We already have ideas for how to bring Dragons of all ages together for a wonderful year.

Health - "We Teach People How to Treat Us"

We are using Jay McGraw's "Life Strategies for Teens" as a resource to help us understand and improve our relationships - with parents, teachers and peers. Our focus over the next few weeks will be to understand the control we have over our actions and how our behaviours affect the way people treat us.

I hope that you will make time for discussions at home about what we are learning. Here are 2 starter questions you could ask each other:

How would you like me to show that I respect you?
What can I do to make you feel I am really listening to you?

Integrated Interior Design Project

What an amazing workshop with interior designer Tracey Ottaviano today! We are so grateful that she spent the morning with our class sharing her experiences, portfolio and expertise. Students learned about the design elements of texture, space and colour and the importance of scale drawings.

Over the next few weeks, students will be working on a project that integrates financial literacy, visual art, tech, media literacy and oral communications. We are calling the project "Dream Bedroom on a Budget". You can review the expectations of the assignment in the image below.

To "sweeten" the deal, Mrs. Ottaviano treated everyone in the class to a colourful box of Smarties.

Tonight, students need to measure the dimensions of the room that they will be using as their dream bedroom. They also need to accurately locate doors and windows so they can create a scale drawing of the perimeter of the room. This is an excellent opportunity for parents to spend some time helping to get measurements and discussing ideas for the project.

Metric Conversions & Scale Drawings

Thanks to a great question from Rori, we spent some time today mastering how to convert metric units. This skill will be critical for our Dream Bedroom on a Budget (details tomorrow) and for our Ecosystems Field Trip (details tomorrow).

The best way to make sure students really understand this is to teach it to someone. Please set aside 10 minutes over the next day or two to listen to a "lesson" on metric conversions and how the "move the decimal" shortcut works.

We are also learning how to use proportions to create scale drawings. Our practice task is draw a scale drawing of the hallway. Students used their pace measurement to determine the hallway dimensions and then they came up with a reasonable scale.

What was most exciting for the grade 8's was to see how something that was very challenging for them last year, was much easier this time!

Attentive Listening Practice

It is becoming really clear that we have fallen into bad habits when it comes to our listening skills. Many students hear words, but aren't really listening attentively. Consequently, they don't understand what they hear. So, in order to build mastery (as we learned from the "How I Built This" podcast with David Kelley of IDEO), we need to practise.

Today, students listened to a delightful news article about a helpline created by 2 teachers and their students in California who wanted to do something to help young people who had developed feelings of frustration, anger and anxiety through the pandemic. They called their helpine, "Peptoc" and there were 5 different options. If they pressed 1, they could vent their anger. If they pressed 2, they could hear encouragement and life advice. Pressing 3 provides a pep talk by kindergartners. If callers want to hear kids laughing with delight, they choose option 4. And option 5 provides encouragement in Spanish.

Peptoc was a massive success and they had more than 8,000 callers an hour!

After listening to the article, we thought it would be a lot of fun to hear what DeWitt Carter kindergartners would say to help someone have a better day. With Mrs. Laur's help, here is the first of what we hope will be many mini videos sharing advice from our own JK/SK friends. You'll have to listen closely!

Linear Measurements in Metric & Imperial Units

In preparation for an exciting integrated project we're going to start on Thursday (you'll have to wait for Thursday's post to learn all about it), we spent some time today determining our pace length and then converting our paces into actual linear measurements.

Most students have only ever worked with metric units. Today we made connections between metric and Imperial measurements so we can use either units as needed.

Design Challenge Week Learning Skills Reflection

We spent some time reflecting on the connection between the purposes of design challenge week (see below for a review of the 7 purposes) and the 6 Learning Skills identified by the Ministry of Education as the critical skills required to be a life-long learner.

Each student had an opportunity to self-evaluate and to privately reflect on the learning skills of their partners.

Challenge #4 Update and Next Steps

Students had time to finish building their food separators this morning! It was wonderful to see the "iterative prototyping" process occur in each group.

There were 2 devices that were highly successful but we all agreed that given enough time, every device would efficiently separate the rice and chickpeas.

To see Alexis and Brianna's device in action, click here. To see a video of Jersey, Skylr and Sheyanne's ingeniously simple device made from 1 index card, click here .

We had a short discussion about the 7 purposes of design challenge week and reflected on which 1 purpose students felt they improved the most over the week.

We are continuing to listen to the "How I Built This" podcast with David Kelley of IDEO to connect his experiences with his hugely successful company to our experiences in class. The most significant learning today was that we need to create an environment that allows people to "think differently" in order to encourage innovation and creativity.

Our next step is to develop criteria for excellent procedural instructions so students can write instructions to build their food separator.

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