Minor Details - September 26

September 26 - 30, 2022

Flash Mob Dance at Awards Assembly

The overwhelming response to seeing everyone dancing at the assembly was that it was "so much fun". It was a little chaotic (I think that's the point with flash mobs) but I have watched the video many times (thank you to Ms. Sachs for taking the video) and each time I notice the smiles and laughter.

This morning, my students reflected on how it felt to either be a leader or support leaders in organizing the dance and how it felt to see an idea they had come to life. It was a huge moment of pride for me to see how everyone in my class stepped up to make this fun event happen. Thanks again to Macy, Alexis and Alexis' sister Lauren for their leadership and enthusiasm.

During the fitness break before the assembly, I watched as some grades 3 and 4 students ran to join in with grade 7 and 8 students who were practising the dance moves on the blacktop. That moment captured the real reason we wanted to do this - to have everyone at DeWitt come together to create a shared memory.

To see the assembly flash mob, click here

National Day of Truth & Reconciliation

On this second year of a national day to recognize the harm that the Residential School System did to First Nations, Inuit and Metis children, we are reflecting on what "reconciliation" means and how we can take action to make sure "Every Child Matters".

Integrated Design Project - Final Stages

Students are in the final stages of completing the work required for the Integrated Design Project. Each student will be doing his or her oral presentation on Monday October 3. The required components are:

a scale drawing of their dream bedroom that shows permanent features (windows, doors etc) as well as furniture etc. (Math - proportional reasoning)
a 3D rendering of their dream bedroom using SketchUp (Technology). In this photo, you can see Macy's work in progress.
a completed Google Sheet spreadsheet showing how they "spent" the required $500 budget (Financial Literacy)
a slide presentation (Media Literacy) that includes ALL above components and describes how their design meets the design elements of texture, space and colour (Visual Arts). In this photo, you can see that Sheyanne has incorporated the theme of her room into the design of her slide presentation.

Please spend some time helping your child review the assignment requirements (all resources are posted in the Google Classroom) and listen to his or her oral presentation so they are prepared on Monday.

Paragraph Writing

Paragraphs are the building blocks of more advanced writing, particularly essays and short stories.

Today we reviewed the criteria for writing an excellent paragraphs. Students are using the key ideas from the articles they read on lawns vs gardens to write their first paragraphs for the ecosystems lawn vs garden proposals we hope to present to Port Colborne town council.

Determining Pattern Rules

We are reviewing what we know about patterns and using a variety of strategies to determine the pattern rule (or "equation") that represents the pattern.

The strategies we use might be very different from ones parents learned in school. This is an wonderful opportunity to spend time together to discuss how we determine the equation that represents a pattern from a data set. This is also a good way to review for the quiz on Thursday!

The Big Project Field Trip Update

The purpose of The Big Project is, of course, to revitalize our schoolyard. Just as importantly, our purpose is to develop leadership and responsibility through the ideation, planning, design and construction of our outdoor space.

Last year we completed the design of Phase 1 which includes a buddy bench, garden boxes and a seasonal greenhouse. Materials have been purchased and construction will begin in late spring 2023.

Our next step is to plan a field trip to experience outdoor classrooms throughout DSBN to make important decisions about what we want in our outdoor classroom. Congratulations to Sabian and Cooper who were the successful applicants for the field trip convener position. They will be planning the route and communications with schools we will be visiting.

Other leadership positions this year are:

Jersey and Josh who are the 2022-2023 Project Managers
Macy, Jersey and Kylie who are the communications team

Effective Media Presentations

Many of us have had frustrating experiences trying to learn information from bad slide presentations. Whether it's terrible background and font colours or too much information on each slide, ineffective slide presentations make us tune out because they're too difficult to understand.

Today we looked at examples of what features made ineffective slide presentations so that we could develop criteria for effective presentations.

As David Kelley said in the "How I Built This" podcast, we need to build mastery by starting with small projects.

Our first presentation task is to create a slide presentation to teach grade 6 students how to improve their attentive listening skills. Students will use feedback from these presentations to improve their slide presentations for the integrated design project (due on Monday October 3) and the ecosystems presentation to explain the environmental benefits of native gardens vs. grass lawns.

Why Saying "Me and Her" is Grammatically Incorrect

If there is one grammar mistake that is ubiquitous in daily conversations, it is the misuse of object pronouns in place of subject pronouns. The most common example of this is saying something like, "Can me and her work in the hallway?". I hear some version of this one all the time: "Her and I went shopping on the weekend".

Today students learned about the difference between the subject and object in a sentence. They also learned that subject pronouns can replace subject nouns and object pronouns can replace object nouns, but object pronouns can NOT replace subjects!

Subject pronouns are:

I, we, he, she, they, it & you

Object pronouns are:

me, him, her, us, them, it & you

We discussed that using incorrect grammar can often be a deal-breaker in job interviews. Most companies want to hire people who will represent their values and standards of excellence. Being grammatically correct may be the one thing that sets a successful candidate apart.

We agreed that we need to practise this orally in our day to day speech. You might find yourself being gently corrected if you fall into the trap of using pronouns incorrectly.

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