November 27 - December 2
Week of Inspiration
Central Idea: Passion, purpose or curiosity inspire us to lead and take action.
セントラルアイデア - 人は自分が持つパッション、才能、知識からインスピレーションを受け行動を起こすことができま
The purpose of the Week of Inspiration is to provide experiences where students will connect, engage and explore a variety of provocations to spark their curiosity about exhibition issues/opportunities. We want our students to take action in this world by connecting their skills/talents with their passion. This week, they will engage with photos, stories, videos, etc.
Key Objectives
Objectives for the Week
Be excited and inspired about the PYP Exhibition
Connect Actions to SDGs
Define action, and identify actions that other people have taken before
Reflect upon my own skills talents and interests and make connections to global issues or opportunities
Flipgrid inspirational videos
What does Action Look Like?
Students listened to stories from adults and other students about actions they have taken to make our world a little bit of a better place. These actions that people have taken are often connected to the Sustainable Development Goals. Students recorded their inspirations on THIS document. (https://flip.com/b580c618)
Advice from year 6 students
Aria
Pick a group to work with that you think you will work together well with instead of a group with your friends. If you really care about your topic it is important that the people you work with do too so choose your partners wisely. Make sure you pick a topic that you really care about, this will make your research a lot easier.
Mabel
Make sure the websites you use are reliable. Make sure you agree with your teammate before you make your questions and sub-questions or anything. You need to work hard to make questions at the start because research takes a lot of time so you don't want to spend too much time thinking of the questions.
Yui
pick a transdisciplinary theme based on your topic. Next, make an essential agreement with your team. This step is optional but it can help decrease the amount of conflicts, and help everyone work better together. After that create your central idea and lines of inquiry. This step is very important! The PYPx is a very challenging project, so you need a mentor to guide you through the process. Your mentor will help you with various things, such as your interview, presentation, and lots more.
Most importantly, start your research AND your interview. Check each site before you use it. Choose one person who is knowledgeable about your topic to interview. Schedule it with your mentor, and write down the questions you want to ask. After the interview, record all the information you get.
Lastly, design your board and put all your information together into one presentation. Believe it or not, the PYPx is actually really fun!
Jackson
Make sure you pick an interesting topic. The PYPx is a very long process so make sure you pick a topic that you can be interested in for two months. If you don't pick a topic you are interested in the PYPx will be very boring and you will not want to try your best so picking an interesting topic is very important. If you work in a group you will need to compromise sometimes if you and your partner want different things.
Inspirational Speakers
Mr Smith
Mr Smith came to talk to us about the extended essay project which the students in the DP work on. He told us how the PYP exhibition is the first step in our journey towards our IB diploma. The extended Essay is an essay of 4000 words that all IB students have 18 months to write. Just like in the PYP exhibition students will need to choose a topic and think of a big question, and smaller questions that they want to answer in their research. Sometimes your interests may change because you find something else really interesting and that's okay. He also told us how incredibly important it is to work on your ATL skills to be able to get the best possible results.
He gave us a really nice example of an extended essay about a student in Angola who wrote research about Mangrove trees which were being moved. She gave her research to the people moving the trees and made a real difference in this process. The whole school got to come to the mangroves to help move them to a better place.
Ryoko Sensei
Ryoko Sensei talked to us about what it is like to have Autism and how some things work differently when you have Autism. She told us about her personal experience with her son who has autism and showed us some very interesting videos explaining what autism is and helping us understand how the world looks for children with autism.
Ryoko Sensei tries to take action to help companies make places accessible by for instance asking them to turn off the music so there aren't too many things going on for children with autism. She also told us about autism awareness month in April and all the actions she takes to help create awareness. Some examples of the amazing actions she took were: organising an assembly at school to help children understand what it is like, volunteering at the Special Olympics, and helping with a special cycling race. One of the things Ryoko Sensei would like to achieve by raising awareness is to convince the people in charge to create a park for everyone and change certain rules to make things easier for children with autism.
How children with Autism experience going to the mall
How the brain of someone with autism works
Ms. Sarah
Ms. Sarah came to talk to us about how the PYP exhibition prepares us for the MYP and the
personal project. She told us that there are a lot of similarities between the PYP and the MYP, like how learning is student-centred and the use of learner profiles. She explained how important the ATL skills we are working on are for all the things we do in the MYP. There are different research skills which are very important in the MYP which are introduced in the PYP exhibition like secondary and primary sources, and citing these in your research.
The MYP has a personal project which is similar to the PYP exhibition where students present their personal projects. Working hard to train our skills needed for the PYP exhibition will set us up for success in the MYP personal project
Ms. Sarah gave two wonderful examples, one about a student who focused on running where the student combined keeping track of her experiences running with research on how running affects your health. The other example was about a student who focused on learning all about Shogi and wrote his research on how the process of learning a new game works.
Ms. Shefali
Ms. Shefali came to talk to us about the essential elements of the PYP exhibition. She told us how important the exhibition is as the final part of our PYP experience before we go to the MYP. All the different concepts of the PYP will be very important and we will show all the things that we have learned in relation to the key concepts, the approaches to learning, and the learner profiles. We watched a video to get us thinking about how to change the world and talked about different ways that actions can impact the world around us in different ways by taking action.
We talked about how some actions we take like cleaning up the beach, planting trees in a local park or picking up garbage and how these small actions can have an impact on the world in a small way. Action does not have to be difficult or visible. Turning off the lights when I'm the last person to leave a room is not a visible action but it is very helpful, where planting trees is an action that is very visible to everyone. Some actions we want to take we will do on our own and some actions will be together with our friends. We take action with every choice we make in a small way.
(Ms. Shefali asked) "What is ONE WORD that you think of when we talked about the PYP Exhibition?"
Kena Hirose
Ms. Kena started her story by telling us about her work in the Peace Centre in the Peace Park. For this job she traveled to the UK and Russia to talk about the A-Bomb and about peace. When she was doing this job she realized she wanted to help people more.
During her life, she listened to the stories of a lot of people who struggled in life because they were immigrants in the country they were living in. When Kena grew up she struggled with different things and a lot of different people helped her which motivated her to help others.
She met a lot of immigrants who lived in Hiroshima when she worked in the Peace Park and decided to help them. These immigrants had normal lives in the country they lived in and have lots of skills and knowledge. Besides teaching these immigrants Japanese and helping them adjust to Japanese culture.
To help these migrants Ms. Kena started an organisation called Radices. This organisation help immigrants learn Japanese and gives them a space to feel safe. Immigrant children have to go to Japanese schools where people look at them and often think they are weird and this can be very scary so it is important for these people to have a place where they can escape from this and feel safe. Radices also organises cultural exchanges where Japanese people can learn about the cultures and special things about these immigrants, and the immigrants can learn more about Japanese culture at the same time so everybody understands each other better.
A lot of times people watch the news and see horrible things happening around the world and then they don't do anything when they see things are bad. It is important to try and help people when you know they are suffering. Every evening from 5:00 to 7:30 Kena is in the peace park to pray for people suffering from war and to try to get people to understand more about this problem. They show pictures drawn by children who live in Palestine where there is war to get people's attention for the conflict and all the people who suffer from it.
The most important thing Ms. Kena wanted us to think about was that when we pick a job we choose something we think is important and that makes us happy but also try to pick something that helps others and to try to show empathy for other people.
Student Questions for our speaker
How can we help?
Listen to people and understand their stories and what they need before taking action.
What is the hardest thing about what you do?
It takes a lot of time and I sometimes feel like I don't have enough time to do everything I want to do. The hardest thing for me was when I found the blind immigrant from Ukraine who had been in Hiroshima for a year, and he was not being helped by the city at all and he was not getting all the help he needed and that made me really sad.
What is the easiest thing you have done?
nothing was easy but everything is important
Nakato San
Nakato San spoke to us today about the outdoor kindergarten he opened here in Japan. He has always had a passion for working with small children, and this was a goal of his since he was a young boy. He had a very successful career working for a large company that sells Japanese Manga.
He has been running this outdoor kindergarten for 4 years. The students spend most of their day outside creating and exploring with nature. He is working towards building a primary school because the students who graduate from his school struggle to be in a desk all day after spending most of their time in nature.
At the school, the kids grow their own food, and learn how to cook it too! They spend much of their day learning how to exist peacefully and respectfully in nature.
Nakato San has worked in schools all over Japan, and he noticed that kids in his outdoor school get hurt less than those who go to a normal public school. Students become more aware of their bodies when they are exisiting primarily in nature.
Mr. Sekyi
Mr. Sekyi came to talk to us about the personal project that the students do in the MYP. Just like the PYP exhibition, the Personal project is a way to show all the things you have learned and celebrate all your development at the end of a part of your schooling. The PYP exhibition does this for the PYP and the personal project does this for the MYP. The most important thing about these celebrations of learning is not that you do something very difficult, but rather that you pick something that you are really passionate about. You also need to make sure that your topic is specific. Mr Sekyi was really passionate about cars but cars is a very big topic so he thought of something he was curious about with regard to cars and he was wondering how the tires of the car were able to support the weight of the entire car as well as all the people inside and still do all the things tires need to do. By asking himself this research question he went from the very broad topic of cars to a very specific topic of tires and how they work. Coming up with questions for your research is a very important part of your research.
We watched a video about a 10-year-old girl who talked to us about how our brains develop and the five things that help us grow our brains better. The presentation was done by a girl who was even younger than all the children in grade 5 and Mr. Sekyi talked to us about what different things the girl in the video did to be able to talk about all the things she did and understand all the things she does.
He also told us about his experience coming to Japan and how it was really good for his health and well-being because he started eating healthier and he started riding his bicycle instead of his car to work. His health got so much better because of this that he no longer needed his glasses anymore.
“Quitting one thing makes quitting the next thing easier.”
Mr. Washington
Mr. Washington came to talk with us about the struggles he faces because he works on his Doctorate, and how he solves them. He follows a very strict time schedule every day and works from very early in the morning till very late in the evening and in the weekend so he can make sure he is able to finish all of his work for school, and for his family, and for his doctorate. Sometimes this means Mr. Washington is very tired and doesn't want to continue anymore but even though it is very hard he doesn't give up. We all have to do hard things sometimes; when we are behind in points when we play sports, when something is very difficult in math, or even when we struggle getting out of bed in the morning sometimes we would like to just give up. It is very important to show perseverance when you find yourself in a situation where things are hard and you might want to give up.
Giving up is easy but when you give up on something it becomes easy to give up on the next thing too and every time you give up you miss out on an opportunity to learn new things and develop new skills. It is important that you spend your time the best way you know how to spend it because time is something you will never get back and you only have so much of it in a day.
Mr. Chris
Mr. Chris came to talk with us about how important it is to take care of living things. When we are young we need people to take care of us and when we are old we need people to take care of us again. Mr Chris always had pets when he was young and sometimes these animals became old and eventually died. Because of these experiences, Mr Chris really appreciates animals and wants them to be cared for very well. When he was on a field trip to the zoo with his class he saw that some animals didn't have the best habitats. Humans are animals too but humans don't always care for other animals well. The animals in the zoo don't have enough plants in their habitats, their habitats are often too small and social animals are often alone which makes them sad. He showed us a video of a chimpanzee in Doha Zoo called Rita who was really smart and sad because her cage was too small. A teacher from a school started caring for Rita and visiting her a lot. The teacher became good friends with Rita and she helped make Ritas' habitat better.
Mr Chris also talked with us about how he could have taken pictures that would have made the zoo look like a great place for animals to live. This shows that it is really important to think critically about what you are seeing and reading to see if the story is real or only something the writer wants us to believe.
Hiro Yamasaki
Hiro Yamasaki told us about a time when there was a big earthquake in Kobe and he and Ryoko sensei spent time taking care of all the animals they could find who were hurt by the earthquake. A lot of people could not take their pets to the shelters that were set up by the government for all the people whose homes were damaged by the earthquake and Hiro Yamasaki and Ryoko sensei took care of all these pets that couldn't go home and couldn't go to the shelter.
After this earthquake, Hiro Yamasaki kept caring for animals who needed help. After mating season, there are a lot more puppies and kittens than there were people to take care of them so Hiro Yamasaki started taking care of all these newborn animals without a home. During breeding season there would be almost 20 or 30 new animals per day and Hiro Yamasaki realized that he would not be able to shelter all these animals forever and ever and ever. He had to close his shelter and a lot of animals ended up on the street.
When animals spend a long time on the street they become wild and if there are too many of them they become a problem. A lot of times cities will go and catch and kill a lot of these animals. Hiro Yamasaki didn't like this way of controlling how many animals there were and he decided to start controlling how many animals there were in a more humane way. He started catching the animals and operating them so they could not have more babies and then letting them go again. This way he solved the problem of there being too many wild animals in the cities without the government going out and killing these animals. This way Hiro Yamasaki created more sustainable cities and communities and cared for Life on land.
Mr. Gavin
Mr. Gaving talked to us about when he was playing Basketball when he was in grade 5. His school organised a basketball tournament and Mr. Gavin wanted to compete. Because Mr Gavin only has one hand playing basketball was a little difficult for him. Rather than giving up, Mr Gavin practised and tried different techniques and he found a way that he could play well with his one arm. He went to the tournament and he won the first game, then he won the second game, and the third. His final game was against his twin brother who is also very good at basketball. The first player with 10 points would win and at some point in the game. At first it was 4-9 for Mr Gavin's brother and people said give up but Mr Gavin didn't and he ended up winning the game with 10-9 against his brother.
Mr Gavin did not end up winning the entire tournament but he did show everyone that he could play basketball just like everyone else and even be really good despite Mr Gavin only having one arm.
IMG_0607 2.MOV
Mr. Steward
Mr. Steward shared his story about the earthquake in Sendai. He told us how he travelled all over Europe when he was younger and he was in Europe when the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl happened. When this happened he was still young and didn't know as much as he does today and he ran away to Portugal to the furthest he could get from Chernobyl in Europe. Later in his life, Mr Steward came to Japan to work at a school in Sendai in Japan. Japan uses a lot of nuclear power. Nuclear power is a great source of power but it is also a complicated source of power.
When Mr Steward lived in Sendai there was an earthquake in the ocean near Japan which created a huge Tsunami. We watched a video to understand what the Tsunami looked like and it was really scary. Mr Steward was at his work when the earthquake hit. The earthquake lasted for 5 to 6 minutes which is very long. The ceiling tiles came down, glass was breaking and there was a lot of noise. But then the worst thing happened when the Tsunami hit the nuclear powerplant which broke and emitted a lot of nuclear energy.
Knowing a lot more than he did a long time ago when Chernobyl happened, Mr Steward knew he had to do all he could to help all the children in his school. First, he sent all the children to the school buses and turned on the buses to warm up the children. Mr Steward took all the children who could not be picked up because of the chaos in the city to his house and they stayed there for 3 or 4 days until they could be with their parents again.
The important message in Mr Stewards' story is that first, you have to make sure that you are okay and healthy but then, try and help other people as much as you can and work with other people to have the greatest chance of success.
Mr. AJ
Mr. AJ talked to us about how you actually make a change. Mr AJ is a training officer at the United Nations which means he goes to places to explain how to do things. Basically a fancy teacher. Besides this, he is also an American football coach, he started a charity organisation and was the leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in Hiroshima.
The first step in taking action is to define a problem and think of different changes you can make to solve the problem. Mr AJ is an American Football coach in Japan but Japanese teams are not very good at American Football. First Mr AJ took a step back and looked at possible reasons the teams were so bad and one of the things he noticed was that the Japanese teams didn't have the American Football culture like they do in the United States because other sports are more popular.
With all this knowledge Mr AJ went to work with a team for 2 years and gave them all the information about American Football that he had from the United States. After 2 years the team hadn't gotten much better. Instead of giving up, Mr AJ went back to his problem and reflected on his solution and he made changes to his strategy and he tried again. When he tried the second time after having learned from the first time, his team did a lot better and actually won the championship.
Now we will look at how to make change with a more serious topic. In Japan, there are people in Japan who have certain feelings about back people because of the colour of their skin rather than who these people actually are. This is a more complicated change because it is about changing people's minds and it is also something people sometimes don't feel comfortable talking about.
The first thing AJ did was do a lot of research on different ways in which black people were treated badly to show people that there really was a problem so people couldn't deny it anymore. With all this research he did a lot of work raising awareness so people would pay attention to the problem.
Tuning-In and Reaching out to Our Community
Cinematic Experience
On Thursday afternoon, students were given a movie ticket and the option of nine clips to watch. This allowed students to learn about various areas of interest to them and reflect on the various ATL (Approach to Learning) skills required in taking action. However, because of the time constraints, they were only able to watch 3 of 9. We've included all nine below for our entire community to watch and enjoy at their leisure.
Please take the time to discuss some of the content below with your kids.
The Science of Taking Action
Extracurricular Empowerment: Kids using technology for action.
Sparking Curiosity
If interested, feel free to engage in the following media as they relate to sparking curiosity within our students. As curiosity can lead and inspire us to take action, we must consider the means by which curiosity is ignited inside each of us.
Did you know?
Questions without Answers
Google How To
Raising Awareness
Animal Conservation
A key component of the Exhibition process is empowering our students to take action relating to their inquiry. Sometimes, this action relates to raising awareness or accumulating information from individuals who have raised awareness on key issues. How will you approach your audience and effectively communicate your message?
The videos below range in topics. Think of the emotions you experience while watching them. Do you feel strong emotions? Do you feel empowered to act? Did you learn something new? Push your audience to take action through a strong grasp of knowledge and utilize your various skills to have your message clearly heard.
Philippines Unselfie
Fearless Girl
Sick Kids
Low Battery
Syria
Landmines Angola
Creative Solutions
For every problem, there is a solution! Sometimes, we have to be extremely creative in how we approach problems both in the classroom and the greater world. Check out some 'creative solutions' which help inspire our students to take action.
Breast Cancer Pebbles
Afghanistan Immunization Bracelet
Lead India
Edible Water Bottles
Follow Your Passion and Purpose
Without passion or purpose, how will you succeed when the learning becomes tough? By choosing a topic which students are passionate about, or find purposeful, they will be able to continue their investigations from start to finish as it is mentally exhausting/draining at times.
I'm Not Black, You're Not White
Apple - Perspective
Motivaçāo e Foco para Superar Limites
Sustainable Development Goals Comic
SDG Comic Slides.pptStudents will be using the SDGs to make sure that their issue that they choose has some global importance.